Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

The first joke sets the theme: a mass murder cannibal in Idaho has “an alternative life style.” 

Larry (Woody Allen) and Carol (Diane Keaton) suffer their polar alternative interests, as the first scene establishes. He likes Rangers hockey, she the opera. They wonder if their dulled marriage will last the 26 years of their neighbours’. By film’s end, their initially fanciful, then life-threatening involvement in that couple’s murder mystery revitalizes their relationship. That ends their respective temptation to adultery with friend Ted (Alan Alda) and novelist Marcia (Anjelica Huston).

Allen and Keaton made the film in the immediate aftermath of his scandalous break-up with Mia Farrow. Resuming his work with Keaton was a clear alternative to Farrow. 

So is his choice of a highly conventionalized commercial genre — the Manhattan murder mystery — after his more personal and ambitious films, especially his string from September through Husbands and Wives. The light-hearted genre is an alternative lifestyle for the serious director Allen had become. At that critical point in Allen’s career, his reputation in ruins as a result of Farrow’s eventually disproven allegations, making such an apparently impersonal film was a remarkably personal initiative.  

  The film is extremely self-reflexive. This is not a film about life but a film about the filmic representation of life. 

Its opening is a bathetic variation on the famous opening of Manhattan. The singer provides a non-lyrical expression of his love for the city. So unlyrical it dares a rhyme on Hackensack. Allen’s romantic Manhattan cityscape leads into the infernal factory where the murdered woman’s corpse is disappeared. 

The lead couple’s comic conversations revive the fumbling and mannerisms that harken back to Love and Death and Sleeper. Carol’s forays into the suspect’s flat recall Rear Window. The killer is entrapped by a scheme that involves a tape of his mistress’s acting audition and its recutting into something incriminating. As its master planner, exotic novelist Marcia Fox, is played by Anjelica Huston, she evokes and counters the victim in Crimes and Misdemeanours. 

The murderer himself is in the process of remodelling a charming old cinema. The radical redo is better for a cinema than for a marriage, but it confirms the parallel of life and cinema. 

In the film’s climax cinema overwhelms the characters’ “real” lives entirely. The showdown occurs at a screening of Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. The famous plethora of mirror images, shattering glass, a total unmooring of image from reality, extends from that film into Allen’s setting. Indeed the killer’s nemesis is (like Rita Hayworth) a redhead who has faithfully served the villain, who walks with a cane like the Welles villain and even repeats his acrid line to his “lover.” 

Films are another alternative life style. As Allen asserted, when a disaster hits life you can still make a movie. Betrayed by one intimate/star you can revert to another. When life gets too complicated for even an Allen masterpiece, turn on the light, entertaining genre. But even that art reflects life, ours as resonantly as the artist’s.