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House-Painting Victim: He painted my house a disgusting color. He said he was a painter. I couldn't believe the results. Then he disappeared.
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Leonard Zelig: And to the, to the gentleman who's appendix I took out, I...I'm, I don't know what to say, if it's any consolation I... I may still have it somewhere around the house.
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[Leonard Zelig is apologizing on radio to all the people he misrepresented himself to]
Leonard Zelig: My deepest apology goes to the Trochman family in Detroit. I...I never delivered a baby before in my life, and I... I just thought that ice tongs was the way to do it.
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Leonard Zelig: I have an interesting case. I'm treating two sets of Siamese twins with split personalities. I'm getting paid by eight people.
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Zelig's Wife: He married me up at the First Church of Harlem. He told me he was the brother of Duke Ellington.
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Leonard Zelig: I would like to apologize to everyone. I... I'm awfully sorry for, for marrying all those women. It just, I don't know, it just seemed like the thing to do.
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Wrist Victim: He was the guy who smashed my car up. It was brand new. Then he backed-up over my mother's wrist. She's elderly... and uses her wrist a lot.
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Leonard Zelig: I love baseball. You know, it doesn't have to mean anything. It's just very beautiful to watch.
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The Narrator: That Zelig could be responsible for the behavior of each of the personalities he assumed means dozens of lawsuits. He is sued for bigamy, adultery, automobile accidents, plagiarism, household damages, negligence, property damages, and performing unnecessary dental extractions.
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The Narrator: The Ku Klux Klan, who saw Zelig as a Jew, that could turn himself into a Negro and an Indian, saw him as a triple threat.
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Leonard Zelig: But I've never flown before in my life, and it shows exactly what you can do, if you're a total psychotic!
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Leonard Zelig: [while under hypnosis] Oh... the pancakes!
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[Zelig thinks he's a psychiatrist.]
Leonard Zelig: I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women.
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Description
Mr. Personality? Or Mr. Personality disorder? Find out in Woody Allen's madcap mockumentary about an identity crisis of hilarious proportions! Thematically intricate, technically complex and filled with some of the most astonishing special effects ever, Zelig is "pure magic" (Newsweek)! Nominated* for two OscarsÂ(r), this "work of breathtaking virtuosity" (Playboy) isfurther proof that Allen "is the premier American filmmaker of his day" (The New York Times)! Leonard Zelig (Allen) is a social quick-change artist whose neurotic insecurity forces him to mimicmentally and physicallywhomever he's with. Treated by Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Farrow), Zelig is slowly cured, and in the process goes from side-show freak to national celebrity to Eudoras fiancÃ(c)! But when misdeeds from Zelig's multiple-personality past start to surface (larceny, bigamy and an unauthorized appendectomy), the human chameleon is on the run again, and Eudora must search the world over to find and save the only man who's every man she's ever wanted!
Amazon.com
The thinking person's Forrest Gump, Woody Allen's 1983 Zelig is a funny, atmospheric mock-documentary about the collision of one man's manifest neuroses colliding with key moments in 20th-century history. Allen plays the title character, a self-effacing, timorous fellow with such a porous personality that he physically becomes a reflection of whoever he is with. Complex and painstaking, the film's pre-Gump special effects manage to place Allen, buried under a series of makeup and prosthetic guises, in a number of scenes along with Adolf Hitler at a Nazi rally, a pope at the Vatican, and famous guests at a garden party hosted by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Similar in tone and satire to some of Allen's short, comic pieces published in The New Yorker magazine, Zelig is a one-note movie that takes its delicious time establishing the fullness of its central joke. It's well worth the wait. --Tom Keogh
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