Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Film Overview
Two very different New York stories gradually converge in Woody Allen’s darkest examination of morality, guilt, love and the unsettling possibility that the universe may offer no final judgement at all.
Martin Landau plays Judah Rosenthal, a successful ophthalmologist whose respectable life is threatened when his longtime mistress, Dolores, insists that he leave his wife Miriam and threatens to reveal their affair.
Desperate to preserve his marriage and reputation, Judah turns to his brother Jack. What begins as a personal crisis becomes a moral decision from which there can be no simple return.
Running alongside Judah’s story is Clifford Stern, played by Woody Allen, an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker reluctantly hired to make a television profile of his successful and self-satisfied brother-in-law Lester, played by Alan Alda.
Cliff becomes attracted to producer Halley Reed, played by Mia Farrow, while his marriage to Wendy deteriorates. The apparently lighter comic story gradually begins echoing Judah’s drama through questions about compromise, self-deception and the relationship between the stories people tell and the lives they actually lead.
Sven Nykvist photographs the film in subdued colour, while an extensive soundtrack moves between jazz standards, Hollywood songs and Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15.
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My Review
When conscience discovers it is not a court of law
Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of Woody Allen’s greatest films because it takes questions he had been asking for years and removes the comforting assumption that moral behaviour will eventually be rewarded.
Judah Rosenthal believes himself to be a good man. That belief matters almost as much to him as actually being one. He is a respected doctor, a philanthropist, a husband and father, and the opening scenes show a life surrounded by the reassurance of public achievement.
Dolores threatens all of it. Their affair has lasted long enough for her to stop accepting the role of secret mistress, and she wants Judah to make the promises real. From her point of view, this is not blackmail in the abstract. She has organised years of her emotional life around what Judah told her.
Judah, however, experiences her demands mainly as danger. The difference between those perspectives is the beginning of the tragedy.
Judah’s moral crisis begins when another person’s reality threatens the comfortable story he has been telling about his own.
Martin Landau is superb because he allows us to understand Judah without asking us to forgive him. His fear is real. His marriage matters to him. His reputation matters. The life he has built genuinely contains love, work and generosity. None of those things cancel what he does.
That is what makes Judah much more disturbing than a conventional villain. He does not think of himself as evil. He thinks of himself as a basically decent person confronted by an impossible situation, and every step towards the unforgivable is presented to him as a practical solution to the previous problem.
Jerry Orbach’s Jack makes that movement chillingly easy. He understands the world in more direct terms. Dolores is a problem, and problems can be removed. Judah initially recoils from the idea, but simply knowing that the option exists changes the shape of his thinking.
Allen is interested in the moment when moral language begins giving way to practical language. Once somebody stops asking “Is this wrong?” and begins asking “Can this be done?”, something essential has already shifted.
The terrible step is not when Judah agrees to the crime. It is when the crime becomes one possible solution among several.
Anjelica Huston gives Dolores enough emotional reality that Judah’s attempts to reduce her to a threat never entirely succeed. She can be demanding and volatile, but she is also responding to years of deception. The more Judah insists that preserving his respectable life is the only reasonable outcome, the clearer it becomes that Dolores has been expected to sacrifice hers for his convenience.
The sequence surrounding her death is among the most powerful Allen ever filmed. Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 replaces the familiar warmth of jazz with something severe and unavoidable. When Judah later enters the apartment, his horror is not only at what has happened but at the fact that it happened because he allowed it to.
For a while, guilt seems capable of destroying him. Childhood memories return. Religious arguments from his family history reappear. His father’s belief in a moral universe competes with Judah’s adult scepticism, and he becomes almost desperate for the judgement he once rejected.
If there is a God watching, Judah is condemned. The more frightening possibility is that nobody is watching.
Judah has spent years doubting that the universe contains moral justice. After the murder, he suddenly needs that justice to exist.
The genius of the film is that Allen does not allow guilt to behave the way morality tales usually require it to behave. Judah suffers, but then something much more troubling happens: he begins to recover.
Time passes. The police do not arrive. His marriage survives. His work continues. He sleeps again. The human mind begins doing what it is exceptionally good at doing — absorbing the intolerable into a revised version of the past.
Judah discovers that conscience is not necessarily an external judge. It is part of the same mind that wants to survive, and therefore it can be negotiated with. Memory fades around the edges. Rationalisation becomes easier. What once seemed unbearable becomes something that happened.
This is the film’s most disturbing argument because it refuses the reassuring assumption that terrible acts inevitably punish the person who commits them. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the person simply learns how to continue.
The punishment Judah fears most is his own conscience. Then he discovers that even conscience can grow tired.
Cliff Stern’s story initially seems to belong in another film. Woody Allen plays him as a struggling documentary filmmaker forced to accept an assignment profiling Lester, the enormously successful television producer he despises.
Alan Alda is wonderfully irritating as Lester because the character is not an idiot. His clichés are often ridiculous and his self-confidence is enormous, but he understands the industry in which he works. Cliff wants artistic seriousness to be enough. Lester knows that audiences, charm, money and opportunity also matter.
The great joke is that Cliff’s contempt does not make him morally or professionally superior. He behaves badly too. He neglects his marriage, judges almost everyone around him and treats his own lack of success as evidence of artistic integrity.
Mia Farrow’s Halley gives Cliff a new audience for the person he would like to believe himself to be. Their conversations about documentaries, Professor Levy and travel create a genuine connection, but Cliff quickly starts building an imagined future around it.
Cliff thinks Lester’s success proves the world has terrible taste. The film keeps asking whether Cliff’s failure automatically proves anything better about Cliff.
Professor Louis Levy is central even though he exists mainly through Cliff’s documentary footage. His reflections on love, suffering and meaning provide an intellectual counterpoint to Judah’s story. Levy has survived experiences that should have destroyed any easy optimism and still insists that human beings can create meaning through love.
Then Levy dies by suicide.
The shock is devastating partly because it defeats Cliff’s attempt to organise reality into a coherent film. His subject has provided thoughtful explanations of existence and then behaved in a way those explanations cannot account for. Reality refuses the narrative Cliff wanted to make from it.
Allen keeps returning to this difference between life and storytelling. Films can impose structure retrospectively. Events in life do not know where the third act is supposed to begin.
Cliff wants Professor Levy to explain life. Levy’s death becomes the reminder that explanations and lives do not always agree.
Sam Waterston’s Ben offers a different response to uncertainty. He is a rabbi losing his sight, yet his faith remains strong. Judah finds that faith both admirable and impossible. Ben cannot prove that the universe is moral; he chooses to live as though moral responsibility matters anyway.
I think that is an important distinction. The film does not present religion as a solved answer and atheism as despair, or the reverse. Different characters face the same indifferent evidence and decide what kind of people they will be in response.
Judah wants proof that his choices matter cosmically. Ben behaves as though they matter humanly. Professor Levy looks for meaning through love. Cliff looks for meaning in art. None receives certainty.
The absence of certainty is not presented as permission. That would be too easy. It simply means responsibility cannot be outsourced to the expectation that the universe will eventually settle every account.
Crimes and Misdemeanors does not ask whether morality can be proved. It asks what remains of morality when it cannot.
The two stories finally meet at the wedding. Judah and Cliff sit together almost by chance, and Judah tells a supposedly fictional story about a man who arranges the death of his mistress and eventually learns to live with it.
Cliff immediately provides the ending a movie would prefer: the killer should confess because the story then acquires tragic meaning. Judah rejects that as fiction. In reality, he suggests, people rationalise, forget and go on living.
It is an extraordinary conversation because Cliff does not know he is speaking to the murderer and Judah has effectively transformed his own crime into narrative. By describing it as a story, he creates one final layer of distance between himself and what happened.
The filmmaker wants moral structure. The murderer knows reality has already refused to provide it.
Cliff proposes the ending a story deserves. Judah has already discovered that life is under no obligation to provide it.
The final montage prevents the film from ending entirely in darkness. Ben dances with his daughter at her wedding while Professor Levy’s voice returns to discuss the choices by which people define themselves and the capacity for love that can create meaning inside an indifferent universe.
The optimism is cautious because everything we have watched remains true. Dolores is still dead. Judah still escaped punishment. Cliff still loses Halley to Lester. Levy is still gone.
Yet people dance, marry, work, love and continue. The film’s answer, if it has one, is not that goodness guarantees justice. It is that the absence of guaranteed justice makes the decision to behave well more meaningful rather than less.
That is why Crimes and Misdemeanors stays with me. It never offers the consolation of pretending the universe is fair. It asks what we intend to do once we realise that.
Cast and Characters
Martin Landau
A respected ophthalmologist whose affair leads him towards a moral choice that changes everything.
Anjelica Huston
Judah’s longtime mistress, unwilling to remain hidden and determined that he honour the future he promised her.
Woody Allen
An unsuccessful documentary filmmaker reluctantly hired to profile the television producer he despises.
Mia Farrow
A television producer whose intelligence and enthusiasm draw Cliff into imagining another possible life.
Alan Alda
Cliff’s enormously successful brother-in-law, whose confidence and commercial instincts make him everything Cliff dislikes.
Jerry Orbach
Judah’s brother, who offers a frighteningly practical solution to the problem of Dolores.
Claire Bloom
Judah’s wife, largely unaware of the private crisis threatening the respectable family life they share.
Joanna Gleason
Cliff’s wife, increasingly frustrated by his career, resentments and emotional distance.
Sam Waterston
A rabbi losing his eyesight whose continued faith offers Judah a moral certainty he both envies and rejects.
Schubert turns Judah’s decision into something inescapably grave
Jazz and popular standards fill much of the film, but Franz Schubert’s final string quartet enters Judah’s story with a completely different emotional force.
String Quartet No. 15
The first movement of Schubert’s Quartet in G Major, D. 887 accompanies the darkest movement of Judah’s story. Its severity stands apart from the source music surrounding the film and gives his moral crisis a weight that words alone cannot provide.
The everyday music continues while the moral world changes
Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Vernon Duke, Vincent Youmans and other songwriters fill restaurants, parties and domestic scenes with music belonging naturally to the characters’ surroundings.
The contrast with Schubert is striking: ordinary life remains filled with familiar music even after Judah has crossed an extraordinary moral line.
Rosalie
Performed by the jazz band, Porter’s song opens the film inside Judah’s polished public world.
Dancing on the Ceiling
Bernie Leighton performs the standard as part of the film’s understated network of source music.
Murder He Says
Betty Hutton’s recording brings a darkly ironic title into a soundtrack where songs often sit against much more serious events.
I’ll Be Seeing You
Heard near the film’s conclusion, the familiar standard accompanies a final movement concerned with memory, love and what remains after choices have been made.
Locations
Crimes and Misdemeanors is firmly rooted in New York, moving between the polished spaces of Judah’s professional life and the film, television and restaurant world surrounding Cliff.
Waldorf Astoria
The landmark hotel was among the principal New York locations used during production.
Tavern on the Green
The celebrated restaurant appears within the film’s world of dinners, professional meetings and New York social life.
One Fifth
The restaurant near Washington Square was another of the real Manhattan locations used during the shoot.
HBO Studios
HBO facilities were used for parts of Cliff and Lester’s television world, grounding their professional rivalry in real production spaces.
Awards and Recognition
Three Nominations
The film received Oscar nominations for Woody Allen’s direction and original screenplay and Martin Landau’s supporting performance.
Best Motion Picture — Drama
The film was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Drama.
Best Film Nomination
Robert Greenhut and Woody Allen were nominated for Best Film.
Director & Screenplay
Allen received BAFTA nominations for both direction and original screenplay.
Alan Alda & Anjelica Huston
Alda was nominated for Supporting Actor and Huston for Supporting Actress.
A Moral Drama Without a Safety Net
Its refusal to provide conventional moral retribution has made the film one of Allen’s most enduring and debated works.