''Getting Even'' (1971) is
Woody Allen
Heywood Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; November 30, 1935) is an American filmmaker, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades. Allen has received many List of awards and nominations received by Woody Allen, accolade ...
'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 magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'' 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
Humphrey DeForest Bogart ( ; December 25, 1899 – January 14, 1957), nicknamed Bogie, was an American actor. His performances in classic Hollywood cinema made him an American cultural icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected 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 characters he created are Sam Spade ('' The Ma ...
's
Sam Spade in ''
The Maltese Falcon'',
Mickey Spillane's
Mike Hammer and
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive durin ...
's
Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe ( ) is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in '' Black Mask'' magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Cont ...
. Kaiser smokes
Lucky Strike 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 – berry (botany), botanically a berry – produced by several kinds of large treelike herbaceous flowering plants in the genus ''Musa (genus), Musa''. In some countries, cooking bananas are called pla ...
'' and ''
Love and Death
''Love and Death'' is a 1975 American comedy film written and directed by Woody Allen. It is a satire on the Golden Age of Russian literature starring Allen and Diane Keaton as Boris and Sonja, Russians living during the Napoleonic Era who enga ...
''.
*The play "Death Knocks" is a direct parody of
Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman (14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish film and theatre director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, his films have been described as "profoun ...
's 1957 ''
The Seventh Seal''.
[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
Eduard Alexander Felix Kersten (30 September 1898 – 16 April 1960) was the personal physical therapist of ''Reichsführer-SS'' Heinrich Himmler.
Early life
Kersten was born in a Baltic German family in Dorpat, Imperial Russia, now Tartu, in ...
.
Notes and references
External links
Woody Allen's bibliography
{{Woody Allen
1971 books
Comedy books
Random House books
Short story collections by Woody Allen