I've been in love with reading and playing with words since I was about five-years-old when I stopped puzzling out what was written on outdoor billboards and Burma Shave signs and got hooked by Dr. Seuss and other very clever fellows. H. Allen Smith and Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman sucked me in later as I matured and funny writing has always been my favorite theme. The world, after all is said, is basically so absurd that it makes fine meat for the comedic appetite.

And Woody Allen was right at the top in this listing. His early funny movies were funny, not because they had stupid people doing stupid things like the Jerry Lewis and The Three Stooges productions but because there is a persistent capability of the world in general and social norms in particular to ingeniously frustrate all original attempts of an enterprising individual to work the system. This can be tragic, but, as has been repeatedly noted, the line between tragedy and comedy is merely a fragile point of view. Since those early films Allen has done both comedy and tragedy and, frankly, although some of his "straight" films have been worth watching I tend to prefer his comedy as he has a tremendously sharp and penetrating wit and a view of life that deliciously punctures the preposterously inflated idiocies of modern life.

Anybody who is intent on seeing the latest Allen film Cassandra's Dream should stop reading this right here as I would like to explain why I think it fails and I have to go into the plot to do so. My prejudiced love of comedy may have some influence here but it seems to me that there are other more basic faults with the film.

The story takes place in London. Two young men, brothers, are living lower middle class lives. One is a blue collar worker with a taste for gambling and the other is white collar guy with ambitions in real estate. As the film opens they are managing. The gambler has a run of good luck which seduces him into a card game where he ends up owing a loan shark much more than he can pay. The white collar brother sees life passing him by if he cannot invest in a promising development.

Suddenly they see hope that their problems may be solvable by a friend of the family, a wealthy American that comes for a visit. He has helped out the family before and the brothers ask him to help now. He agrees to do so on one condition. A former business associate of the American is preparing to testify in court that will destroy the American's life. He has apparently been involved in some underhanded deals and in exchange for giving the brothers funds for getting themselves out of their money troubles they must kill the man who will testify against him.

The brothers who have the standard social decencies embedded in their personalities are, at first, shocked by the request but their immanent personal troubles press them too hard and their sense of what is right soon crumbles under the pressure. By chance they encounter their victim before their plan goes into action and he turns out to be a rather ordinary non-entity of no outstanding personal character. Although this meeting is disturbing to the brothers they press ahead and get on with their project. Their first attempt is frustrated by circumstance which, to my mind, is Woody Allen's comic talent struggling to get out but he manages to suppress it and the deed is finally accomplished successfully and with no evidence to incriminate the two.

This is where a deus ex machina pops into the plot seemingly out of Allen's concept that within each of us is an inexorable inextinguishable morality that will always frustrate evil deeds. There was little if any of this preceding the murder aside from the initial reluctance of the brothers when the idea was presented to them so its emergence as a powerful force afterwards when the deed was successfully accomplished seems to me quite artificial and highly self destructive.

The blue collar brother is suddenly possessed of an explosion of conscience that threatens to expose the crime and the more logical white collar brother becomes somewhat panicked over the possibilities. The story ends in total tragedy for the two.

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a radio interview of Woody Allen about the film and he characterized the story as a classical Greek tragedy which seems to me to be off base. A Greek tragedy concerns a bad decision which leads to inevitable consequences. This seems closer to Shakespeare's Macbeth who suffers the consequence of a flawed character.

But the essential lack in the story is the paucity of depth of the central characters and the lack of appreciation of the victim of crime. The victim appears and disappears with very little fluster, merely an animated prop. The two brothers are decent ordinary people who get into a squeeze and flub getting out of it.

Hannah Arendt, in her examination of Eichmann made a noteworthy observation. He went to work, exterminated Jews, and went home to his wife where he probably had a beer before he had dinner and, like any other working man went to bed and slept well. There was nothing obviously monstrous about him.

Perhaps this was what Allen was after but the wrench of the psyche evoked by horror and heart felt tragedy never appeared. At least in me.