Re: Deconstructing Harry

From: David P. Hayes
Newsgroups: alt.fan.woody-allen
Date: Tuesday, December 23, 1997 8:34 AM

John Strelow wrote in message <349849BD.54F0@pacbell.net>…
>What I
>found much more distracting than Robin Williams was the voice of Marge
>Simpson as his wife.

Julie Kavner, who does the voice of Marge Simpson, was Woody's love interest in "New York Stories" (1989) before "The Simpsons" became a weekly series, and she has been one of his "stock company" since (though hasn't appeared in every film). Woody presumably cast her because he knows her range.

>Art is all this man [the central character] is good at; he's
>totally incompetent at life. It seems, in watching the film, that Allen
>put a great deal of himself into the film, and that it is very personal.
>This may be what I liked most. All Harry has, when it comes down to it,
>is his art, because he wrecks everything else. Considering the negative
>off-screen publicity that has plagued Allen in recent years, I wonder if
>this is indeed how he feels about himself.

Woody copies from "Manhattan" by having a character be a writer who shares personal secrets with his reading public. In "Manhattan," Meryl Streep was his ex-wife who published an autobiography that laid bare his dreadful deeds ("That book made me out to be like Lee Harvey Oswald," he tells her). In "Deconstructing Harry," Woody is the writer, and he writes thinly-disguised fiction. In both films, the person whose life was exposed in print comes to the writer and threatens body harm (though when in "Manhattan," Woody says "I came here to strangle you," it isn't really to be taken literally).

--
David Hayes

 

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