The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (40 page)

Despite its emulation of
The Thin Man
series and brief homages to
Double Indemnity
and
The Lady from Shanghai,
the film which
Manhattan Murder Mystery
most closely resembles is Hitchcock’s
Rear Window
.
²⁶
That Allen could model his “trivial picture” on Hitchcock’s constitutes no contradiction for Allen, who argued that “I think Hitchcock himself never intended anything significant, and indeed his movies are not significant. They are delightful, but completely insignificant.”
²⁷
In both movies a couple characterized as being too complacently secure is drawn into the death of a neighbor which one member of the couple insists is a murder, the female character placing herself in jeopardy by repeatedly entering the murderer’s apartment in search of evidence. In Allen’s film, as we’ve seen, the characters’ involvement in the plot is a sublimated version of sexual adventuring. This point is reinforced by Marcia’s asking Ted, after he’s revealed to her that he slept with House’s mistress, Helen Moss, that afternoon as part of their scheme to keep Moss unavailable to House while the trap is being sprung on him, “You’ll do anything to catch a murderer, won’t you?” In Hitchcock’s film, the gradual absorption of Jeff Jeffries (James Stewart) in the activities of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) is the consequence of the photographer’s being laid up with a broken leg, thus re ducing his involvement in life to that of a voyeur vicariously participating in the experiences of others by watching them through his rear window. Allen’s dismissal of the existence of “anything significant” in Hitchcock’s films not withstanding, lines like those of Stella (Thelma Ritter)—“We’ve become a race of peeping Toms. People ought to get outside and look at themselves”—and the comment of Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly) to Jeffries, “I’m not much on rear window ethics, but we’re two of the most frightening ghouls I have ever known,”
²⁸
have given two generations of film critics substantial textual inducement to read
Rear Window
as one of Hitchcock’s oblique cinematic commentaries on photography—and, by extension, film—as a voyeuristic medium. Whereas Hitchcock’s film thoroughly succeeds in using the conventional thriller format to conceal a sophisticated argument about film without puncturing the movie’s pretense of popular entertainment transparency,
Man- hattan Murder Mystery
insists, in a way that Allen’s other films don’t, on the absolute difference between significant and popular art. The movie locates itself so intently in the latter realm that even the recurrent theme of life imitating art gets reduced to a one-liner at the close, the inclusion of film clips from
Double Indemnity
and
The Lady from Shanghai
apparently carrying no reverberations or thematic ramifications beyond dramatizing how dwarfed Allen’s characters are by Wilder’s and Welles’s on the movie screen. If
Manhattan Murder Mystery
is among the least resonant of Allen’s films, it’s at least partly because of his dubious assumption that the genre he was working in can’t be anything else.

The limitation of
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
finally, is that its affectionately nostalgic appropriation of the generic moves of earlier mystery and murder/comedy films gave Allen permission to pose none of the questions his most interesting films always leave in play—the relationship between genders, between serious and popular art, between literary and film genres, and the issue of the desire for meaning running afoul of the human capacity to embrace illusion.

There is, however, still another Hollywood icon influencing the course of
Murder Mystery
. Returning to their condominium building after the opening Rangers’ game scene, Larry tells Carol about a Bob Hope movie on television he’s looking forward to watching. The line reinforces Larry’s characterization as someone—like Jeff Jeffries—dependent upon spectating for excitement, while introducing the Hollywood figure who seems to encapsulate for Allen a side of his personality as surely as Ingmar Bergman incarnates for him philosophical gravity and intense spiritual introspectiveness. Having been asked by the American Film Institute to assemble a tribute to Hope, Allen told Frank Rich that he “had more pleasure watching Hope’s films than making any film I’ve ever made. I think he’s just a great, huge talent. Part of what I like about him is that flippant, Californian, obsessed- with-golf striding through life. His not caring about the serious side at all.”
²⁹
When Carol tries to tell Larry about developments in her sleuthing, he responds “I don’t want to know—leave me alone,” and a particularly intense dose of what Carol has discovered provokes from him the comment, “It’s the eye of the beholder. We have to get you to the doctor to get happy glasses.” In
Mighty Aphrodite,
Allen offers a more deliberate repudiation of pessimistic perceptions of existence in the Greek chorus’s donning of “happy glasses”; in
Murder Mystery,
Larry Lipton’s trial-of-bravery has resuscitated him sufficiently that he whom Carol believes “used to be a fun guy” can now joke merrily with her about Ted as they disappear into their condo building. The mugging face he makes toward the audience when Carol zings him in the last line is Allen’s way of signaling what the entire movie has dramatized: the idea that the world of
Manhattan Murder Mystery
is a self-consciously Bob Hope reality, one in which even the presence of murder cant alter its “not caring about the serious side at all.”

A testament to Allen’s uncharacteristic insistence on the absolute discontinuity between popular and high art,
Manhattan Murder Mystery
suffers from its insistent joviality and from the unreflective, unrelenting reverence it displays toward the conventions of the urbane New York whodunit. The film’s closing good-naturedness rings slightly hollow because what Carol describes as “the most exciting adventure I’ve ever been on” has never seemed more than a Yuppie couple’s brief hiatus from their wealth’s insularity, an artificially induced holiday from late-middle age anomie. It is perhaps the greatest risk to Allen’s filmmaking career that his movies can become no more than this: diverting, generically imitative adventure mechanisms ultimately intended to restore their characters—and, thus, their audiences—to a sense of their own comfort and equanimity. Rather than effectively replicating the silly cheerfulness of the resolutions of 1940s Nick and Nora Charles movies, the Liptons’ 1993 retreat into their apartment building in the closing image of
Manhattan Murder Mystery
seems smug.

The couple appears to gather the security of their glass fortress around themselves much as Allen in the film has wrapped himself snugly in the conventions of the sophisticated comedic whodunit genre he’s resurrecting. In a game of mirrors reflecting mirror images as disorienting as the scene in which Mrs. Dalton enacts her revenge on House, Allen has made in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
a movie about “people who are different and happy like in the movies.”
Everyone Says I Love You
would prove more successful in transforming this cinematic Chinese box into charmingly compelling yet highly self-conscious film narrative. What the pursuit of the mystery is for Carol is too much what the film is for Allen: a contrived antidote for an oppressive reality, distraction impersonating remedy. The movie’s numerous allusions to previous detective films leave little doubt as to the validity of Larry’s admission that “I’ll never say that life doesn’t imitate art again”
³⁰
; the major limitation of
Manhattan Murder Mystery
may be, in fact, that its images of life are finally too imitative of art, too dictated by the style and genre of an earlier era’s films to have much contemporary vitality of their own. But the comment Larry makes which even more effectively summarizes
Manhattan Murder Mystery
(and Allen’s ambivalent attitude toward making it), comes earlier in the film: “You’re making a murder,” he admonishes Carol as her fixation upon the mystery deepens, “where nothing exists.”

16

That Voodoo That You Do So Well

Mighty Aphrodite

Think of Oedipus. Oedipus is the structure of funny. Who did this terrible thing to our city? Oh my God—it was me! That’s funny.

—Lester discoursing on comedy in
Crimes and Misdemeanors

The mystery underlying
Mighty Aphrodite
is not, as it is in
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
generically but genetically coded. Allen was inspired to write the film’s screenplay by thinking about the legally indeterminable heredity of Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Dylan, and the fact that the child would never know what her inheritances actually are.
¹
The way in which those meditations also inspired the introduction of the Greek chorus into the film isn’t difficult to imagine, the enigmas of parenthood precipitating questions about origins appropriate to these on-stage projections of the audiences of Greek tragedy. And so the movie opens with the chorus bemoaning the lives of men and women, cataloguing those heroes—Achilles, Menelaus, Antigone, Medea—fated by the inexplicable wills of the gods to misery and suffering. “For to understand the ways of the heart,” the chorus leader (F. Murray Abraham) intones, “is to grasp clearly the malice or ineptitude of the gods who, in their vain and clumsy labors to create a flawless surrogate, have left mankind dazed and incomplete.”

“Take, for instance,” the chorus, suddenly sounding very un-Greek choral, responds, “the case of Lenny Weinrib, a tale as Greek as fate itself.”
²

The case of Lenny Weinrib (Allen) involves his attempt to alter the future of Linda Ash (Mira Sorvino) so that when his adopted son, Max (Jimmy McQuaid), goes searching for his mother later in life, he won’t be confronted by a prostitute appearing in porno films under the
nom de cinema
Judy Cum. Whether Lenny’s efforts seriously constitute “a tale as Greek as fate itself” is, of course, dubious. In fact, some of the film’s reviewers perceived the chorus’s presence in
Mighty Aphrodite
as an arbitrary means of producing a few easy laughs, as “a device pushed well beyond its comic limit.”
³
It’s likely that the good trick of having the chorus from behind their masks of tragedy express themselves in the whiny inflections of a Woody Allen protagonist—“Oh, cursed fate! Some thoughts are better left unthunk!”; “And why a child now, out of left field?”—does become subject to the law of diminishing returns. And yet, the implicit identification of the chorus with Allen’s screen persona suggests that there is a more substantial justification for their presence than the anachronism-inspired laughs they provoke. Like the extraterrestrial Og in
Stardust Memories
who, employing an intonation similar to theirs, advises Sandy Bates to make funnier movies, they represent the antagonist in the dramatic dialogue Allen is having with himself over making light comic movies like
Mighty Aphrodite
. (It may be because
Manhattan Murder Mystery
has so completely resolved this conflict that it seems such a less interesting film.) If the chorus is right that fate betrays the greatest among us, and if their leader is right—and Allen’s expressed perceptions of the world on film or outside of it have never suggested that either of them
isn’t
right—that circumstances of existing in the universe leave mankind “but dazed and incomplete,” there seems little cause for optimism about human life and still less occasion for the making of celebratory movies. Nonetheless,
Mighty Aphrodite
moves toward a remarkably cheerful resolution, one that culminates in the conversion of the chorus leader (who proves, admittedly, not inordinately resistant to transformation) from his diagnosis of humanity’s “dazed and incomplete” condition to his closing affirmation of human life as being “unbelievable, miraculous, sad, wonderful.” The chorus leaders change of heart, in fact, distills the overall trajectory of the film: the human capacity for change provides the primary source of energy dictating the comedic resolution of
Mighty Aphrodite
. Its pervasive breezily comic tone notwithstanding,
Mighty Aphrodite
dramatically opposes Allen’s pessimistic perception of human life with his desire to make movies that provide the condemned with consolatory laughter, and if the outcome of the film’s extratextual
agon
seems inevitable, that’s just a testament to the mightiness of the power which transforms the chorus from disputants of grim universal mysteries to celebrants of—in the words of the Cole Porter classic they end up performing—“that voodoo that you do so well.”