"WOODY NO GOODY"

...to quote Mia farrow's daughter.

New Yorkers are a skeptical bunch who can't easily be conned.

During and after the sickening Allen/Farrow custody trials, Woody Allen was constantly forced to shut down shooting on his films, as enraged passers-by practically stormed his sets, shrieking en masse, "Child Molester!!!"

Woody Allen has never been exonerated from the charges of sexually abusing his then seven year-old adopted daughter, Dylan.

Frank Maco, County Prosecutor for Litchfield, Connecticut, announced that, "although he was dropping the case (to spare Dylan from trauma) there was no question that Dylan Farrow had been molested."

Predictably, Woody Allen sued Maco, but the lawsuit was dismissed. Recently, there has been litigation with Allen's former producer, Jean Doumanian.

For someone who has made a career within a career of portraying himself as a meek, nebbishy victim both on and offscreen, Allen acclimates well to the role of legal pitbull.

But New Yorkers haven't grown to loathe Woody Allen because of his atrocious values, emotional sociopathology, rampant hypocrisy, self-righteousness or even his increasingly amateurish, tedious movies.

No, we chafe at his dishonest portrayals of Our Town.

With rare exceptions, Woody Allen's films are set in Manhattan, where he seems truly oblivious to the presence of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other ethnic residents.

Allen's Manhattan exists solely in the "Silk Stocking" District -where median family income is $700,000.

In approximately 30 films, he has featured only one black star--the brilliant Hazelle Goodman, racistly cast as a pot-head hooker in Deconstructing Harry.

Perhaps he should simply title his oeuvre New York City: 10021.

Never was his contempt for the city's working-class more evident than in Small Time Crooks. Here he presented poor people as gaudy, tasteless, crude and stupid, who ultimately admit defeat in emulating inherently tasteful, classy, erudite trust-funders.

Woody Allen is so star-struck with the wealthy WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) he loves/despises, that he eschews all irony.

Compare his 1930's MGM Studio-esque fantasy images to Fred Schepisi's Six Degrees of Separation, which reveals the dysfunction, brittleness, rage and desperation of an ambitious jet-set couple.

If I want to revel in a celluloid fantasy world of upper-class carefree bliss, I'd rather rent a frilly, frothy, frolicky Mary Astor classic...or even a creampuff like Married and in Love, directed by John Farrow.