Woody at his best ! | Crimes and Misdemeanors [VHS]

Not so Petty 'Crimes' | Crimes and Misdemeanors [VHS] | Martin Landau, Woody Allen

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	• Crimes and Misdemeanors [VHS] Martin Landau, Woody Allen M G M, Inc average customer review:based on 82 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Mature Look at the Thin Line of Morality -

Woody Allen directs, produces and stars in "Crimes and Misdemeanors." It is a meaty, complex film with interesting, fine-tuned characters and provoking relationships. Many topics are examined including infidelity, murder, God and religion, moral rules of the universe, comedy, adultery and tragic situations.

Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) is a struggling documentary filmmaker in a marriage that has becoming boring and meaningless. His wife asks her brother, Lester (Alan Alda) a successful comedy star to give Cliff a job so they have income to live on. In the meantime we see Martin Landau playing a successful ophthalmologist, Judah Rosenthal, who is having an affair with a former airline stewardess, Dolores (Anjelica Huston), who loves him deeply and is threatening to go to Judah's wife and discuss the relationship. She wants Judah for herself and he may have made promises to her he cannot keep. He is deeply troubled and discusses his sin to Ben (Sam Waterston, a patient and learned rabbi who is losing his eyesight but not his faith. Ben recommends Judah tell his wife and ask forgiveness. The relationship may change but the truth and forgiveness is the moral way out. Judah cannot hurt his wife of 25 years and turns to his brother Jack, a man of the underworld, connected to the mob and can make things "happen" - in this case, get rid of Dolores who is also threatening to blackmail Judah on some fund movements between stocks and foundation monies she knows about.

In separate scenes Cliff is continuing making the documentary about his pompous brother-in-law, Lester, and they are both falling for the film's producer (Halle Reed (Mia Farrow). Even though Cliff is married, he is not happy and lets Hallie know his feelings for her. Lester is also a "ladies man" and is shown flirting with starlets after hours. He has a very high opinion of himself, and Cliff struggles with his failures and hopes. His other project involved a professor speaking on the joys of humankind, happiness and optimism. Ironically, Lester learns his "star" has committed suicide so he has to "shelve" his one hopeful dream project.

Overall "Crimes and Misdemeanors" is a mature look at the complex rules of morality and what how each individual frames their actions, and how "chance" plays in the game. One line mentioned during a Jewish Sedar was that "If Hitler won the war, history books would have been written much differently."

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Woody at his best !

This picture, along with "Hannah and her Sisters" and "Zelig" are, to this date, Woody's best films. Well, you can add "Radio Days" and "The purple rose of Cairo" to the list. It's a "to see you is to love you" kind of film. The screenplay is as polished as it can be, the cast shines throughout and you'll leave the theatre with the feeling (very rare theese days) that yu've seen a great movie. No wonder the crew gave a round of standing applause after some scenes were shot.

Moving, funny, cinical and very, very humane, it's not to be missed.

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Not so Petty 'Crimes'

One of the greatest dilemmas a director can face is making a likable, relatable film when nearly all the characters presented are thoroughly unlikable. This is one of the dilemmas Woody Allen faces with his film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Let's take a look at the main hero of the film. Here is a man, Judah, in an unhappy marriage caring on with another woman for over two years who decides it's time to kill her off before she releases his secret to his wife.

How can such a man be presented as likable? Well, Woody Allen's best decision is to make him an everyman. A man caught up in the situation in which he must face his demons head on. He has made a mistake and he must deal with the consequences of such mistake. In an ordinary Hollywood film, this would mean him being caught and forced to pay for the crime that he has committed. Such is not the case here. Sure he has some regret but, by facing and admitting to what he has done, he is able to move on with his life. One of the great strengths of this film is that it doesn't shy away from what Judah has done. It doesn't make light of it and it doesn't deny that it has happen.

He is simply a man who has made this mistake and is forced to go on with his life carrying this horrible mistake. Should he have gone to jail? You bet. Should he have told his wife about his adultery? Of course. But, that is not how life works. We live in a world where we don't always get what is coming to us. Great things happen to bad people everyday and vice versa. I don't believe this makes a bad guy, just a realistic one. By crafting a movie with a central character with real flaws, Woody Allen has created a movie of uncommon power. Four days after seeing it, I still can't get it out of my head. What a great film.

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A brilliant film about the nature of guilt and judgement

Deeply moving, deeply though-provoking, brilliantly acted and occasionally very funny. A disturbing, dark film about human nature that still manages to leave room for a glimmer of hope within it's chilling bleakness.

Martin Landau is amazing, but all of the cast make significant contributions.

One of the few films I can watch over and over, with no loss of its power. Every time I watch it I end up pondering my own sense of morality, my questions about whether there is truly justice in the world, and the extent to which good people do bad things. And yet, along with all those heavy ideas, this is also entertaining, witty, and occasionally very tense story-telling of the first order.

For me it's second only to 'Annie Hall' amongst Allen's huge body of work, and stands as one of the few truly great films of the 1980s.

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Woody's Finest

Having just recently viewed this film, I have to say that my appreciation of Woody Allen has grown tremendously. I never realized how much of an artist he truly is.

This film actually follows a similar pattern as the old greek plays and many of the more modern plays where you have a main plot that's more serious and cerebral, counterbalanced by a second plot that's a little more earthy and comical. The main plot involves Judah, a successful opthomologist much beloved and respected by his family and friends, who ends up having his mistress murdered to prevent her from revealing their affair to his wife and friends. The second plot involves Cliff, a struggling film-maker who is given the odious job of making a documentary of his boorish brother-in-law Lester, a successful TV producer.

The first plot deals primarily with the shame and guilt that Judah has to endure, first over the extra-marital affair, and second, over the murder to cover up the affair. Martin Landeau really does a brilliant job of bringing Judah's character to life. We feel his stunned anguish when he says to his family "I've just done a terrible thing" and then making a quick recovery "I left my notes at the office." Later, after the murder is commited, he visits his childhood home in New Jersey. There he sees a flash back of his family gathered around the dinner table having their sader. Judah's atheist aunt scolds his father, who's an orthodox jew, for filling the kids heads with a bunch of nonsense supersition. There is no God. There is no absolute moral framework. We live in a world where might makes right, citing the murder of six million jews by the Nazis as an example. Judah's father takes the opposite view that there is a righteous God who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked either in this life or the next. His aunt says that if a man can commit murder and not be troubled in conscience and not get caught, he's home free. After a few months the murder is finally pinned falsely on someone else, Judah breathes a sigh of relief and gets on with his happy, successful life.

The second plot with Cliff has a similar but not nearly as serious dilemma. We feel sympathetic with Cliff and yet find ourselves more charismatically drawn to Lester. In the end, Lester ends up getting his way in life while Cliff goes away penniless, with a broken marriage and no girlfriend.

The moral in both of these plots is that life is not always fair, and that sometimes people treat others unfairly or do terrible things and get off scott free.

I have to say although the film itself is very well done, I disagree with the conclusion. If we operate from the premise that there is no God then certainly there is much in life that is cruel and unfair and is not brought to justice. If on the other hand we operate from the premise that there is a righteous God who sees what we do the thought of facing His judgement is sobering if not downright troubling. Even in Judah's case, it's doubtful that he got off scott free. He was a good man and a man of conscience and he had to carry the guilt and shame of his terrible deed around for the rest of his life. I've known cases where that alone drove people to the brink of insanity.

Personally, I think the older plays, where the tragic character has to pay the price for his or her misdeeds is probably closer to the truth.

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Along with Deconstructing Harry which would follow seven years later, this is Woody Allen's most somber comedy-drama, as well as his most ambitious film of the 1980s. Allen weaves together two central stories about very different groups of Manhattanites, linking them through a mutual friend, a rabbi (Sam Waterston) who's going blind. This image is key to the sometimes ponderous, often clever musings on faith, morals, and vision (or lack thereof) that obsess his deeply troubled and unhappy characters. At its center, the film explores people who, through lack of religious conviction or arrogance, rationalize their awful, selfish acts by presuming that God couldn't possibly be watching.

The central story--a neo-noir of sorts--follows a fortuitous ophthalmologist (Martin Landau, all sweat and grimaces) who faces the prospect of his obsessed mistress (Anjelica Huston) ruining his life by telling his family of their affair. Desperate, the doctor hires his slimy criminal brother (Jerry Orbach) to eliminate the situation, and then suffers overwhelming regret afterwards. The flip tale is more typical Allen. Funnier and lighter, it focuses on an impossible romance between Allen's character and Halley Reed, a film producer played by Mia Farrow. Between Allen and his Hollywood fantasy stands his brother-in-law (Alan Alda, perfectly cast as an obnoxious, successful sitcom producer), who also desires Halley. Allen is Landau's opposite: an honest, struggling documentarian who cares nothing about fortune, suffers in a loveless marriage, and is surrounded by triumphant phonies. The nice-guys-finish-last moral may be as contrived as it is devastating. Yet, when Landau and Allen finally share a final scene during a wedding, their faces, subtle body movements, and contrasting fortunes somehow suggest that indeed God may be blind, and if not, the deity has a very sick sense of humor. --Dave McCoy

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