Sunday, March 31, 2024

Hannah and her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)

The movie starts with a Thanksgiving dinner. The kid's table is in the background. And, at the kid's table are Moses Farrow, Daisy Previn, and Fletcher Previn. Soon-yi Previn was there somewhere. 
I didn't recognize Louis Black, but he's in the movie. I didn't see John Turturro but, according to the credits, he was in it. I did recognize Elaine from Seinfeld

Woody Allen modestly listing the cast in alphabetical order in the opening credits always bothered me since his name is Allen. Has he ever not had his name appear first?

Hannah has two sisters. One lives with crabby misanthropic artist Max Von Sydow who acts like a genius and is trying to "educate" her. She starts sleeping with Hannah's husband (Michael Caine who got an Oscar out of it).

Hannah had fixed up her neurotic ex-husband, Woody Allen, with her other sister who had a cocaine problem which was one reason their date didn't go well.

In a subplot, Woody Allen's character goes through a health scare and tries to find religion while grappling with his own mortality. Meanwhile, actor Lloyd Nolan playing Hannah's father had cancer and was on his last legs.

Reportedly modeled on Bergman's Fanny and Alexander

Allen reported in his memoir that he doesn't shoot coverage. He films just what he needs. He doesn't film unnecessary retakes for every conceivable angle. In this movie, it meant he didn't have enough footage for one scene, so the editor took care of it by adding an intertitle. Then they scattered intertitles throughout the film so it wouldn't stand out.

One of the few Woody Allen movies to include a firearms accident. It had some funny lines. 

Long ago, I read a review of the movie in a Jewish newspaper. Their critic was a rabbi who accused almost everything he reviewed of anti-Semitism. He pointed out that in this movie, Max Von Sydow says he watched a "boring documentary" about Auschwitz, Woody Allen says that his date gone wrong was like the Nuremberg Trials, and in one scene where attractive young architect Sam Waterston is showing the sisters his favorite buildings in New York, the camera pans over to the Fifth Avenue Synagogue which, in fairness, was kind of weird-looking.

As Wikipedia put it:

In the 1986 Woody Allen film, Hannah and her Sisters the building is panned across while being criticized for its architectural incongruity — "That's disgusting. That's really terrible." — after a shot of the consistent facades of the rest of the block.

The rabbi/critic defended the synagogue's appearance and said that there must have been a lot of other unattractive buildings in the city Allen could have used.

My sister pointed out that the only Black person in the movie was a household servant.

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