Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)
Film Overview
When an elderly neighbour dies suddenly, Carol Lipton becomes convinced that the woman’s apparently harmless husband may have murdered her — and discovers that amateur detective work is much more exciting than her comfortable marriage has been lately.
Diane Keaton plays Carol, married to book editor Larry Lipton, played by Woody Allen. Their lives are comfortable, cultured and increasingly predictable until their neighbour Lillian House dies shortly after the Liptons meet her and her husband Paul.
Paul’s surprisingly cheerful response to his wife’s death immediately makes Carol suspicious. Larry thinks the idea is ridiculous, but their recently divorced friend Ted encourages Carol’s curiosity and becomes increasingly involved in the investigation.
What begins as neighbourhood speculation soon produces missing ashes, late-night surveillance, a mysterious woman, the Hotel Waldron and the extraordinary sight of the supposedly dead Lillian travelling through Manhattan.
Anjelica Huston joins the investigation as Marcia Fox, one of Larry’s authors, whose knowledge of murder mysteries gives the group a way to turn suspicion into an elaborate trap.
Written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, the film reunites Allen with Diane Keaton and combines marital comedy with a genuine murder plot, jazz, New York locations and a finale staged inside a revival cinema.
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My Review
The murder that saves a marriage
Manhattan Murder Mystery is one of the Woody Allen films I enjoy most simply because everybody involved appears to be having such a good time making it.
The premise is deliberately old-fashioned. Carol Lipton suspects that the pleasant elderly man living nearby has murdered his wife. Larry thinks she has been reading too many mysteries. Carol begins investigating anyway, and before long both of them are considerably more involved than either expected.
What makes the film more than an affectionate detective comedy is the marriage at its centre. Larry and Carol are not unhappy when the story begins. That would make things too simple. They are comfortable.
Comfort has become the problem. Carol worries that they may eventually resemble Paul and Lillian House, two pleasant people who appear to have reached the stage of marriage where almost everything is familiar. A possible murder turns out to be exactly the disruption she needs.
Carol thinks she is trying to solve a murder. What she really discovers is how much she misses being surprised by her own life.
Diane Keaton’s return is crucial. Her comic rhythm with Allen is completely different from the Mia Farrow films immediately preceding it. Keaton brings a restless enthusiasm that forces Allen into the comparatively sensible role, which is a lovely reversal of their older screen dynamic.
Larry may be neurotic, but Carol is the person climbing around apartments, following suspects and proposing theories that become more improbable by the hour. He spends much of the film trying to persuade her to behave rationally, even as the evidence starts suggesting she may actually be right.
Keaton makes Carol’s curiosity infectious. She is frightened, but excitement keeps overpowering the fear. The investigation gives her something that shopping, restaurants and the normal cultural routines of Manhattan no longer provide: uncertainty.
It also makes Larry see his wife differently. Somebody he had begun to experience as completely familiar suddenly looks adventurous, unpredictable and attractive again.
The mystery works because Larry starts looking at Carol with the same curiosity Carol is directing towards the neighbours.
Alan Alda’s Ted complicates that rediscovery. Recently divorced and clearly fond of Carol, he treats her murder theory with exactly the enthusiasm Larry refuses to provide at the beginning. Surveillance becomes flirtation almost by accident.
The possibility that Carol and Ted might have become involved years earlier gives their partnership an extra charge. Sitting together waiting for a suspect to appear, they begin talking about the opportunity they once chose not to take.
Nothing actually needs to happen between them. The possibility is enough to remind Larry that a comfortable marriage remains vulnerable to alternative versions of life.
Alda is ideal because Ted never feels threatening. He is warm, intelligent and genuinely helpful. That makes Larry’s jealousy more revealing than it would be if Carol were simply attracted to an obvious rival.
Ted does not have to steal Carol away. The possibility that she might choose him is enough to wake Larry up.
Anjelica Huston’s Marcia then arrives and beautifully balances the arrangement. Larry is already professionally fascinated by her. She is clever, glamorous, self-possessed and exactly the kind of person capable of making Carol jealous in return.
More importantly, Marcia understands mysteries. Once Carol and Larry have gathered enough apparently impossible facts, Marcia is the person capable of turning them into a theory. Her entrance changes the film from amateur snooping into something approaching an actual detective story.
Huston plays her with great calm, which makes the increasingly elaborate plan even funnier. Everyone else is nervous and excited; Marcia reacts as though manipulating a suspected murderer through edited audition recordings is simply the logical next step.
The four characters make a wonderful team because the investigation and romantic complications begin feeding each other. Carol notices Larry noticing Marcia. Larry notices Carol noticing Ted. Solving the murder becomes inseparable from proving that they still care about losing one another.
By the middle of the film, jealousy has become almost as useful to the Lipton marriage as the murder investigation.
The mystery itself is more carefully constructed than its comic tone initially suggests. Lillian’s ashes, Paul’s late-night movements, a second woman, hotel reservations and the sighting of the supposedly dead Lillian all keep changing what Carol thinks happened.
The Hotel Waldron sequence is especially enjoyable because the film briefly becomes genuinely sinister. Carol and Larry enter expecting to confirm one theory and instead discover Lillian’s body, only for it to disappear before anyone else can see it.
Their later discovery of the corpse on top of the lift is the kind of macabre joke Hitchcock might have appreciated. Allen keeps danger close enough to matter without allowing it to overwhelm the comedy.
The eventual explanation is satisfyingly complicated: a dead sister, impersonation, inheritance fraud, adultery and one murder followed by another betrayal. What seemed like Carol’s overheated imagination turns out to have underestimated the situation.
Carol begins with an outrageous theory and eventually discovers the truth is considerably more outrageous.
Carlo Di Palma’s handheld photography gives New York an entirely different energy from the romantic images associated with Manhattan. The camera follows people through apartments, streets, hotels and restaurants with the restless curiosity of Carol herself.
This New York is also wonderfully specific. Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center, the 21 Club, the National Arts Club, hotels and restaurants are not isolated postcard shots. They belong to the Liptons’ routines.
The opening exchange — Larry enduring the opera in return for Carol enduring a Rangers game — tells us almost everything we need to know about their marriage. They have learned compromise so thoroughly that even entertainment has become part of a negotiated system.
Murder destroys the schedule. Suddenly they are missing sleep, following suspects, breaking into apartments and crawling around dark buildings. Manhattan becomes exciting again because they are no longer moving through it according to habit.
Manhattan never changed. Larry and Carol had simply become too accustomed to moving through it safely.
The soundtrack reinforces that pleasure in the city. Bobby Short’s recording of Cole Porter’s I Happen to Like New York could hardly be more appropriate, while Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman and Art Tatum with Ben Webster create a soundtrack full of jazz and urban sophistication.
Paul Desmond’s Take Five suits the investigative rhythm particularly well. Jazz gives the film movement without making the suspense feel artificially dramatic.
Miklós Rózsa’s music from Double Indemnity introduces the film-noir tradition directly into the soundtrack. Allen is not hiding his influences. The pleasure comes from putting ordinary contemporary New Yorkers inside the grammar of older murder movies.
That becomes explicit in the final cinema sequence, where the real pursuit unfolds against images from an Orson Welles film playing on screen.
The Liptons begin as people who watch old movies. By the end, they have accidentally wandered into one.
The climax inside Paul’s revival cinema is one of the film’s greatest pleasures. Larry is pursued behind the screen while a gun battle from an Orson Welles movie is projected in front of him. Cinema and reality briefly line up almost perfectly.
It is a beautifully constructed joke because the film has spent so much time borrowing from murder mysteries and film noir. At the climax, the characters literally disappear behind the image that has been inspiring the story.
Paul is finally killed not by Larry or Carol but by Gladys, another woman in his complicated network of affairs. Marcia later explains the final details almost as though delivering the last chapter of a detective novel.
Once the crime is solved, the romantic structure solves itself too. Ted and Marcia head towards dinner together while Larry and Carol realise that fear, excitement and jealousy have unexpectedly restored something between them.
Larry and Carol solve the murder because they become a team again. Becoming a team again is ultimately more important than solving the murder.
The reunion with Diane Keaton gives the film an extra pleasure for anyone familiar with Allen’s earlier work. There is no attempt to recreate Annie Hall as though fifteen years have not passed. Larry and Carol are older people with an established marriage, grown children and routines accumulated over decades.
That makes the chemistry more interesting rather than less. Keaton’s ability to make Allen look comparatively restrained changes the entire energy of his screen persona. Larry becomes the man desperately trying to keep up.
I also like the fact that the film does not pretend marital renewal requires some enormous psychological breakthrough. Larry and Carol do not sit down and discover the single hidden truth of their marriage. They have an adventure.
Sometimes shared experience does what analysis cannot. After spending years knowing almost exactly what tomorrow will look like, they spend a few days having absolutely no idea.
The Liptons do not repair their marriage by understanding it better. They repair it by having something new happen to them together.
Manhattan Murder Mystery may not be one of Allen’s most ambitious films, but that is part of why I enjoy it. After the emotional intensity and restless form of Husbands and Wives, this feels like a filmmaker allowing himself to enjoy the machinery of comedy, suspense and New York.
The screenplay with Marshall Brickman has the construction of their earlier collaborations, where jokes, character and plot continually push one another forward. Even the romantic complications become clues of a different kind, revealing what Larry and Carol still feel beneath the comfortable routines.
Keaton, Alda and Huston make the ensemble enormously likeable, the jazz soundtrack moves beautifully through the city and the final movie theatre sequence brings the whole thing together with real visual wit.
A murder mystery saving a middle-aged marriage is a ridiculous idea. By the end, it feels completely logical.
Cast and Characters
Diane Keaton
A curious and increasingly adventurous Manhattan wife who becomes convinced that the elderly neighbour across the hall has murdered his wife.
Woody Allen
Carol’s book-editor husband, initially determined to prove her theory absurd before the evidence — and his jealousy — draw him into the investigation.
Alan Alda
A recently divorced friend whose enthusiasm for Carol’s theory creates both a useful investigative partner and a source of anxiety for Larry.
Anjelica Huston
A successful author and Larry’s client whose knowledge of murder mysteries helps turn the group’s suspicions into a practical plan.
Jerry Adler
The Liptons’ apparently pleasant elderly neighbour whose behaviour after his wife’s death begins Carol’s entire investigation.
Lynn Cohen
Paul’s wife, whose sudden reported death becomes increasingly mysterious when Carol believes she has seen her alive in Manhattan.
Jazz makes the murder mystery unmistakably Manhattan
Bobby Short, Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman and Art Tatum with Ben Webster give the film one of Allen’s most consistently enjoyable jazz soundtracks.
I Happen to Like New York
Bobby Short’s performance of Porter’s song is the perfect statement for a film that turns familiar Manhattan restaurants, apartments, theatres, hotels and cultural institutions into the setting for an improbable murder investigation.
A detective soundtrack with one foot in classic cinema
Paul Desmond’s Take Five, Erroll Garner’s I’m in the Mood for Love and Misty, and recordings by Coleman Hawkins and Benny Goodman give the investigation its sophisticated New York rhythm.
Miklós Rózsa’s music from Double Indemnity explicitly links the contemporary comedy to the older film-noir tradition that inspires the story.
Take Five
Performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the familiar jazz recording gives Carol and Larry’s amateur investigation effortless momentum.
I’m in the Mood for Love
Erroll Garner’s performance quietly connects the detective story with the romantic reawakening happening inside the Lipton marriage.
Have You Met Miss Jones?
Art Tatum and Ben Webster perform the standard as part of the film’s exceptionally rich jazz selection.
The Hallway
Music from Double Indemnity brings classic film noir directly into a story increasingly behaving like one of the old movies its characters love.
Locations
Few Woody Allen films use Manhattan quite as playfully as Manhattan Murder Mystery. The city’s real cultural institutions, hotels, restaurants and streets become stages in Carol and Larry’s increasingly elaborate investigation.
Madison Square Garden
The film opens with Larry and Carol at a New York Rangers game, immediately establishing the negotiated cultural differences inside their marriage.
Lincoln Center
Larry’s reciprocal obligation is attending the opera, completing the opening joke about the couple’s contrasting tastes.
21 Club
The famous Midtown restaurant is one of several genuine Manhattan institutions incorporated into the film.
Chelsea Hotel
Interiors of the fictional Hotel Waldron were filmed inside the historic Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street.
Hotel 17
The exterior of the Hotel Waldron was created using Hotel 17, while other interiors were filmed elsewhere.
National Arts Club
The landmark building provides the setting for the wine tasting where Carol’s murder investigation and the film’s romantic jealousy become increasingly entangled.
Awards and Recognition
Diane Keaton Nomination
Keaton received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy.
Anjelica Huston Nomination
Huston was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Marcia Fox.
Best Foreign Film Nomination
The film received a César nomination for Best Foreign Film.
Carlo Di Palma Nomination
Di Palma received a Silver Ribbon nomination for the film’s cinematography.
Allen & Marshall Brickman Reunited
The film reunited Allen with his Annie Hall and Manhattan co-writer Marshall Brickman.
Diane Keaton Returns
Keaton’s return to a leading role opposite Allen gives the film a comic rhythm strongly connected to their celebrated collaborations of the 1970s while allowing the characters to be unmistakably older.