Word: greekness
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Stephanopoulos gave a brief summary of Greek history, from its beginnings as the world's first democracy to its current status as a smaller world power...
This messy business is never fully explained, but the commotion gives author Zencey room for a fond sketch portrait of a man he clearly admires. Adams bustles about crime scenes pretending to courage he doesn't really feel, an animated footnote annotating in Greek and Latin. He marvels at fingerprinting, then just coming into use in Paris, and at "instantaneous" communication by pneumatic tubes. For a time he suspects that one of the villains is his friend John Hay, later to be a U.S. Secretary of State. A gendarme confronts him at an awkward moment: "Oh, dear, Monsieur Adams. This...
Basically, the movie is supposed to be a romantic spoof on Greek tragedies. The stage shifts back and forth from Allen's modern New York City life to a supposedly funny version of "Oedipus Rex" in a Greek amphitheater. The latter is complete with togas, masks, and even Oedipus and his mother making out in the background. This all sounds hysterical, right...
However, the Greek Chorus, F. Murray Abraham in particular, shines as one of the film's few genuinely funny elements. They get the smart and sassy lines, and use them to their full effect, without overkill. If only the chorus was featured more throughout the movie, it just might be worth it to sit through everyone else's mudanity...
...impressive names in the movie, with the exception of Allen himself, have tiny cameo roles as various Greek actors or Chorus members. Here the prime question comes into play: does one really want to spend $7.50 to hear Olympia Dukakis crack one joke...