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Tuesday February 11th 2025

Analyze This | 1999

When mob boss Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro) begins to get anxiety attacks, he hires hapless shrink Dr Sobel (Billy Crystal) to cure him in Harold Ramis’s bright, character-based comedy, filmed mainly around New York.

The opening flashback of the ‘Appalachian’ mafia meeting (a scene based on a real event) is held at the John Jay Homestead, 400 Jay Street, to the east of Katonah. The home of John Jay, one of America's Founding Fathers and co-author of the Treaty of Paris which ended the Revolutionary War, is now a State Historic Site. Katonah is about 40 miles north of New York City.

It’s outside the Muscoot Inn, 105 Somerstown Road, to the west of Katonah, that the cop notices the unusual amount of traffic, and sparks of the raid.

The warehouse, in which Vitti’s interrogation of an unfortunate victim is interrupted by an unwanted emotional attack, was the old Maxwell House plant in Hoboken, New Jersey. Built in 1938 (at the time the largest coffee factory in the world), the landmark building stood at 1125 Hudson Street, but has since been demolished and replaced with condos.

Vitti’s ‘heart failure’turns out to be an anxiety attack, diagnosed at Elmhurst Hospital Center, 79-01 Broadway, Elmhurst, in Queens.

It’s to Upper Montclair, New Jersey, that Vitti travels to consult psychiatrist Dr Sobel at his home, 538 Park Street, between Alexander Avenue and Overlook Road.

Sobel’s life is inevitably turned upside down. Until it’s disrupted, Sobel’s wedding  to Laura MacNamara (Lisa Kudrow) is going ahead in Miami Beach, Florida, at the expensive St Regis Bal Harbor Resort, 9701 Collins Avenue at 96th Avenue, Bal Harbour. Vitti, naturally, stays in the hotel’s Presidential Suite.

The nautically-themed bar, with its tank of mermaids, to which Sobel is summoned by Vitti, is the Wreck Bar at what was the Sheraton Fort Lauderdale Beach Hotel, now the B Ocean Fort Lauderdale, 1140 Seabreeze Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale. Unfortunately, the real bar isn’t quite as wonderfully kitsch – most of the OTT décor is courtesy of the film’s art department – though you can see the mermaids.

A refusal to Vitti’s invitation sees Dr Sobel dunked into the shark tank at the Miami Seaquarium, 4400 Rickenbacker Causeway (the sharks are CGI – it’s actually the Manatee Tank that was used).

Sobel’s Godfather-inspired dream of being gunned down while buying oranges, cleverly uses the same New York street on which Don Corleone’s attempted assassination. Exiting 202 Mott Street, Sobel is attacked after buying fruit at the fruit stand at 203 Mott Street in Little Italy.

He tells Vitti of his dream while attending the funeral of a snitch at the Church of St Luke and St Matthew, 520 Clinton Avenue, Brooklyn. The Episcopalian church had to be redressed as Catholic, after the Catholic church refused co-operation following the filming of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant.

The Italian-American social club is on Mulberry Street at Spring Street in New York’s Little Italy. ‘Paretti’s’, the restaurant in which it turns out Vitti’s father was gunned down, is fictitious. It was built on Kenmare Street. This interior was also used for the Mulberry Street social club and, more surprisingly, as Vitti’s house.

Vitti finally opens up to his emotions while attempting to whack Dr Sobel on the Newark Bay waterfront on Staten Island, in front of the Bayonne Bridge (that’s the same bridge destroyed by aliens neat the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds).

Sobel and Laura finally get, hurriedly, married in the Waldorf Astoria New York, 301 Park Avenue (incidentally, the same hotel had also served for Sobel’s father’s book launch at the opening of the film) in New York. The often-used hotel can also be seen in Woody Allen’s Hannah And Her Sisters and in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

As Sobel is whisked off to pose as Consigliare at the high-level mob meeting, the cops are foiled with seven identical limos emerging from the tunnel to the toll gates of the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

The venue for the meeting, the ‘Tops Limousine Service’, is the garage of a bus company in Red Hook, Brooklyn (though the interior was an empty factory in Long Island City, Queens).

Finally cured – and brought to justice – Dr Sobel visits a reformed Vitti at the real Sing Sing Prison, in Ossining, New York State.