Woody Allen (1993)
It’s a little too long but Manhattan Murder Mystery is effortlessly entertaining. You take Woody Allen’s facility for writing roles and dialogue of the kinds in evidence here so much for granted. His proven expertise in creating self-aware, hyper-articulate New Yorkers encourages the assumption that it must come easily to him – and that more of the same is no kind of challenge. The murder mystery dimension is a good idea because it provides a plot on which to hang the splendid dialogue, even if Allen and Marshall Brickman, who co-wrote the screenplay, don’t engage it with the story as much as they might. The murder element also provides a turn of events that interrupts and spices up the relationship of Larry Lipton (Allen), who works in publishing, and his wife Carol (Diane Keaton). The film rarely lets you forget that Carol and the couple’s friend Ted (Alan Alda), at least, are people with time on their hands. The conviction that their quietly affable neighbour Paul House (Jerry Adler) has murdered his wife (Lynn Cohen) – a conviction which Carol embraces long before her husband but which he eventually shares – intensifies, modifies and distracts the Liptons from the tensions in their marriage.
Manhattan Murder Mystery has many funny moments but nothing scary – except for one bit that’s a combination of the two. This occurs while the Liptons are trapped in the lift of a hotel where they’ve just discovered a corpse in a bedroom. You get the feeling that the writers enjoyed concocting the murder plot as an intellectual exercise but although it’s the cause of most of the action it doesn’t feel integral to it. In the closing stages, we get two helpings of explanation of what actually happened – both courtesy of the smart and self-regarding Marcia Fox (Anjelica Huston), one of Larry’s authors and, as far as Carol is concerned, a rival for his affections. (Ted has corresponding status in Larry’s mind.) Anjelica Huston delivers these expositions with panache: she seems to express Woody Allen’s preference for getting all this detail out of the way in one go rather than have it take up too much of our or his attention over the course of the film. The second time we get the explanation it’s somewhat different from the first but it comes over largely as a reprise of (and reward for) Huston’s witty theatricality.
Although the suspicion that the people here are fundamentally more preoccupied with their personal relationships than with detective work supplies a bit of edge, it’s Woody Allen’s neglect of suspense and momentum that makes Manhattan Murder Mystery feel protracted – and made me feel pleasantly drowsy at times. Yet all the performers are so assured and expert – and their enjoyment of what they’re doing is so palpable – that it hardly matters. There’s a sequence in the closing stages when Larry, Carol, Ted and Marcia are trying to trick Paul House into an admission of guilt through playing to him over the phone a recording of words spoken by his suspected mistress (Melanie Morris). This scene fuses, very satisfyingly, a sense of the four characters playing a game with a sense of the four actors having a ball. (And Jerry Adler is first rate as Mr House.) The relaxedness of this film may well have an autobiographical explanation: the role of Carol was written for Mia Farrow but the real-life marital situation between her and Allen evidently made another screen appearance together impossible by the time the picture came to be made. Except for a cameo in Radio Days, Diane Keaton hadn’t appeared in an Allen film since Manhattan (1979). Renewing their comic partnership successfully must, in the circumstances, have been powerfully relieving and nostalgic (‘Seems Like Old Times’ …) The climax to the story takes place in the old cinema Mr House owns, where an Orson Welles film is playing. I felt inadequate not recognising it – it’s The Lady from Shanghai.
16 January 2012
