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From: jelkind@garnet.berkeley.edu (The Unexpected Tiger)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.cinema
Subject: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Message-ID: <1991Jun11.164342.13441@zerkalo.harvard.edu>
Date: 11 Jun 91 16:43:42 GMT
References: <1991Jun9.000517.10781@zerkalo.harvard.edu> <1991Jun9.070254.11134@zerkalo.harvard.edu> <1991Jun10.195909.12597@zerkalo.harvard.edu>
Sender: thakur@cfa.harvard.edu (Manavendra K. Thakur)
Reply-To: jelkind@garnet.berkeley.edu (The Unexpected Tiger)
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In article <1991Jun10.195909.12597@zerkalo.harvard.edu> npc@electron.physics.arizona.edu (Nick Christenson) writes:

>In C&M, the use of eyes as symbolism is terrific. . . .

I like C&M quite a bit (it's a much better film than "Alice" for instance, 
IMHO) but I personally felt that the bit about rabbi going blind = the
blindness of God was just a trifle forced, and less than a trifle lacking
in subtlety.  The symbolism that I found most appealing was the use of the
Schubert G major quartet.  When the movie came out, there was a discussion
in rec.arts.music.classical wherein some people felt that he should have
used the "Death and the Maiden" quartet, which I think would not have
been nearly as effective.  The G major quartet is "about" the fundamentally
irreconcilable conflict between major and minor (it keeps switching back
and forth the whole way through), which exactly matches the kinds of moral
conflicts that the characters undergo.  Including Woody Allen's character,
who can't realize that Alan Alda's character indeed has some redeeming
features.

>. . . .Is there a higher justice as his father suggests or does
>might make right as his mother says (his flashback in his old house
>of his family's dinner party.)  

I think you missed part of the point.  It wasn't a dinner party, but the
Passover seder.  I think that Allen himself may be making some belated
realization of the true significance of his Jewishness (i.e. other than
as a source for laughs like the great scene in Take the Money and Run
where the experimental treatment has the side effect of turning him into
a hassidic rebbe).  But beyond that, the seder is one of the basic rituals
centered around the idea of (a) God's place in the world and (b) trying
to find a moral structure for the world.

IMHO, the seder scene is the only one of Allen's non-parodistic Bergman
ripoffs that really works.  I am referring to the scene in "Wild
Strawberries" where he goes back to his family breakfast party.

					Richard Schultz