Crimes and Misdeanours (15.)
Directed by Woody Allen. 1989
Starring Martin Landau, Woody Allen, Alan Alda, Mia Farrow, Joanna Gleason, Anjelica Huston, Jerry Orbach, Claire Bloom and Sam Waterston. Available individually on blu-ray from April 5th or as part of the Woody Allen: Seven Film – 1986-1991 boxset from Arrow Academy.
Crimes and Misdemeanours is like receiving a knockout punch from someone you've known for over twenty years and had never previously even raised their voice in anger in your presence. For years the great weights of morality and mortality had become feathers in Allen's hands, trivial fripperies to be tossed about lightly; here they are delivered with a force that is rare in any movie, especially one with zingers like “The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.” In most ways it is just another typical Woody film, but for 104 minutes a cloak of enormously gravitas drapes itself across Woody's shoulders. It was never to return again, but for the brief window, he wore it well.
Like Hannah and Her Sisters, the film employs a clear demarcation between comedy and drama. On the dark side Judah (Landau) is a successful ophthalmologist and philanthropist whose comfortable life is threatened by his neurotic mistress (Huston) who is threatening to tell his wife. In desperation he turns to his brother (Orbach) for advice, and he offers to arrange for her to be gotten rid of. On the light side Cliff Stern (Allen) is an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker who gets to shoot a profile of a wildly successful sitcom producer, Alda, a man he considers to be a pompous and immoral oath. He also starts to make some moves on production assistant Farrow.
Apologies, but big plot spoilers from here on in, so watch the film first.
It is, of course, another of his Hail to the Russian features, primarily Dostoevsky. Usually Woody is ever so humble when approaching his elders and betters but here he shows a bit of defiance. What really sets it apart from his other films though is something you never get in Allen dramas, and not that much in his comedies either: subtlety. Like all characters in Allen dramas, both Judah and Cliff spell out everything they are feeling for us but the difference this time is that both of them have a great gift for self deception. Landau is a passive aggressive murderer, slowly coaxing his brother into pushing him into doing it. Afterward he flirts with confessing, but he is surely flattering himself. He is too puffed up on his own importance. He frames both the murder, and his refusal to confess to it, as acts of self sacrifice, done to spare his wife embarrassment.
It is telling too that Allen doesn't give the victim a sympathetic moment in the film. In most of her scenes Huston is seen being dangerously unreasonable and unhinged. In the few flashbacks to happier times in their relationship she isn't shot to be attractive or desirable, she looks like a frump. The audience are willing him on to get rid of her. Like Judah, our moral qualms are fairly superficial: she's annoying our protagonist so we want her out of the picture.
Meanwhile Cliff is eager to see himself as the martyr, the moral conscience that everybody puts down, but his hatred of Alda is at least partly motivated by envy, as his wife (Gleason) tells him. And why is a married man chasing after Farrow anyway, and why is he doing it by showing her footage of a proposed documentary about a philosopher Louis Levy? All this helps Allen as an actor, it makes for a much fuller performance. Indeed the acting all round is phenomenal. Alda has never been funnier while Landau is phenomenal.
Allen has always worked with the best cinematographers around, though often you wouldn't know it, outside of the showy black and white efforts. Often master like Gordon Willis, Darius (Delicatessen, Seven) Khondji, Carlo Di Ponti are asked to shoot his drab looks at the interiors and exteriors of Manhattan. Here though Bergman's cameraman Sven Nykvist, concluding a brief 2.5 movie secondment to Allen (alongside Another Woman, he shot his contribution to the compendium movie New York Stories) gets to do some tremendous work. The scene where Judah finally commits himself to do it, during a thunder storm. has a fierce visual power. It's contrived, but boy does it work. He also gets a lot out of the chilly winter exteriors and I'd say this is the best looking of all Allen's colour movies.
C&M is a great film to see when you are a teenager, or young enough to be of a teenage disposition. It's a great distillation of that world view that humanity is utterly corrupt and that the good guys (i.e. you) always lose and evil (them) always wins. You can really wallow in the self pity and yet here it doesn't feel indulgent, it feels earned. But in it mighty final scene, when the two protagonists meet for the first time, Allen to lick his wounds and Landau to gloat about how he's come to terms with a godless universe, I bet most viewers sympathies shift sneakily over to Landau's side, and exit the film with him while trying to avoid catching their reflections in a mirror.
Directed by Woody Allen. 1989
Starring Martin Landau, Woody Allen, Alan Alda, Mia Farrow, Joanna Gleason, Anjelica Huston, Jerry Orbach, Claire Bloom and Sam Waterston. Available individually on blu-ray from April 5th or as part of the Woody Allen: Seven Film – 1986-1991 boxset from Arrow Academy.
Crimes and Misdemeanours is like receiving a knockout punch from someone you've known for over twenty years and had never previously even raised their voice in anger in your presence. For years the great weights of morality and mortality had become feathers in Allen's hands, trivial fripperies to be tossed about lightly; here they are delivered with a force that is rare in any movie, especially one with zingers like “The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.” In most ways it is just another typical Woody film, but for 104 minutes a cloak of enormously gravitas drapes itself across Woody's shoulders. It was never to return again, but for the brief window, he wore it well.
Like Hannah and Her Sisters, the film employs a clear demarcation between comedy and drama. On the dark side Judah (Landau) is a successful ophthalmologist and philanthropist whose comfortable life is threatened by his neurotic mistress (Huston) who is threatening to tell his wife. In desperation he turns to his brother (Orbach) for advice, and he offers to arrange for her to be gotten rid of. On the light side Cliff Stern (Allen) is an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker who gets to shoot a profile of a wildly successful sitcom producer, Alda, a man he considers to be a pompous and immoral oath. He also starts to make some moves on production assistant Farrow.
Apologies, but big plot spoilers from here on in, so watch the film first.
It is, of course, another of his Hail to the Russian features, primarily Dostoevsky. Usually Woody is ever so humble when approaching his elders and betters but here he shows a bit of defiance. What really sets it apart from his other films though is something you never get in Allen dramas, and not that much in his comedies either: subtlety. Like all characters in Allen dramas, both Judah and Cliff spell out everything they are feeling for us but the difference this time is that both of them have a great gift for self deception. Landau is a passive aggressive murderer, slowly coaxing his brother into pushing him into doing it. Afterward he flirts with confessing, but he is surely flattering himself. He is too puffed up on his own importance. He frames both the murder, and his refusal to confess to it, as acts of self sacrifice, done to spare his wife embarrassment.
It is telling too that Allen doesn't give the victim a sympathetic moment in the film. In most of her scenes Huston is seen being dangerously unreasonable and unhinged. In the few flashbacks to happier times in their relationship she isn't shot to be attractive or desirable, she looks like a frump. The audience are willing him on to get rid of her. Like Judah, our moral qualms are fairly superficial: she's annoying our protagonist so we want her out of the picture.
Meanwhile Cliff is eager to see himself as the martyr, the moral conscience that everybody puts down, but his hatred of Alda is at least partly motivated by envy, as his wife (Gleason) tells him. And why is a married man chasing after Farrow anyway, and why is he doing it by showing her footage of a proposed documentary about a philosopher Louis Levy? All this helps Allen as an actor, it makes for a much fuller performance. Indeed the acting all round is phenomenal. Alda has never been funnier while Landau is phenomenal.
Allen has always worked with the best cinematographers around, though often you wouldn't know it, outside of the showy black and white efforts. Often master like Gordon Willis, Darius (Delicatessen, Seven) Khondji, Carlo Di Ponti are asked to shoot his drab looks at the interiors and exteriors of Manhattan. Here though Bergman's cameraman Sven Nykvist, concluding a brief 2.5 movie secondment to Allen (alongside Another Woman, he shot his contribution to the compendium movie New York Stories) gets to do some tremendous work. The scene where Judah finally commits himself to do it, during a thunder storm. has a fierce visual power. It's contrived, but boy does it work. He also gets a lot out of the chilly winter exteriors and I'd say this is the best looking of all Allen's colour movies.
C&M is a great film to see when you are a teenager, or young enough to be of a teenage disposition. It's a great distillation of that world view that humanity is utterly corrupt and that the good guys (i.e. you) always lose and evil (them) always wins. You can really wallow in the self pity and yet here it doesn't feel indulgent, it feels earned. But in it mighty final scene, when the two protagonists meet for the first time, Allen to lick his wounds and Landau to gloat about how he's come to terms with a godless universe, I bet most viewers sympathies shift sneakily over to Landau's side, and exit the film with him while trying to avoid catching their reflections in a mirror.