“I’d always been a fan. … I asked him to do it, and he said, ‘But I can’t act! I can only do what I do, I’m not an actor, you’ll be disappointed,’” said Mr. Allen. “You know, those are the ones who can always do it. The ones that tell you how great they are can never do it. Larry is all, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ but when it came time to do it, right out of the box, he did it. And not just the comedy, which I expected, but all the other things he had to do which required acting and emotions and being touching and all that—he did that, too.”

“I didn’t even know I was on his radar, to tell you the truth,” said Larry David, 61, with utmost seriousness, speaking from Los Angeles a couple of days later. “I’m very surprised about that. When you hear that Woody Allen is a fan of yours … ” He paused. “It’s surprising.

“I gave him every opportunity to get someone else. I was kind of uncomfortable. I was out of my comfort zone,” he said. Then he laughed. “Of course, the comfort zone is not very big! I take one step to the right and I’m out of my comfort zone.”

So, a new Woody Allen movie starring Larry David filmed right here in New York City. Could there be a more deep-fried mix of talent, comedy and neuroses? For most of us, Woody Allen is as quintessential New York as the Chrysler Building. Many New Yorkers grew up with a vision of this city spun by Annie Hall and Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters, where the skyline always twinkles and romance lurks around every limestoned corner; where brainy, nervous men charm young and naïve beautiful women in grand prewar apartments lined with bookshelves; where there are country weekends with lobsters to chase and always—always—love to find and fail. And then there’s Larry David, another Brooklyn boy made good, co-creator and writer of Seinfeld, which defined New York all over again in the ’90s, with its exquisite, endless examinations and sweating of the small stuff—soup Nazis, being master of the domain, parking garages and puffy shirts. Since his 1999 HBO special Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the still-airing series that followed, he’s made performance masterpieces of excruciating situations. The news that he was to star in Mr. Allen’s latest had some rubbing their hands in anticipatory delight, others sharpening their knives, all anxious to see if Mr. David could pull off the ultimate as a Woody misanthropic paradigm.

(This is harder than it might seem … remember the disastrous Jason Biggs turn in 2003’s Anything Else? Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity?)

But we’ll go ahead and say it: Whatever Works is Woody Allen exactly as you want your Woody Allen to be. It’s witty, dark, poignant, zany and hilarious, and showcases a New York filtered through the Allen lens as we’ve never seen it before. Meaning, forget the Upper East Side! This film creeps through the crooked and narrow streets of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, knishes to hanging chickens.

And as for Mr. David … he indeed pulls it off and then some playing Boris Yellnikoff, a half-suicidal almost–Nobel Prize–winning physicist who suffers from night terrors (he wakes up with strangling death screams) and minor OCD (he washes his hands and sings “Happy Birthday”—twice!—in order to kill all the germs), then tosses it all away (literally) and considers the majority of Earth’s population too stupid and meaningless to even deal with.

The Woody angel who enters this time—the beloved innocent woman—is Evan Rachel Wood as Melody, a teenage Southern runaway who manages to entrance Boris in spite of himself. A May-December romance (familiar to all Allen devotees) follows with its inevitable complications, but darker than usual—heartbreak ensues. Don’t ask! Filling in any and all gaps is a terrific supporting cast including  Patricia Clarkson, Michael McKean and Ed Begley Jr.

Whatever Works is as nimble as his smaller comedies but still feels like a big Woody film, in the Hannah dimension. It also seems to carry the well-tempered glow of late Woody Allen with a well-satisfied view of late life and with few illusions. And a great surmounting romantic joke. And somehow Larry David of all people has the ideal astringency for a Woody Allen protagonist, cutting through the plot without giving up the layers of sentimentality and darkness that make the soot of his New York romances.

MR. ALLEN SAID he originally wrote Whatever Works, his 39th feature-length film, with Zero Mostel (another great Brooklyn Jewish comedian and Mel Brooks’ original Max Bialystock from the Producers) in mind for the role of Boris. But Mostel died in 1977 and Mr. Allen put the script in a drawer. He said that when he decided he wanted to film something in New York again after shooting his last four films in Europe, he dusted it off and updated it. 

The title refers to a rather pragmatic philosophy when it comes to our treacherous human hearts, namely that if you should find something or someone in your life that makes you happy, go with it—regardless if it might appear, at first glance, to be all wrong. “I do believe in that strongly myself,” Mr. Allen said. “As long as you’re not hurting anybody … or doing anything that’s causing any mischief or hurting anyone or anything awful, that whatever works to get through your life is fine. All the nonsense about what one should be doing and shouldn’t be doing and what’s quote unquote appropriate according to what I call the appropriate police—it’s nonsense. It’s a tough scuffle through life,” he said. “A tragic situation. Whatever gets you through—as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else—is fine.”

Whatever Works has its fair share of dark corners, but audiences may be pleasantly surprised at its ultimately sunny rom-com message. It’s strange to think that Mr. Allen wrote this film decades ago, long before we learned far too much about his own private romantic struggles (though its doctrine is an easy leap from his infamous “The heart wants what it wants” remark to Time magazine in 1992 amidst the Mia/Soon-Yi scandal).

“I think my philosophy has been consistent over the years, and it appears either persuasive or idiotic depending on how good the film is,” he said. “If I make a film and the film itself works, then I feel people come away saying, ‘Gee, the philosophy here makes sense.’ And if I make a film where I’ve struck out and I’ve made bad artistic choices and the film is not good, then they think, ‘His ideas are stupid and narcissistic and irrelevant.’ But really the ideas have always been the same … it’s just that I’ve failed artistically.”

The concept of things seeming right versus being right has indeed popped up in Mr. Allen’s films before. But Whatever Works might be the only film that so plainly and deeply examines it. At the start of the film, Boris looks around at his comfy life, his just-right uptown apartment and appropriate spouse, and realizes he feels miserable and trapped enough to die (something he manages to fail at, too). He trades it all in for a ratty bathrobe, teaching chess and holding forth in cramped coffee shops—often while looking straight into the camera and speaking to the audience directly. Yet happiness is lurking for him, even if he doesn’t know it, in the most unusual of places.

“This happens all the time,” said Mr. Allen. “You meet somebody, you have a relationship with that person, and, on paper, it just seems completely logical and right and it is right, and yet for some inexplicable reason, you go and gravitate toward the person who is consummately wrong for you, and makes your life into a hell. And that still attracts you more. And had you settled for the person who was right on paper, you indeed would not have been happy.”

Back in Los Angeles, Larry David considered the “whatever works” philosophy as it might apply to him (in fact, he took a night to think about it before phoning The Observer back with his thoughts).

“Even though something might be right on paper, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work,” he said. “Whereas something very odd on paper could be perfect, and something about that person makes you feel good. That’s the most important thing,” he said. “Usually for me, those are the first people I reject. The ones that make me feel good. Why should I feel good when there are women who can’t stand me and whom I can’t be myself around? Those are the ones I want.”

This sort of sentiment is exactly what we’d expect to hear from Mr. David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he plays a bizarro version of himself. But consider this: If that persona, the one we think we know (“What I’m playing on TV is not really me,” he said. “Although I’ve said many times that I wish it was”), is now, in Whatever Works, playing yet another cinematic version of Woody Allen, we’re now into Lost-levels of confusion when it comes to the line between performer and reality. Where are we? Is Boris, with his crushing anxieties and disgust with the human race, a representation of the director himself?

“I don’t know Woody that well, but it’s pretty obvious it’s at least a bit of some of who Woody is,” Mr. David said. “He must have seen something in me to make a passable stand-in for him.” Mr. David said he had brought Annie Hall home recently for his 14-year-old daughter to watch. “She couldn’t get through it because [Woody’s character] reminded her too much of me. She can’t watch me, either. As far as I know, we’re the only two people she’s said that about.”

ONE COULD SPEND hours listing the similarities between Mr. Allen and Mr. David (both New York–born, outer-borough Jewish comedians with wicked dark streaks, a certain amount of performative self-hatred plus self-regard, sharp pens, significant intellectual chops and even sharper tongues), but the differences are more interesting. For example, though both men may be called pessimists, the ways in which they are pessimistic are quite contrary.

“I think [Woody’s] probably more of a pessimist about the big picture,” Mr. David said. “The hopelessness, meaninglessness of it all—the blackness of eternity—those questions. Whereas I suspect I’m probably more pessimistic about the smaller things: The relationship won’t work out, Obama will lose, the Yankees will lose, the movie will bomb—things like that. People won’t watch ball games with me because I’m so pessimistic. I’m no fun to be around.” (But what happens when Obama does win? “I know! My whole world goes topsy-turvy. I still can’t believe it,” he said.)

Case in point, perhaps, was Mr. Allen’s response to what The Observer had felt was a pretty straightforward happy resolution in the film. “I’m always so didactic in everything I do, and so heavy-handed, I wanted it to be clear that even though it was a happy ending, we all still remain in this dreadfully tragic predicament, and a tragic life, and that the story did end with a certain amount of temporary happiness,” he said. Um, really? “I did want to portray Larry’s take on life as closer to reality than other people. He might seem like a complainer, a malcontent, like a misanthrope, a cynic, a nihilist—whatever words you want to impute to him, but there’s a great deal of sad truth to his perceptions. And I wanted to make that very clear at the end of the movie.” 

Larry David laughed when later told of his director’s assessment. “I think generally it feels that there are moments of joy, but at the bottom it’s doom and gloom. O.K., so there’s a big pool of doom and gloom and every now and then you can swim up to the surface like a dolphin and get some joy and then you go back under.”

“I have what I call, what I would perceive to be, a very realistic view of life, whereas other people criticize me all the time as being, you know, cynical and misanthropic and nihilistic,” Mr. Allen said. “You know, I don’t think I am! It’s possible that I am and I have a blind spot. But I don’t think so. I think my perception of it is correct—that it’s a tragic event and it takes real improvising and real luck and real work to get through it.”

By all accounts, the shoot for Whatever Works was a pleasant one. Mr. Allen directs long, difficult takes, but keeps civilized hours, and for the New York natives like Patricia Clarkson, it was a chance to walk home from work. Michael McKean, who plays one of Boris’ few friends, had worked with Mr. Allen in the 2004 Atlantic theater production of Secondhand Memory. He said Mr. Allen seemed particularly energized and happy. “He seemed to be in good spirits,” Mr. McKean said. “He had a great relationship with his DP and the rest of the crew. The thing with him is that he knows what he wants, that’s key. And he had a really good group.” Mr. McKean said he would take Mr. David and Ms. Wood (recommended for the role by Mr. Allen’s wife) to Katz’s deli for late-night corned beef.

“He writes these really beautiful notes,” said Ms. Clarkson, of receiving her second Woody Allen script. “Like with Whatever Works—it’s always something funny like, ‘If you have something better to do, I’ll understand.’ And then I open the script and it’s this divine part.”

And when she says notes, she means notes! No emails for Woody Allen. “It’s gone past me,” he said, of the Internet age. “I don’t have a computer, I don’t have a word processor or any of that stuff. I’ve never been able to work on instruments. I don’t get gadgets at all. I have a typewriter and still, after all these years, have great trouble changing the ribbon on it.” He paused. “I know I’m missing something. I know when friends Google instant information or things”—he keeps a Webster’s dictionary close by—“it just seems so futuristic to me! I’m still plodding and doing it the other way. I don’t say that proudly, or like it’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I’ve just never been able to make the transition.” 

Mr. Allen said he always tells his actors to paraphrase him. “If you’re going to ask for a divorce, ask for a divorce,” he said. “Do it in your own words.” Mr. David, an excellent improviser by nature, wound up wanting to stick to the script, though he said he had the urge in the beginning of shooting to try to change things around. “I’ve been speaking my own words my entire life,” Mr. David said. “It started to get a bit refreshing to get someone else’s words in my mouth.” (Did he ever, The Observer wondered, start to feel comfortable in his leading role? “Maybe the next-to-last day,” he laughed. “Yeah, on the last day I was like, you know what? I thought this is pretty easy!”)

MR. ALLEN SAID that now that he’s finished his film—he’s done the foreign prints, he’s completed the DVD color corrections—he’ll never see it again.

“I made Take the Money and Run in 1968 and I’ve never seen it since, or any of the others.” But surely he’ll attend the glitzy Ziegfeld Tribeca Film Festival premiere on the 22nd? Mr. Allen said no, he never actually sits through the films. “I go in and walk on the red carpet … smile … answer the questions, and then I sit down and the second the lights dim, I’m out. I’m at a restaurant with my wife and we have dinner. And then I go to the party afterwards and go back into phony social mode where people are exchanging enormous insincerities. They’ve hated the film but they’re saying, ‘Gee, great film. Great film.’”

You might expect this kind of gloom from Boris, but not from Woody Allen! 

“I can’t ever say I’ve been happy with my films,” he said quietly. “It’s always the same story: I set out to make them and I’m setting out to make, you know, the greatest thing ever made. Citizen Kane or Othello. But by the time I’ve finished, when the compromises set in, and I’ve screwed this up artistically and I couldn’t get that actor and I didn’t have enough money for this, and I guessed wrong on this joke … by the time I put the picture together, I’ve gone from being sure that I was going to make the next great American masterpiece to just praying that it won’t be an embarrassment.” Mr. Allen sighed. “So I find myself in the cutting room, scrambling, taking a moment out of here and sticking it there. Putting a piece of music in here, and patching up something there, and hoping that I’ll just breath and survive. I’ve already abandoned all integrity and all hope of an uncompromising masterpiece.”

By reaching out to Larry David in Whatever Works, Woody Allen has added something to his canon that he might never have gotten on his own. He hired the one working comedian who could put a knife edge on the usual adorableness of the Woody Allen interpreter. Whatever Works may not be an uncompromising masterpiece, but it’s the astonishing collaboration of two uncompromising comic masters of the romantic and tortured New York psyche.

And it works.

svilkomerson@observer.com

In the super-earnest, cash-strapped America of today, you can no longer define yourself by a flashy purse or the number of Louboutin porno pumps in your closet. Ding-dong, the Sex and the City female archetype is melting! That post-feminist woman, the gal who thought drinking Cosmos and buying Blahniks made her an empowered and contributing member of society, is now lying in the fetal position in her closet, clutching fistfuls of credit card bills and cringing with embarrassment at her previous excesses.

In order to stay relevant in this brave new world, you must reinvent yourself and develop new interests that take you beyond knowing how to spell and pronounce the words “Balenciaga” and “Lanvin.” It’s time for change! Obama aside, you owe it to the sisters of yore to become a more substantive chick. The suffragettes and hairy-legged gals of the ’70s feminist movement did not throw themselves on the ramparts so that you could live your life like one those blond dingbat shopaholics on The Hills.

Regarding shopping: Chances are you no longer have the shekels to splurge the way you once did. Even if you have the cash, your consumer confidence has taken a nose dive, and you are now, horror of horrors, “shopping in your closet.”

Here’s my advice: Continue shopping outside your closet—maintaining a fierce and meaningful allegiance to, for example, Barneys and Jonathan Adler—but stop yapping about it. Stop braying on about your purchases as if you were doing something meaningful like removing brain tumors or solving the global economy. SHOP BUT DON’T TELL.

And stop allocating all your free time to shopping. You can no longer afford to, and, in Obama-world, you run the risk of being branded an idiot—or, worse still, a Republican holdout.

From now on, your shopping trips will be more like surgical strikes. Snag yourself a personal shopper who can streamline the process. (Do you seriously think Michelle Obama is rummaging through the racks of Isabel Toledo and Narciso Rodriguez herself?) Call Pat Drake at Barneys—she used to be a Rockette!—or email her at pdrake@barneys.com, and she will get you hooked up.

“But how can I possibly fill the hours formerly occupied with shopping?” I hear you shriek with petulant shrillness bordering on abject terror.

The answer is simple: Netflix.

In order to get a clear sense of how New Yorkers spent their leisure time before the arrival of the Shopping Godzilla, you must take a trip down movie memory lane, viewing the cinematic masterpieces from that bygone era.

In Saturday Night Fever—lensed back when the meatpacking district was only known to drug-addled cross-dressers and fisting-club habitués—the cast of funsters is either disco-dancing, working in a paint store, shagging or unconscious: i.e., they are living their lives. We never see Tony actually buying his NikNik shirts. They just are.

In Taxi Driver there is no Pretty Woman–esque shopping montage for De Niro and Jodie Foster. She’s too busy hooking. He’s too busy moping and grinding his teeth.

In Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow is too busy avoiding Beelzebub to waste time at Pea in the Pod. If this movie were to have been remade during the recent shopaholic era, scenes of the haunted protagonista loading up on Liz Lange for Target would doubtless have been added.

In Manhattan or Annie Hall, the brainy Upper West Siders divide their time between reading The New York Times and, yawn, visiting museums.

Call me a philistine, but let’s face it—museums can be very boring. If you are going to fill your spare time by taking this highbrow route, then I would suggest you at least opt for the more niche institutions. Example: During a recent Florida holiday, my Jonny and I bagged our post-Thanksgiving shlep to the Bal Harbor Shops and went instead to the Burt Reynolds Museum—Florida’s Largest Celebrity Museum!—in Jupiter. Though not really on a par with the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, the Reynolds museum, with its endless walls of autographed glossies—look, there’s Dinah Shore! Look, there’s the canoe from Deliverance!—made for an enrichingly cheesy afternoon. And … drumroll … there is a museum store!

Caution: Museums with tantalizing gift shops can defeat the purpose and plonk you right back where you started, in full shopaholic mode. You must resist. You must gird your loins with your newfound gravitas and fight the temptation to buy those Smokey and the Bandit shot glasses.

Deep is the new superficial!

sdoonan@observer.com

“We saw the Fellini film,” he begins, and forget the blather about La Strada being a great film for its use of “negative imagery” (whatever that is). The cineaste showboat’s complaints about self-indulgence, about the lack of a cohesive structure, about Fellini not knowing what he wants to say, sums up much of the director’s career.

There are few great filmmakers—and Fellini certainly was one—who went so wrong so resolutely. Through Nights of Cabiria in 1957, Fellini built on the neorealism that Vittorio De Sica had brought to Italian cinema, mixing it with a lyrical and sometimes whimsical strain that never devolved into sentimentality or into the ickiness of what’s come to be called magic realism.

It all changed with 1960’s La Dolce Vita, one of those enormous critical and commercial successes that, as 2001 did with Stanley Kubrick, set a director on a path that negates everything that had been good about his work. Everyone remembers the pleasure of watching Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg gambol in the Trevi Fountain. Unfortunately, that interlude is surrounded by three hours of moralizing about the spiritual emptiness of modern life—as if we should be shocked that the rich indulge in casual sex and shallow luxury. As with the decadence that Antonioni would show in Blow-Up, what we’re meant to view as bad actually looks like a lot of fun. (If rolling around with a naked, teenage Jane Birkin is the path to hell, I know a lot of us who are going to be stocking up on sunblock.) In Pietro Germi’s great 1961 comedy Divorce, Italian Style, the inhabitants of a rural Italian town flock to a showing of La Dolce Vita and, as Germi shows us their shocked and envious faces taking in all this moral corruption, he speaks the truth about Fellini’s opus: It’s a movie for hicks.

La Dolce Vita is the type of success that kills a director. After it, Fellini was a ringmaster collecting his grotesques, the very lack of structure and discipline in his movies acclaimed by his adherents as the fulfillment of a phantasmagoric vision. The empty-headedness, as in 8 1¼2, could be fun to let wash over you. Hardened into habit, whimsy becomes leaden, and that makes later films like City of Women and Ginger and Fred nearly unwatchable.

Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord, just released by Criterion on one of its typical—i.e., immaculately restored—DVD’s, has many of the same problems other Fellini films do: The picture is populated by caricatures instead of characters; there’s that damn controlling metaphor of life as a carnival; the episodes are strung together without any sense of dramatic structure or pacing. If you took away the “Felliniesque” touches, what you’d be left with would be terribly sentimental. Inevitably, the argument has been made that Fellini’s usual mishegas is here a way of emphasizing how imagination affects memory. It’s not; it’s habit. But in Amarcord, for once, Fellini’s self-indulgence doesn’t overtake the movie, doesn’t wear you out. You can see everything that’s wrong with the picture and it remains a pleasure to watch.

The title, a neologism invented by Fellini, according to Sam Rohdie’s accompanying essay, translates roughly as “I Remember.” Based on Fellini’s reminiscences of growing up in Rimini, Amarcord follows a year in the life of a seaside town, from spring to spring, in the late 30’s, when Mussolini was in power and Italy had made common cause with Germany. The poster for the movie showed the characters in tableaux staring out at the viewer. Watching it is like seeing them step out of tableaux for an episode, then fade into the background.

Some of the more promising characters—like the fat schoolboy hopelessly in love with a lithe, pampered classmate, or the mama’s boy who, in his teens, already has the dark circles under his eyes of a haggard middle-aged man—don’t get enough screen time. And there’s far too much of others, like the town idiot who spins endless tall tales. Although his big episode, a story of sneaking into a sultan’s harem for the night, is at least visually amusing: As the idiot plays his flute, the concubines rise from their bed one by one in what looks like Busby Berkley directing The Arabian Nights.

Some characters immediately call up the worst in Fellini, like Volpina, the town nympho, who licks her lips and leers into the camera. Fellini didn’t do great by women. There’s the inevitable huge-breasted woman who bares them to the camera. Magali Noël has the role of Gradisca, the town beauty, and her twitching backside gets as much screen time as the rest of her.

Perhaps Amarcord works because, in mining his memories of growing up, Fellini connects with the adolescent impulse to make fun of everything, to jeer at authority. The town lawyer, a friendly, pleasant fellow, turns up to relate the town’s ancient history to us—and gets a raspberry or a snowball in the head for his troubles. Those missiles represent the best timing in the film, a schoolboy’s response to the endless crap our teachers always bored us with. And what should be a groaningly loud section—a family dinner that erupts into chaos—instead plays as explosively funny, with the father (Armando Brancia) essaying the type of slow burn we might have enjoyed had Edgar Kennedy been Italian.

It all blows away as easily as the dandelion puffballs that float through the air at the beginning and end of the movie. Fellini’s stand-in (Bruno Zanin) has no more weight than any other character, and he certainly shows nothing of the artist in utero. And though individual scenes are touching—as in the tender solicitude of a wife caring for her husband after an interrogation by the local Fascists—Fellini’s decision to treat the Fascists as no more than clowns just seems part of his inability to get outside his own head. (Even clowns can cause destruction and terror.)

Finally, though, the picture’s good nature wins you over. It’s like spending time with a wearisome old relative who, for once, recovers the charm that used to make his stories a pleasure instead of a trial. Fellini may have left the church behind decades before Amarcord, but this time out, he earned an indulgence.

Jenny Kwak, an artist whose family emigrated from Korea in the late 70's, is the owner of both Do Hwa and Dok Suni, and her mother, Myung Ja Kwak, is the executive chef. The new restaurant is just as cool as its sibling, but it's much larger and every bit as crowded. While Dok Suni feels more like a bar, Do Hwa, designed by Hassan Abouseda, suggests a Korean house, and a striking one at that. The walls are paneled with dark brown leather that looks from a distance like polished wood, and lined with banquettes topped with charcoal-blue cushions. Back-lit shadow boxes decorated with Korean characters punctuate panels topped with a row of glazed clay pots originally made for fermenting kimchi. The dark wooden tables, some with gas grills in the middle, are set with candles and brown paper mats. Naked bulbs with glowing filaments hang from gridwork in the ceiling and cast a subtle, low light over the very noisy room.

The clientele at Do Hwa is young and beautiful (and probably Internet rich), and at the bar they're not drinking ginseng martinis but "cinema cocktails" in glowing colors, named after obscure movie characters. The one that looks like a creamsicle is "Al Neri," Brando's bodyguard in The Godfather (vodka, Cointreau and Tuaca), the turquoise one is "Mr. Blue," a character in Reservoir Dogs (vodka, blue curacao and Cointreau). The drinks were created by Ms. Kwak as an homage to Quentin Tarantino, an investor in the restaurant, which is also a showcase for performance artists and downtown filmmakers, with midnight screenings and events on Fridays and Saturdays.

But I am here for the food. It's very different from the cooking served in Korean restaurants on 32nd Street, which has always been a bit too esoteric for me (even though I do like tripe). While the new Woo Lae Oak serves updated, nouveau Korean food, with dishes like Dungeness crabs in crêpes and barbecued ostrich, Do Hwa, like its sister restaurant Dok Suni, serves hearty home cooking "for guests." A good introduction to the cuisine is one of the four tasting menus (for four people, costing between $25 and $27 per person) from different regions. Also, at lunch you can get the "blue plate" special : an inexpensive combination of dishes like short ribs with rice, mung bean sprouts and cabbage, served in one compartmentalized dish with kimchi (cabbage pickled with red pepper). Banchan, traditional Korean condiments, are served with dinner and include kimchi, shredded potato, anchovies with seaweed salt, sautéed spinach, flat seaweed and a truly wonderful tofu (I know you don't believe there's such a thing, but it's creamy and soft, like a fresh curd cheese).

Korean food doesn't fall into the traditional Western mode of three courses, so the staff will help you put together different dishes to create a meal. Myung Ja Kwak is justly famous for her dumplings. The kimchi, pork and beef dumplings pack a spicy wallop, but I prefer the vegetable ones, light won ton half-moons stuffed with a crunchy, leafy filling, served with sesame dipping oil. A nice lighter start to a rich dinner is the spinach and watercress salad in a pine nut and vinegar dressing. Another good way to begin is with half-orders of stewed meats such as the deji kalbi, pork ribs stewed in red pepper and garlic sauce with white radish. The ribs fall off the bone and are coated with a rich, deep sauce given a zap of vinegar to cut the fat. Ojinxo bokum is a hot and spicy stir-fry of tender pieces of squid with chili peppers, carrots and green onions. For a main course, the classic bibimbop is excellent, a medley of rice and vegetables in a hot pot topped with beef strips, stir-fried kimchi and eggs–a dish created, it's said, by Korean housewives resigned to eat the leftovers of their husbands' meals.

Korean cooking has a do-it-yourself aspect, with gas grills set in the middle of the table like at Benihana. The meats are marinated in sesame oil, soy sauce, garlic, kiwi and onion juice and served up ready to cook. The waiter turned on the grill and put the food on it right away, without waiting for it to heat up! Nevertheless the kalbi gui, boneless beef short ribs, came out juicy (and not overcooked by me). The meats are a better choice than the seafood–a medley of scallops, shrimp, lobster tail, squid and oyster mushrooms that turned out to be rather tasteless, and quite a bit of work since they all had different cooking times and you had to pay attention. The grill dishes are served with lettuce, perilla leaves, cloves of raw garlic and green chili peppers (Korean food may be delicious but it's not subtle). You wrap the meat in the leaves to make a package and dip them in a spicy sauce. I leave out the raw garlic.

I enjoyed most of the food at Do Hwa, but when it came to dessert, we parted company. Our waiter explained that they had been through quite a few tastings since the staff hadn't warmed to the Korean desserts they'd tried initially. The current short menu of desserts uses Korean ingredients in Western-style creations. He brought over what appeared to be a lovely moist layer cake, covered with chocolate and filled with cream. "Yum," said my companion, digging in. She took a mouthful and made a face. It was, unfortunately, the driest dessert she'd ever eaten.

A rolled sponge cake with mandarin orange tasted as though it were made of asbestos. A crêpe filled with red bean paste and served chilled was rubbery and stuck to your lips. A chocolate clove cake with banana ice cream was as dry as the layer cake, literally falling into fine crumbs when you cut into it. The smooth, soft leather wall felt the way the chocolate cake didn't taste.

To wash away the taste of the cake I ordered green sea anemone tea. It arrived in a brandy glass, an exotic marine flower that released its scent gradually as you stirred it.

Friday, April 28 at midnight Do Hwa will begin a showing of movie classics from A to Z, beginning with Annie Hall . I think a cinema cocktail would be in order–I wonder what an "Annie Hall" would be?

Do Hwa

* *

55 Carmine Street, Between Bedford Street and Seventh Avenue South

414-2815

Dress: Black

Noise level: High

Wine list: Short, reasonably priced, with a selection of sakes

Credit cards: All major cards except Discover

Price range: Main courses $14 to $24

Dinner: Monday to Friday noon to midnight; Saturday 5 P.M. to midnight; Friday and Saturday late night menu to 2 A.M.; Closed Sunday

* Good

* * Very Good

* * *: Excellent

* * * *: Outstanding

No Star: Poor

Jenny Kwak, an artist whose family emigrated from Korea in the late 70's, is the owner of both Do Hwa and Dok Suni, and her mother, Myung Ja Kwak, is the executive chef. The new restaurant is just as cool as its sibling, but it's much larger and every bit as crowded. While Dok Suni feels more like a bar, Do Hwa, designed by Hassan Abouseda, suggests a Korean house, and a striking one at that. The walls are paneled with dark brown leather that looks from a distance like polished wood, and lined with banquettes topped with charcoal-blue cushions. Back-lit shadow boxes decorated with Korean characters punctuate panels topped with a row of glazed clay pots originally made for fermenting kimchi. The dark wooden tables, some with gas grills in the middle, are set with candles and brown paper mats. Naked bulbs with glowing filaments hang from gridwork in the ceiling and cast a subtle, low light over the very noisy room.

The clientele at Do Hwa is young and beautiful (and probably Internet rich), and at the bar they're not drinking ginseng martinis but "cinema cocktails" in glowing colors, named after obscure movie characters. The one that looks like a creamsicle is "Al Neri," Brando's bodyguard in The Godfather (vodka, Cointreau and Tuaca), the turquoise one is "Mr. Blue," a character in Reservoir Dogs (vodka, blue curacao and Cointreau). The drinks were created by Ms. Kwak as an homage to Quentin Tarantino, an investor in the restaurant, which is also a showcase for performance artists and downtown filmmakers, with midnight screenings and events on Fridays and Saturdays.

But I am here for the food. It's very different from the cooking served in Korean restaurants on 32nd Street, which has always been a bit too esoteric for me (even though I do like tripe). While the new Woo Lae Oak serves updated, nouveau Korean food, with dishes like Dungeness crabs in crêpes and barbecued ostrich, Do Hwa, like its sister restaurant Dok Suni, serves hearty home cooking "for guests." A good introduction to the cuisine is one of the four tasting menus (for four people, costing between $25 and $27 per person) from different regions. Also, at lunch you can get the "blue plate" special : an inexpensive combination of dishes like short ribs with rice, mung bean sprouts and cabbage, served in one compartmentalized dish with kimchi (cabbage pickled with red pepper). Banchan, traditional Korean condiments, are served with dinner and include kimchi, shredded potato, anchovies with seaweed salt, sautéed spinach, flat seaweed and a truly wonderful tofu (I know you don't believe there's such a thing, but it's creamy and soft, like a fresh curd cheese).

Korean food doesn't fall into the traditional Western mode of three courses, so the staff will help you put together different dishes to create a meal. Myung Ja Kwak is justly famous for her dumplings. The kimchi, pork and beef dumplings pack a spicy wallop, but I prefer the vegetable ones, light won ton half-moons stuffed with a crunchy, leafy filling, served with sesame dipping oil. A nice lighter start to a rich dinner is the spinach and watercress salad in a pine nut and vinegar dressing. Another good way to begin is with half-orders of stewed meats such as the deji kalbi, pork ribs stewed in red pepper and garlic sauce with white radish. The ribs fall off the bone and are coated with a rich, deep sauce given a zap of vinegar to cut the fat. Ojinxo bokum is a hot and spicy stir-fry of tender pieces of squid with chili peppers, carrots and green onions. For a main course, the classic bibimbop is excellent, a medley of rice and vegetables in a hot pot topped with beef strips, stir-fried kimchi and eggs–a dish created, it's said, by Korean housewives resigned to eat the leftovers of their husbands' meals.

Korean cooking has a do-it-yourself aspect, with gas grills set in the middle of the table like at Benihana. The meats are marinated in sesame oil, soy sauce, garlic, kiwi and onion juice and served up ready to cook. The waiter turned on the grill and put the food on it right away, without waiting for it to heat up! Nevertheless the kalbi gui, boneless beef short ribs, came out juicy (and not overcooked by me). The meats are a better choice than the seafood–a medley of scallops, shrimp, lobster tail, squid and oyster mushrooms that turned out to be rather tasteless, and quite a bit of work since they all had different cooking times and you had to pay attention. The grill dishes are served with lettuce, perilla leaves, cloves of raw garlic and green chili peppers (Korean food may be delicious but it's not subtle). You wrap the meat in the leaves to make a package and dip them in a spicy sauce. I leave out the raw garlic.

I enjoyed most of the food at Do Hwa, but when it came to dessert, we parted company. Our waiter explained that they had been through quite a few tastings since the staff hadn't warmed to the Korean desserts they'd tried initially. The current short menu of desserts uses Korean ingredients in Western-style creations. He brought over what appeared to be a lovely moist layer cake, covered with chocolate and filled with cream. "Yum," said my companion, digging in. She took a mouthful and made a face. It was, unfortunately, the driest dessert she'd ever eaten.

A rolled sponge cake with mandarin orange tasted as though it were made of asbestos. A crêpe filled with red bean paste and served chilled was rubbery and stuck to your lips. A chocolate clove cake with banana ice cream was as dry as the layer cake, literally falling into fine crumbs when you cut into it. The smooth, soft leather wall felt the way the chocolate cake didn't taste.

To wash away the taste of the cake I ordered green sea anemone tea. It arrived in a brandy glass, an exotic marine flower that released its scent gradually as you stirred it.

Friday, April 28 at midnight Do Hwa will begin a showing of movie classics from A to Z, beginning with Annie Hall . I think a cinema cocktail would be in order–I wonder what an "Annie Hall" would be?

Do Hwa

* *

55 Carmine Street, between Bedford Street and Seventh Avenue South

414-2815

Dress: Black

Noise level: High

Wine list: Short, reasonably priced, with a selection of sakes

Credit cards: All major cards except discover

Price range: Main courses $14 to $24

Dinner: Monday to friday noon to midnight; saturday 5 p.m. to midnight; friday and saturday late night menu to 2 a.m.; closed sunday

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor

To those of you leery of back-jacket "advance praise," let me say straight off that British biographer John Baxter's nearly 500-page deconstruction of Woody Allen amply lives up to the adjectives that adorn its hindquarters. "Often hilarious"? You betcha! How else to describe Mr. Baxter's strenuous exercises in overinterpretation? ("Pervaded as it is by a sense of personal helplessness and inadequacy, Sleeper also offers an insight into Allen's psychology.") Is this new bio really a "bracing corrective to the usual … studies"? Yup!–though the studies Mr. Baxter seems most intent on "correcting" are atlases and geographical surveys. He informs us that rich and famous people like Mr. Allen live on "Central Park East opposite the Metropolitan Museum" (when they're not relaxing in posh "South Hampton"); East 79th Street is "just off Sixth Avenue"; and The Bronx, Mr. Allen's birthplace, is "that windy borough east of Manhattan." Is Woody Allen: A Biography really "compulsive reading"? Mm- hmmm ! My editor compelled me to read it. (I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that I was paid to do so.)

Mr. Baxter's book is one of two biographies of Mr. Allen coming out this winter; in February, Scribner will publish The Unruly Life of Woody Allen , by Marion Meade (whose other subjects, I couldn't help noticing with a tiny anticipatory frisson , run the gamut from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Madame Blavatsky). The crucial difference between these and Eric Lax's excellent–if, admittedly, authorized–1991 life of Mr. Allen is, of course, that Mr. Lax's book was published before that fateful day in January 1992, when Mia Farrow discovered that her lover was snapping "classic 'split-beaver' shots" of her adopted daughter. The likelihood that you'll want to pick up either of the new books will probably be directly proportional to your desire to possess, in a single official-looking, predigested volume, the contents of the innumerable newspaper and magazine articles that have chronicled Mr. Allen's erotic, familial and marital adventures since then.

Pre-1992, his life was a standard great American success story, Brooklyn Pop-Entertainment Division: ugly-duckling childhood spent avoiding parental bickering to $10,000-a-week standup gigs by age 28. Mr. Baxter traces Mr. Allen's ascendance in ample if often indiscriminate detail: Thirty pages on the making of What's New Pussycat? seems a bit much, especially when there are half as many on important films like Annie Hall and Interiors . Perhaps because he's writing the first biography of Mr. Allen that includes the grisly and (we thought at first) anomalously tawdry post-1992 era, Mr. Baxter goes out of his way to emphasize what he sees as a unifying thread of bad moral character running from the Brooklyn years straight through to the height of the actor-director phase. Needless to say, he singles out Mr. Allen's treatment of the fairer sex as a harbinger of things to come; at times, you can practically hear him pursing his lips in disapproval. Mr. Allen's divorce from second wife Louise Lasser, the author grimly reports, was effected with "indecent" haste–whatever that means.

The constant tut-tutting about every aspect of Mr. Allen's life, artistic as well as personal–Mr. Baxter manages to find a telltale "cold-blooded quality" in, of all things, Annie Hall –is too bad, because the author, an old hand at Hollywood bios (he's "done" Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini and Steven Spielberg), knows how to whip up the amusing trivia: Who knew that Vivian Vance, Lucille Ball's TV sidekick and the star of Mr. Allen's 1966 play Don't Drink the Water , was contractually obliged to stay 20 pounds overweight during the run of I Love Lucy ? It would have been fun to have more of this, but instead you get character assassination of the 5-year-old Allan Konigsberg, about whom, the author triumphantly declares, the boy's own mother said, "something went sour." Reading that, I couldn't help wondering how much contact Mr. Baxter has had with Jewish mothers.

Mr. Baxter's lousy geography is, in fact, a nice symbol for his fragile grasp of pretty much everything else about New York–especially Jewish New York. (Very early on, he wrings his hands over what he apparently sees as the terrible conundrum presented by the filmmaker's given name, Allan Stewart: "Why," the author agonizes, "two Scots names? Nobody is any longer sure." Scots? Scots ? You mean those aren't Jewish names?) Matters aren't helped by the portentous, block-that-metaphor prose ("stranded by the receding high tide of leisure spending …"); the deadening penchant for idle pedantry (do we really need the Latin names of the trees that surrounded P.S. 99 in Flatbush?); and a dangerous tendency to combine the purest conjecture with slippery-slope logic in order to produce "deep" psychological and esthetic insights. One typical example: Unfounded speculation as to whether Mr. Allen might have visited a prostitute in the 1950's leads to a confident assertion about the filmmaker's "attraction to the idea of paid sex" and, thence, to a lengthy discussion of the profound significance of prostitutes in his films.

At least until you get to the Soon-Yi, Mia, classic-split-beaver stuff, Mr. Allen's alleged flaws are pretty much those you'd expect in a canny, extremely successful, hardheaded professional, a self-made man who's confident of his own talent and impatient (and rude) with professional–and personal–connections who can't meet his idiosyncratic standards. This is the "real" Woody Allen, Mr. Baxter suggests, and the author goes so far as to distinguish this Mr. Hyde throughout his narrative from his more sympathetic, Dr. Jekyll half–the half Mr. Baxter calls "Woody Allen," the famous screen persona we all love, the masturbation-obsessed, thanatophobic everyman, a cowardly, girl-crazy " nebbish with uncombed collar-length red hair and an obvious bald spot."

The author isn't the first to distinguish "Allen" from "Woody Allen." Looking back, it's tempting to see the explosion of vituperation that greeted the 1992 revelations about Mr. Allen's private life as an expression of something deeper–something that had nothing to do with sexual mores and taboos; something that was a lot like betrayal, and hurt. Hurt, because we all suddenly realized that "Allen" wasn't, in the end, "Woody Allen"; that maybe "Woody Allen," whom we liked to think was us , was after all a fiction. Mr. Baxter cites with approval a French taxi driver on the subject of Mr. Allen's popularity: "Well … look at him…. He's short. He's bald. He's ugly. He can't get laid. He's just like me." As usual, the author's cultural tone-deafness, his ignorance of his subject's turf and milieu, lead him woefully astray. The whole point of "Woody Allen" was, in fact, the opposite: He was short and bald(ing) and plain and did get laid–by an army of ravishing partners in a host of films, from the ditzy Annie Hall to the nymphomaniac wonderbra-ed countess in Love and Death to the angelic Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan .

Mr. Allen created in "Woody Allen" a character no self-respecting Manhattanite could resist believing in: the average-looking guy who watches Holocaust documentaries and cites Sartre and thereby gets the girl. Then Soon-Yi happened. "Allen," you realized, was capable of moral and sexual grotesqueries that "Woody Allen" just joked about. Precisely because of the way you'd been able to identify with him, you felt snookered.

Had Mr. Baxter immersed himself in more than a bunch of newspaper clippings and transcripts of interviews with minor figures and people with whom Mr. Allen doesn't talk anymore, he'd have picked up on some of this; he'd have figured out a meaningful way to connect the scandalous stuff that makes books like this fun (and makes them sell) with the broader cultural stuff that makes them worth taking seriously. But he's way out of his element–he's somewhere east of Manhattan, in the windy Bronx, poring over the famous headline that read, according to him, "President to City: Drop Dead."

The subtitle of Mr. Baxter's book could well have been "Baxter to Allen: Drop Dead." Why did he bother to write (copiously) about someone he clearly doesn't like–or, for that matter, understand? As you slog through this tawdry book, you realize that the author's anger and bile are secondhand, generic–default mode for celebrity biographers, the dirtmongers whom Mr. Allen crudely mocked in his grim, self-pitying Celebrity . The rest of us can be excused for having confused "Allen" with "Woody Allen," but Mr. Baxter positively relishes the Jekyll-Hyde model: He needs adorable, helpless, schlumpy "Woody" to beat up cold, mega-rich, hardheaded "Allen." It's a cheap trick. No serious biographer would use persona to beat up personality, just as no serious reader would be so foolish as to judge a book by its cover.

Ralph Fiennes as the raging lover, novelist Maurice Bendrix, and Stephen Rea as the dull but ever-loving husband, government official Henry Miles, would seem to have been logical enough choices for their parts after their respective triumphs in Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) and Mr. Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). The big surprise is the American Julianne Moore as the very British and passionately adulterous wife Sarah Miles. For the miraculously saintly Sarah I would have thought in advance more along the lines of Kristin Scott Thomas or Emily Watson. However, after seeing Ms. Moore's Sarah, I cannot believe anyone else would have been more poignantly believable in the role.

The three points of the sexual triangle would normally break down into the familiar trinity of lover-wife-husband. But the final conflict here rages instead between the God-hating novelist and the God that has taken Sarah away from him not once but twice.

When I first read the novel-it now seems eons ago-I didn't realize how fully I would one day understand and appreciate its firsthand wisdom about love in all its paradoxes involving the flesh and the spirit, the body and the soul. Back then, in the early 50's, I didn't even know that the book was inspired by Greene's adulterous love affair with American Catherine Walston, who was married to a wealthy farmer, nor that the novel was dedicated to her-she is the cryptic "C." Greene's biographer, Norman Sherry, has described their relationship as "the greatest literary affair of the century."

Yet, neither the book nor the movie may be everyone's cup of tea. Mary McCarthy deplored Greene's painfully tortured brand of Catholicism. William Faulkner, on the other hand, is quoted in the book's blurbs more positively: "One of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language." Curiously, sometimes when my thoughts turn to The End of the Affair , they turn also to Faulkner's The Wild Palms .

I never saw Edward Dmytryk's much panned 1955 film based on the novel with Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson and John Mills I as the tragic trio, but I cannot imagine the censors of the time would have allowed the degree of explicit sensuality permitted in the 90's to serious directors like Neil Jordan. And without this sensuality the love story becomes turgidly evasive in the telling. Mr. Jordan, his cast and his collaborators manage to keep the movie marvelously balanced between the physical and the spiritual dimensions of the affair so that the sex never becomes sordid, and the religiosity never becomes censorious.

This is not a movie with a trick ending or a redemptive moral. It is as much a story of how a novelist transforms his suffering into the stuff of art as it is about the nakedness of desire, of pain and of loss in the lives of two lovers. One of the film's stylistic coups is the way it gets inside Maurice and Sarah without slowing the unfolding of the plot.

Michael Nyman's darkly romantic score enhances the film's emotional urgency as it propels its characters back and forth in time to their final resting place. Roger Pratt's cinematography, Tony Lawson's editing and Anthony Pratt's production all contribute to the expression of a casual authenticity in what is never made to seem like a remote period drama.

Mr. Jordan has eliminated Sarah's mother from his adaptation, and she contributes a crucial piece of information in her garrulously slatternly way in the book, but I think I understand Mr. Jordan's thinking in the matter. Aside from her bombshell revelation, Sarah's mother lends herself too easily to distracting caricature on the screen. Similarly, Mr. Jordan reduces the scope of the plot's miracle-mechanism, at least partly, I suspect, to bring the running time in well under two hours, a welcome rarity in this season of unbridled directors' cuts occasionally over three hours.

Ian Hart's mystical and metaphorical private detective, Mr. Parkis, and his little boy apprentice, Lance, played by Samuel Bould, share acting honors with the three principals and help illuminate the Greene-Jordan ironies attendant on a seemingly frivolous and potentially sordid quest for truth. Every "fact" that seems to lead to the open road of lust and license twists instead to the dead end of an unyielding God. James Isaacs as Father Smythe, the church's ambassador seeking Sarah's sanctification in hallowed ground, Deborah Findlay as his sister, Miss Smythe, and James Bolam as Mr. Savage, the secular arm of Greene-Jordan's truth-seeking, complete the extraordinary ensemble.

I hope there is enough hunger among more thoughtful moviegoers for an uncompromising work like The End of the Affair with its expression of spiritual grandeur. Like The English Patient , The End of the Affair is a wartime love story out of sync with the prevailingly patriotic mood of the time, but there is less exotic spectacle in Affair than there was in Patient . People who hated Patient may choose to stay away from Affair in an anti-Fiennes frenzy. I rather liked Patient , but I didn't admire it nearly as much as I admire The End of the Affair . I suddenly realize that I am going around in circles like the novelist, Greene's alter ego, but I can't help myself. Movies like this make me lose my critic's cool and become an unpaid cheerleader for the film's commercial success in a mostly crass Christmas season.

The Jazz Singer and His Silent Muse

Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown is the 30th movie he has directed in his 35-year career, the 33rd in which he has written at least part of the screenplay, the 30th in which he has acted, and that includes cameos and talking heads (including his current attraction). In terms of Oscars, he has been nominated six times for best director, 13 times for best original screenplay, once for best actor (for Annie Hall , 1977) and twice for best picture ( Annie Hall , Hannah and Her Sisters , 1986). He walked away with the best director Oscar for Annie Hall , the best original screenplay for Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters and the best-picture Oscar for Annie Hall . Curiously, my favorite Allen movie, Manhattan (1979), was never nominated for anything.

The point is that by now you should know whether you love, like or admire Mr. Allen enough to see anything he does as a matter of course, or hate, dislike or deplore him enough to pretend his films do not exist, or that they are to be shunned at all costs. The busy crossroads where art, morals, politics and posturings intersect has recently embroiled me in the controversy over Elia Kazan. I respect both Mr. Allen and Mr. Kazan as consummate professionals, solid craftsmen and creative auteurs, and I would never stay away from anything they did, either, out of a misguided sense of propriety. Besides, I am a film critic and historian, and do not enjoy the luxury of boycotting filmmakers who offend other people.

But what about the in-between people who are just looking for a good movie? They could do a lot worse than Sweet and Lowdown , but, sadly, they could do a lot better as well. There are almost no quotable lines of dialogue in this "biography" of a fictional jazz guitarist named Emmet Ray, and played with gusto by Sean Penn. Mr. Allen and other jazz aficionados intervene in the proceedings from time to time to introduce a new anecdote to illustrate some outrageous misadventure or other in the ultimately unhappy life of this legend. A part-time pimp and a full-time heel with the women in his life, Emmet Ray is unusually unlikable even for an antihero.

His idea of a fun date with his girl of the moment is to watch trains go by as he shoots rats in the rail yards with his trusty .45. The one man in the world who reduces our antihero to genuine tears and envious panic is the real-life jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt (Michael Sprague), whose recordings are on the soundtrack. Since jazz has never been my thing, I'll have to take the words of the talking heads and the production notes at face value. Certainly, the extended selections of certified jazz greats on the soundtrack attest to Mr. Allen's well-known interests as a performing jazzman.

The only comparable visual music is supplied by the eloquently mute performance of the up-and-coming Samantha Morton as the too-easily-discarded and permanently regretted lost love of Emmet Ray's bilious existence. Indeed, Ms. Morton's silent-picture gem of a portrayal in a 1999 talkie is alone worth the price of admission. How Chaplin would have loved her in his golden age!

Has Anyone Here Seen G.I. Joe ?

William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe , from the screenplay by Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson, based on the book by Ernie Pyle, was described by James Agee as "a tragic and eternal work of art." By any critical standard, it was the war movie to end war movies, with stirring performances by Robert Mitchum, Burgess Meredith, Freddie Steele and Wally Cassell, and it seems to be missing, which is to say that it is unavailable on videotape, laser disk, 16 millimeter, 35 millimeter or cable television. To complicate matters, a mediocre documentary with the same title is circulating freely on the videocassette market. There is no listing of it in Leonard Maltin's exhaustive Movie and Video Guide , nor the Video Movie Guide put out by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter. I discovered the mysterious inaccessibility when I tried to book it for my Columbia University class on the war film. Hence, I am sending an S.O.S. to underground film buffs everywhere. Have you a copy of this movie, or do you know where and how I can get it? I would hate to see it become a "lost" film amid all the current frenzy of archival restoration.