Monday, January 27, 2014

Martin Bergmann, a psychologist who...

...played a philosopher in Woody Allen’s 1989 film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, died at age 100. From his obit in the Times:

Mr. Allen was looking for a tweedy, white-haired, European-sounding psychoanalyst to portray Professor Louis Levy, a humanistic philosopher. In the movie, a dark comedy about marriage and its discontents, Mr. Allen plays a filmmaker at work on a documentary about Levy, who is seen only in film clips. 

When Mr. Bergmann first saw “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” he received a psychological jolt: at the end of the film, he discovered, Professor Levy commits suicide off camera.

“It was a little bit of a shock,” Mr. Bergmann told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “It was essential for Woody Allen, to develop the plot. It wasn’t so nice for me. Some of my patients were quite upset.”

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