Woody Allen's ethereal variant on Ingmar Bergman's earthier Smiles of a Summer Night. Can Allen have expected anyone to be terribly interested, when he himself was evidently not? On the one hand, the material tends to be a bit academic, with much sport made of a university pedant, author of Conceptual Pragmatism, and firm nonbeliever in anything the eye can't see. (This characterization might have seemed a good deal less sporting if it weren't for Jose Ferrer's perfect touch in the part.) On the other hand, there are Allen-the-character's whimsical inventions, which actually work, and Allen-the-filmmaker's prosaic notions of magic, nature, the spirit world. The bronze glaze over the image and the rigid pictorial compositions insure against any urge to laugh. Perhaps the one point of interest would be Allen's unerring consistency in his choice of replacements for Diane Keaton, even if this means forcing Mia Farrow to imitate the departed one's speech patterns. The benign condescension towards all these daffy females (the others are Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty) may provide the closest contact to the ostensible era: the early 1900s. With Tony Roberts; photographed by Gordon Willis. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
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