Editor’s Note: For Freeline Media movie critic Mike Fried, it’s time for a Woody Allen retrospective! Mike reviews some of the Woodman’s films — are we talking about the good, the bad, and the glorious? Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
BANANAS
*****
Where does one begin on this film? On the surface it’s a movie about a disinfected New Yorker, who decides to move to a Latin American country that has just become a dictatorship; and he joins the rebels. Because the leader of the rebels turns out to be an insane man (think Fidel Castro), he becomes the leader of the rebels and comes to New York in disguise.
That’s the basic story, but the movie is so much more than that. The plot is merely a device to insert some absolutely terrific — dare I say it? — stand up material into the film.
For me, this movie (along with Take The Money And Run (1969) and Sleeper (1973) are Woody Allen’s great comic trilogy, full of slapstick humor and sight gags. It doesn’t hurt that the movie opens up with a political assassination with Howard Cosell providing the play by play (“Sir, you’ve been shot! When did you know it was all over?”). And from there it is off the the races, whether it’s a parking dispute between monks on Wall Street when one guy in a cross steals another guy on a cross’s parking spot to one of the funniest trial scenes ever filmed (including an appearance by J. Edgar Hoover), a memorable snakebite scene and a large takeout order that is still laughable 53 years later, this movie scores in every scene. And speaking of scores, Marvin Hamlisch’s nice energetic jazz score livens up the film.
How am I immature?
Well, emotionally, sexually, and intellectually.
Yeah, but what other ways?
Perhaps one day, you will be a tiger.
Well, don’t hold your breath. If you ever need a squirrel, call me.
One of the Woodman’s finest comedies.
MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY
*****
Larry and Carol are coming back from a hockey game and they meet their neighbors, Paul and Lillian, a charming older couple. Next thing they know, Lillian dies of a coronary. Carol is suspicious because Lillian was so healthy, while Larry believes she died of a heart attack. Carol is goaded into investigating this further by their friends Ted and Marcia. And Carol goes into overdrive when she thinks she sees Lillian on a bus after she is found dead. Hilarity ensues.
This is one of Woody Allen’s best comedies. The dynamic between Keaton and Allen is even better than in Annie Hall. They are on opposite ends of the spectrum about their suspicions, and it’s just a lot of fun to watch. While he tells her she’s nuts, she gets the bright idea to sneak into Paul’s apartment using a stolen key. But Paul forgot his wallet and comes back!
Keaton’s comic timing shines through. When Larry says that they should call the police, Carol responds “This is my case.”
In the scene where Paul returns, Woody shows his directorial chops, switching deftly from comedic to suspenseful. In addition, he is hysterically funny as Larry, throwing off trademark quips (“I prefer to atrophy”), as well as yelling at Carol for investigating. The two of them could be Miles and Luna from Sleeper, magically transported back from the future into current day New York City. There’s a brilliant scene in the middle of the movie where both of them are talking to the cops telling separate stories. Their manic energy is hysterical.
Jerry Adler, in the first role I can recall seeing him in, shines as Paul, and his tone shifts from jovial to suspicious at the blink of an eye. I’m glad Woody used him because otherwise we would not have Hesh (The Sopranos) and Chief Feinberg (Rescue Me).
And Alan Alda crushes it as Ted, the conspiracy-minded friend. He is into this story, even going so far as to urge Carol to surveil the woman they think is the girlfriend.
I’d liken this movie as a close cousin to Broadway Danny Rose and a direct descendant of The Thin Man films, although whereas Nick and Nora needed alcohol, Larry and Carol need tranquilizers.
This is a cleverly crafted murder mystery and the credit goes to Woody and Diane. It’s one of my favorites of his from the 1990s, which was a particularly strong decade for the woodman.
Madcap is the word I’d use.
The murder mystery story was part of the original script for Annie Hall but was excised as dragging down the story. Allen dusted it off later and gave it to longtime collaborator Marshall Brickman to see if they could make it work.
They did.
WATCH IT!
FUN FACT: in a blink and you’ll miss him role is 17 year old Zach Braff as Carol and Larry’s son.
SHADOWS AND FOG
****
German expressionism has never been this funny.
Kleinman, a nebbish, is woken up by his neighbors to join in a vigilante mob hunting for a serial killer who strangles his victims (and sometimes cuts their throat) on fight nights. When he gets dressed, though, the mob is gone. Meanwhile, a circus comes into town. Unfortunately, Kleinman may wind up becoming a scapegoat for three competing lynch mobs.
While nowhere near Woody’s best, this film is extraordinarily distinguished by its production design (the biggest set ever created in NYC) and cinematography, which purely echoes Fritz Lang’s M and the story which is right out of the world of Franz Kafka. In fact, Woody is representative of Kafka’s Josef K. He even dresses like Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert.
It is a treat for film lovers because it just looks so good and combines the very essence of Woody’s comic nervousness with the moody tension of classic black and white crime cinema.
Had this movie been filmed in color it would have been a swing and a miss. But even when the script sags, the look of the film is just so mesmerizing that it draws you in.
This is one of Woody’s most underappreciated works.
Kleinman, you’re not really a coward or a worm or a yellowbelly?
No, but keep going. You’re in the right column.
WATCH IT!
COUP DE CHANCE
*** 1/2
A chance meeting between two old high school friends.
Attraction.
Infidelity.
Crime.
Or as the Woodman described it: “I can only tell you that this is a crime film, a serious story of crime and punishment. With a dose of romance, of course.”
So goes Woody Allen’s 50th and possibly final film, Coup de Chance, which is Woody’s only film not in English.
Lou de Laâge and Melvil Poupaud excel as Fanny and Jean Fournier, the husband and wife at the center of this tale. When Fanny meets Alain, a former classmate, their friendship goes to the next level. When Jean finds out about it, he goes to the next level yet. But Lou’s mother is suspicious of Jean.
For most of its 93 minute running time, the film bothered me because here was Woody doing a drama and yet his use of 80s and 90s jazz for the score gave it an uplifting comedic quality — and yet it wasn’t.
The ending cured a lot of my issues. We’d like to be able to control everything but in reality we have very little control.
It is all a stroke of luck.
WATCH IT!
CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
*****
“I’ve gone out the window.”
Judah Rosenthal is a well respected physician. He has a loving wife and a loving family. He also has a mistress, Dolores, who threatens to reveal the relationship between herself and Judah, who feels that he must take matters into his own hands. Cliff Stern is a documentary filmmaker who is struggling in his work and in his marriage to his wife, Wendy, whose brother, Lester, is a successful (and vain) television producer. Judah turns to his gangster brother, Jack, to get a hitman. Cliff is hired by Lester to do a documentary about Lester. Cliff falls in love with Lester’s associate producer. These two storylines converge as only Woody Allen can converge them — as comedy is tragedy plus time.
People speak about Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan and other films as being among Woody’s best but this one is not talked about enough. Of course, I think Woody’s first three films (Take the Money and Run, Bananas and Sleeper) are his best but I am all in for comedy. But this movie is something special.
Its structure, flipping between the present and the past in both storylines, is seamless and in doing so Allen underscores the notion that all of us are confronted with difficult situations but would we act as these two main characters act. Probably not. But it kind of makes perfect sense, the way Allen writes it, because the characters don’t see right and wrong.
And bringing Allen’s words to life are a tremendous group of actors: Allen as Cliff, Alan Alda as Lester, Anjelica Huston as Dolores, Jerry Orbach as Jack and Sam Waterston as Ben, the rabbi to whom Judah confides. But none excels so much as Martin Landau as Judah, a man tormented with what he has done and what he will do. His performance is one of the very best performances in any Woody Allen film and it garnered him his second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He should have won but no one was going to beat Denzel Washington for Glory.
And while Allen makes comedies and he makes dramas, it’s rare that he makes the comedy-drama that strikes such a fine balance between the two that in one moment you can feel dread and the next minute you can be howling hysterically. This is a fine riff on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the Russian Literature clearly with which Allen has immersed himself and expressed in his works.
This deserved the Screenplay Oscar over Dead Poets Society. I mean, only Woody can pivot from “Jack, God have mercy on us, Jack” to “Honey, you’re the one who stopped sleeping with me, ok. It’ll be a year come April 20th. I remember the date exactly, because it was Hitler’s birthday.” And the finished Cliff Stern documentary on his brother-in-law is one of the funniest sequences of his career.
“If you want a happy ending, you should go to a Hollywood movie.”
It’s a Top 5 Woody Allen movie.
WATCH IT!
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
