Manhattan is ice cold—on the rocks rather than straight up. It is a movie about cruelty and betrayal among contemporary urban intellectuals, but I've yet to meet a c.u.i. who has flinched at any of it. And it is a movie that is flinchable or nothing; Woody Allen is incapable of the sculptural precision and timing which justify emotional distance in Dreyer or Bresson or even Lubitsch. Allen means to confront us with unpleasant truths—but there is no confrontation, only exposition.

Other recent c.u.i. films have succeeded where Allen fails. There were moments so raw and real in Mazursky's Blume in Love and Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage that friends of mine had to escape to the lobby for a few minutes. Yet watching Manhattan, not once are we moved to look away from the screen. To take one example: Has anyone who's ever broken with a best friend over a mutual lover experienced the matter as bloodlessly as Woody Allen and Michael Murphy do? Here is a film about passion which is wholly devoid of it….

Manhattan's "liberalism" functions only so long as that word is defined along traditional lines, which have come to include "equal rights for women." In the ways that seem important to me in 1979, Manhattan is a profoundly conservative movie. In its sexual politics, it is shockingly conservative. In its understanding of women, in its view of the possibilities of man-woman relationships, in its attitudes toward sexual viewpoints different from Woody Allen's own, Manhattan is more than old-fashioned; it is reactionary. Which would be fine if one could feel that Allen's position on these matters was hard won. But his way of dealing with challenges to his stance is obtuse and superficial—prejudiced, really. And unless you're Griffith making Birth of a Nation, great art is unlikely to emerge from prejudice….

From Take the Money and Run to Manhattan, there is a consistency in the Allen persona. Whether shy with women, as in the early films, or aggressive with them, as in the recent ones, the character Allen portrays always represents common sense. He is correct, morally virtuous, sensible; the others are selfish and ridiculous….

One has only to compare Robert Altman's recent, and very underrated, A Perfect Couple, with Manhattan to see the difference between the generosity of a great artist and the mean-spiritedness of a petit maitre. Altman, while expressing his commitment to serial heterosexual monogamy, tries to understand the other options…. Allen, by contrast, appears to believe that his way is the only way.

There is a word for Woody Allen's world-view. The word is "provincial."