Zelig

Computers can work wonders now. The magic lasted a short time before we began accepting that any picture can be made over into any other picture - or any person can be put into it who wasn't there in the first place.

Why, they can even bring the dead to life again to complete their movie role, like Oliver Reed in Gladiator.

But Woody Allen's comedy about a Little Nobody who apparently met every Big Body in his lifetime, like Roosevelt, Hitler, Chaplin and Eugene O'Neill, made a one-joke film into a masterly visual deceit when it first appeared.

Allen's character is integrated by the higher technology into the meeting points of history with a cool display of chameleon timeliness.

That's really all, folks - it's not particularly funny, but the spoof works very smoothly and it's a film quite definitely 'of its time'.

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