Word: judah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is possessed by a primal memory: a rabbi instructing the boy Judah that the eye of God is all seeing; no crime ever escapes it. Now successful and middle aged, Judah self-deprecatingly suggests to the audience at a testimonial dinner on his behalf that perhaps he became an ophthalmologist because he is haunted by that recollection...
...Cliff's only connection to Judah -- until the concluding sequence of this thematically unified but somewhat bifurcated movie -- is through Ben, another rabbi (Sam Waterston), who is one of Cliff's brothers-in-law. The rabbi is Judah's patient, and his eye trouble is quite literal; by the end of the movie he has gone blind. But this blindness is also symbolic. By visiting this affliction on the only character in his movie who has remained close to God, Allen is suggesting that if the Deity himself is not dead, then he must be suffering from severely impaired vision...
...crimes and misdemeanors Allen records in this film go not merely unpunished; they are generously rewarded. Upstairs, on the melodramatic story line, a hypocritical Judah gets away with murder, arranging for the assassination of his mistress (Anjelica Huston), who threatens to make their affair -- and his equally shabby financial affairs -- public, thereby destroying his family, wealth and reputation...
This is the funny stuff? Yes, because Allen puts a deliberately farcical spin on Cliff's frenzies. It is good showmanship, a way of relieving the itchy ironies of Judah's discomfiting story. It also rings with irony. If neither Judah's guilty musings on his own crimes -- and he does exhibit a strong desire to be caught and punished -- nor decent Cliff's frantic quest for some kind of fulfillment can awaken heaven's sleeping eye, then what in this world can? If Manhattan, coming at the end of the '70s, was Woody Allen's comment on that decade...
...possessed a monopoly on iron smelting, and perhaps they even made steel. With advanced swords and shields, they fought the neighboring Israelite tribes, mortally wounded King Saul and stole the Holy Ark of the Covenant. In the face of the Philistines' military threat, the powerful kingdoms of Israel and Judah united against them. Defeated first by David and then by the Egyptians in an alliance with Solomon, the Philistines went into decline in the 10th century...