Crimes and Misdemeanors
Short description
Crimes and Misdemeanors follows two New Yorkers whose lives run on separate tracks before converging. Judah Rosenthal, a successful ophthalmologist, wants to end an affair with Dolores, a woman who refuses to let go and threatens to expose him to his wife and family. Feeling cornered, he turns to his brother, who has ties to organized crime, and faces a moral choice about how far he is willing to go. In a parallel story, Cliff Stern, a documentary filmmaker with little success to show for it, takes a paid assignment profiling Lester, a wealthy and self-satisfied television producer. While working on the project, Cliff falls for Halley, a producer he meets through the job.
Woody Allen directed the film from his own screenplay, and it sits sixteenth in the chronological order of the forty-eight features he has directed, arriving between Another Woman and New York Stories. Allen plays Cliff, Martin Landau plays Judah, Mia Farrow plays Halley, Alan Alda plays Lester, Anjelica Huston plays Dolores and Joanna Gleason plays Wendy. Robert Greenhut produced for Orion Pictures.
Made for 19 million dollars, the film returned about 18 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.8 from roughly 63,000 votes and on TMDB 7.4 from under a thousand, while a critics' rating of 8.3 from fifty reviews places it above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- For one-third of the film, Woody Allen shoots a documentary, directed by Mia Farrow. Allen disliked these scenes in the final version of the film. During post-production, he cut a third of the film and then rewrote and reshot those scenes from scratch. As a result, Sean Young's scenes were completely cut, and Daryl Hannah's role was reduced to a cameo.
- The role of Professor Louis Levy was not played by an actor, but by Woody Allen's acquaintance and therapist, world-renowned Martin S. Bergman – a clinical professor of psychology teaching a postdoctoral program at New York University.
- Alan Alda was initially only supposed to appear in the opening scene with Daryl Hannah. Woody Allen asked Alan to improvise in that scene. He liked the result and ultimately decided to leave it in the final version of the film.
- Martin Landau originally auditioned for the role of Jack Rosenthal.
- During his argument with Cliff, Lester states he has a closet full of Emmys. In real life, Alan Alda had won four Emmys before appearing in this film.
- During the wedding celebration, a jazz orchestra plays Crazy Rhythm, with muted trumpet sounds audible, even though the trumpeter isn't playing at that moment.
- When Jude decides to kill Dolores, he dials only 7 digits when calling his brother, Jack. Jude lives in Connecticut, and Jack lives in New York, so he would have needed to dial at least 10 digits to reach him.
- Woody Allen felt he was too "nice" to the other characters at the end of "Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986), and he made this film as a response to those feelings.
- Lester (Alan Alda) was created in the image of Larry Gelbart, with whom both Woody Allen and Alan Alda worked. Both felt animosity towards him due to his despotic methods. Various remarks by Lester, such as: “Comedy is tragedy plus time” and “If it bends – it’s funny, if it breaks – it’s not funny” – are quotes by Larry Gelbart. Despite his well-known dislike for Gelbart, Allen called him “the best comedy writer of anyone I’ve ever known and just a wonderful human being” in a statement shortly after Gelbart’s death. And Alda said: “Larry’s genius as a writer changed my life because I got to say his lines, which are so good they will live on. But his other genius was his enormous talent for companionship, and that ‘light’ went with him, and we are left sitting in the dark” (from the Los Angeles Times obituary).
- The woman who says “Hello Lester… Thank you so much for the invitation… It’s a lovely party” at 10 minutes and 10 seconds into the film is Wanda Toscanini-Horowitz, the wife of the greatest pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
- Clifford's sarcastic remark, directed at Hayley Reed (Mia Farrow), that she loves Lester like a brother, is a reference to David Greenglass, who was the brother of convicted “atomic spy” Ethel Rosenberg, and whose testimony in court helped convict her and her husband Julius Rosenberg of espionage.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
