Woody Allen Tonight: Part 1 of "Death Knocks" (from "Getting Even")

[The sombre, caped figure huffs audibly and then trips over the window sill and falls into the room.]

DEATH [for it is no one else]: Jesus Christ. I nearly broke my neck.

NAT ACKERMAN [watching with bewilderment]: Who are you?

DEATH: Death.

NAT: Who?

DEATH: Death. Listen -- can I sit down? I nearly broke my neck. I'm shaking like a leaf.

NAT: Who are you?

DEATH: Death. You got a glass of water?

-- the opening of "Death Knocks"

Tonight we continue our Woody Allen sampling, begun Monday night with "A Look at Organized Crime," with a justly famous playlet from 1968, "Death Knocks." Woody's well-known admiration for, or perhaps awe of, Ingmar Bergman seems to me more productively expressed in this rollicking hommage to The Seventh Seal than in his later stiflingly pseudo-Bergmanesque films like Interiors and September. -- Ken





FOR PART 1 OF "DEATH KNOCKS," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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