Our Aliens and Theirs

In my last column I discussed Woody Allen’s Manhattan as an artistic failure. But this sporadically amusing film that is being hailed as a supreme masterpiece should also be recognized as a moral, human failure—its ethics as deficient as its aesthetics.

To start with a couple of specific examples. One of the high points of hifarity occurs when Mary (Diane Keaton), during an already comic sequence, gets a phone call from which it emerges that her analyst—whom she calls Donnie, and who is given to phoning her at 3 a.m. and crying on her shoulder—is in a coma from having taken an overdose of drugs. This is presented as a laugh line and has the audience duly in stitches. There may, of course, be the odd psychiatrist who does go to pieces, but

JS

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John Simon

In my last column I discussed Woody Allen’s Manhattan as an artistic failure. But this sporadically amusing film that is being hailed as a supreme masterpiece should also be recognized as a moral, human failure—its ethics as deficient as its aesthetics.

To start with a couple of specific examples. One of the high points of hifarity occurs when Mary (Diane Keaton), during an already comic sequence, gets a phone call from which it emerges that her analyst—whom she calls Donnie, and who is given to phoning her at 3 a.m. and crying on her shoulder—is in a coma from having taken an overdose of drugs. This is presented as a laugh line and has the audience duly in stitches. There may, of course, be the odd psychiatrist who does go to pieces, but