MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY
Director: Woody Allen
After the delicious black humour of 1992’s Husbands and Wives, Woody Alien’s new film is an immense disappointment. The director has spoken of it being intended as a diversion but Woody Allen and Diane Keaton dithering around, discovering a convoluted murder plot in an apartment up the hallway provides the most contrived 90 minutes I’ve ever sat through. Keaton’s character is drawn into it all through domestic boredom one presumes, while Allen is the sort of man who has watched Double Indemnity a few too many times for his own good - Manhattan Murder Mystery has quite a few nudgy cineaste jokes and the final showdown is a clumsy replay of the mirror scene from Welles’ Lady from Shanghai. Some of the gags are lamentably handled, in particular one involving a faked phone ‘constructed’ out of a circle of cassette players.
Allen dealt with murder in the 1990 Crimes and Misdemeanours, a black comedy in which questions of morality were more equivocal. Angelica Huston may not be murdered in Manhattan Murder Mystery as she was in Crimes, but she deserves better roles than that of Allen’s sidekick in his latest film. WILLIAM DART
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/RIU19940401.2.49.4
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Rip It Up, Issue 200, 1 April 1994, Page 28
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198MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY Rip It Up, Issue 200, 1 April 1994, Page 28
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