''Getting Even'' (1971) is
Woody Allen
Heywood "Woody" Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; November 30, 1935) is an American film director, writer, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades and multiple Academy Award-winning films. He began his career writing ...
's first collection of humorous stories, essays, and one short play. Most pieces were first published in ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'' between 1966 and 1971.
Contents
# The Metterling Lists
# A Look at Organized Crime
# The Schmeed Memoirs
# My Philosophy
# Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?
# Death Knocks
# Spring Bulletin
# Hassidic Tales
# The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers
# Notes from the Overfed
# A Twenties Memory
# Count Dracula
# A Little Louder, Please
# Conversations with Helmholtz
# Viva Vargas!
# The Discovery and Use of the Fake Ink Blot
# Mr. Big
Some of the tales in detail
*"Mr. Big" is a parody of the style and structure of
hardboiled
Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective fiction and noir fiction). The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence o ...
detective stories. The protagonist, Kaiser Lupowitz, is a parody of the characters which were typically played by
Humphrey Bogart on film:
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (; May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade ('' ...
's
Sam Spade in ''
The Maltese Falcon'',
Mickey Spillane
Frank Morrison Spillane (; March 9, 1918July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have ...
's
Mike Hammer and
Raymond Chandler's
Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe () is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler, who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The hardboiled crime fiction genre originated in the 1920s, notably in ''Black Mask'' magazine, in which Dashie ...
. Kaiser smokes
Lucky Strike
Lucky Strike is an American brand of cigarettes owned by the British American Tobacco group. Individual cigarettes of the brand are often referred to colloquially as "Luckies." Throughout their 150 year history, Lucky Strike has had fluctuating ...
like Sam Spade, and is also used by Allen in another hard boiled parody, ''The Whore of Mensa'' (1974), collected in ''
Without Feathers'' (1975).
*The philosophical arguments of "My Philosophy" will be later used in the films ''
Bananas
A banana is an elongated, edible fruit – botanically a berry – produced by several kinds of large herbaceous flowering plants in the genus ''Musa''. In some countries, bananas used for cooking may be called "plantains", distinguis ...
'' and ''
Love and Death
''Love and Death'' is a 1975 American comedy film written and directed by Woody Allen. It is a satire on Russian literature starring Allen and Diane Keaton as Boris and Sonja, Russians living during the Napoleonic Era who engage in mock-serious ...
''.
*The play "Death Knocks" is a direct parody of
Ingmar Bergman's 1957 ''
The Seventh Seal
''The Seventh Seal'' ( sv, Det sjunde inseglet) is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) and a game of ch ...
''.
[Richard Alan Schwartz (2000]
''Woody, from Antz to Zelig: a reference guide to Woody Allen's creative work, 1964-1998''
p.38
*"The Schmeed Memoirs" heavily parodies
Felix Kersten.
Notes and references
External links
Woody Allen's bibliography
{{Woody Allen
1971 books
Comedy books
Random House books
Short story collections by Woody Allen