The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)
Film Overview
In 1940 New York, a veteran insurance investigator and the efficiency expert he cannot stand are hypnotised by a stage magician and unknowingly turned into jewel thieves.
Woody Allen plays C.W. Briggs, an old-fashioned investigator at North Coast Fidelity & Casualty whose ability to solve insurance fraud depends on instinct, contacts and his belief that he can think like a criminal.
Helen Hunt plays Betty Ann Fitzgerald, the company’s new efficiency expert, brought in to modernise the office. She and Briggs immediately dislike one another, trading insults while fighting over almost every aspect of how the company should operate.
At an office night out, stage magician Voltan hypnotises Briggs and Betty Ann using a jade scorpion. Unknown to them, he plants trigger words that allow him to control their behaviour after they return home.
Briggs begins committing jewel robberies with no memory of what he has done, then finds himself assigned to investigate the crimes. His great professional claim — that he can get inside the mind of a thief — suddenly becomes much more literal than he could have imagined.
Dan Aykroyd plays company boss Chris Magruder, Wallace Shawn is colleague George Bond, David Ogden Stiers plays Voltan and Charlize Theron appears as wealthy heiress Laura Kensington.
Watch The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
My Review
The detective who has to investigate himself
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion is built from an irresistible comic contradiction: C.W. Briggs has spent his career boasting that he can think like a criminal, only to become a criminal without knowing it.
Briggs belongs to an older detective tradition. He trusts instinct, street contacts and years of experience. Betty Ann Fitzgerald represents everything he thinks is replacing that world — efficiency reports, modern management and the suggestion that a system might perform better than an individual with a good nose for trouble.
The hostility between them is exaggerated enough to tell us immediately where the romantic comedy is heading. They dislike one another with far too much energy for indifference to be plausible.
Allen and Helen Hunt make the antagonism the engine of the film. Every conversation is a contest, and neither character is prepared to surrender even a minor point without making the other person pay for it.
Briggs thinks Betty Ann is destroying everything he understands about his profession. Betty Ann thinks Briggs is the reason the profession needs fixing.
The hypnosis plot works because it removes the one thing both characters value most: control. Voltan does not persuade Briggs to steal jewels. He turns him into somebody capable of committing the crime and waking the next morning without even knowing a decision was made.
That becomes increasingly funny once Briggs is asked to investigate. He studies the evidence with complete professional confidence, repeatedly getting closer to the correct conclusion without realising the conclusion is himself.
There is something beautifully absurd about a detective using his instinct to hunt a criminal whose instincts are literally his own. Every strength that made Briggs good at his job now risks exposing him.
The mystery therefore does not need to hide the culprit from the audience. We know exactly what happened. The suspense comes from wondering how long Briggs can remain the only investigator in New York who does not.
Briggs finally succeeds in getting inside the thief’s mind. Unfortunately, he was already there.
Helen Hunt gives Betty Ann a harder edge than many of Allen’s romantic leads. She is extremely competent, impatient with Briggs and entirely prepared to change a workplace that has organised itself around male confidence.
Her affair with Chris Magruder complicates that strength. Dan Aykroyd’s Chris has promised to leave his wife, placing Betty Ann in the familiar position of waiting for somebody else to make a decision that will determine her future.
That makes her clashes with Briggs more interesting. At work, she is the person insisting everybody behave rationally. In her private life, she has accepted an arrangement built almost entirely on hope.
Briggs knows none of this initially. He simply sees the woman reorganising his office and assumes that must be enough information to understand her.
Betty Ann has a system for making an insurance office efficient. Her own romantic life is operating on considerably less reliable paperwork.
The 1940 setting is one of the film’s great pleasures. Santo Loquasto creates an insurance office that feels as though it might exist a few blocks away from the world of Double Indemnity, while Zhao Fei gives the interiors a warm period polish.
Allen is clearly enjoying the language of old detective films without treating the style merely as parody. Desks, filing cabinets, hats, nightclubs and wealthy estates all contribute to a world where Briggs can reasonably imagine himself as a hard-boiled investigator despite looking very little like one.
The Rainbow Room sequence is especially effective because it combines the period glamour with the mechanism that will destroy everybody’s control. Voltan’s act begins as entertainment and becomes the key to the entire crime story.
Old Westbury Gardens, 20 Exchange Place and Gramercy House extend the period world into real New York and Long Island locations.
The soundtrack is exactly right for this world. Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady, Earl Hines performing Two Sleepy People, Glenn Miller’s Sunrise Serenade and Dick Hyman’s Rainbow Room performances create a musical environment inseparable from the 1940 setting.
Tuxedo Junction and How High the Moon give the nightclub material energy without turning the soundtrack into an obvious period compilation.
There is also a pleasing relationship between the polished music and Briggs’s very unpolished personality. The world around him may be sophisticated. Briggs remains Briggs.
That contrast is part of why the period setting works so well. Allen has placed his familiar screen persona in another cinematic tradition and allowed the tradition to remain elegant around him.
The music, clothes and rooms belong to a sophisticated 1940 thriller. Briggs has somehow wandered into it without receiving the sophistication.
Charlize Theron’s Laura Kensington gives Briggs a brief opportunity to imagine himself as the kind of detective who attracts glamorous heiresses. She is directly attracted to him, and Briggs accepts the situation with remarkably little curiosity about why.
The scenes are funny because his vanity instantly defeats his investigative instinct. A professional sceptic who questions everything becomes wonderfully uncritical the moment the evidence flatters him.
Meanwhile the real emotional connection is developing with Betty Ann through arguments, danger and the slow discovery that each has misjudged the other. The hypnosis plot ultimately forces them to see behaviour separated from the public personality each has constructed.
Neither is quite the person the other has spent the film insulting.
The final revelations are deliberately neat. Voltan’s scheme is exposed, Briggs’s innocence becomes clear and the hostility between him and Betty Ann finally gives way to the attraction that has been visible to almost everyone else for much of the film.
It is an old-fashioned ending for an old-fashioned comedy, and that feels appropriate. The film is less interested in reinventing the detective story than in enjoying its machinery.
I think that is the best way to approach The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. The pleasures are in the period design, the insults between Allen and Hunt, the nightclub hypnosis and the increasingly ridiculous sight of an investigator confidently searching for himself.
Sometimes a good comic mechanism really is enough to carry a film.
The mystery is solved when Briggs finally stops assuming the one person above suspicion must be Briggs.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
A veteran insurance investigator unknowingly hypnotised into committing the very robberies he is assigned to solve.
Helen Hunt
An efficiency expert brought in to modernise the company and Briggs’s fiercely argumentative professional rival.
Dan Aykroyd
The company boss whose secret relationship with Betty Ann is considerably less straightforward than the office believes.
Wallace Shawn
A colleague caught in the middle of the office rivalry and the increasingly strange insurance investigation.
Charlize Theron
A wealthy heiress who takes a surprisingly direct romantic interest in Briggs.
David Ogden Stiers
The stage hypnotist whose jade scorpion allows him to turn unsuspecting subjects into jewel thieves.
Duke Ellington gives the mystery its 1940 sophistication
Jazz, swing and nightclub standards build the musical world around Briggs, Betty Ann and the hypnotic crime scheme.
Sophisticated Lady
Ellington’s recording gives the period setting an elegance that works beautifully against Briggs’s less polished detective persona.
Swing music around a hypnotist with criminal intentions
Earl Hines, Glenn Miller and Harry James join specially recorded performances by Dick Hyman and the Rainbow Room All Stars.
The result gives the detective plot the musical language of the era without turning the film into a straightforward noir imitation.
Two Sleepy People
Earl “Fatha” Hines performs the standard, a particularly appropriate title for a story driven by altered states of consciousness.
Tuxedo Junction
The performance helps give the Rainbow Room sequence the authentic energy of a 1940 nightclub.
Sunrise Serenade
Miller’s recording adds one of the era’s most recognisable big-band sounds to the soundtrack.
In a Persian Market
The Albert Ketèlbey composition adds another distinctive period colour to the film’s musical world.
Locations
The film turns contemporary New York and Long Island locations into an idealised 1940 world of insurance offices, nightclubs and wealthy estates.
Rainbow Room
The celebrated restaurant and nightclub provides the setting for Voltan’s hypnotism act.
20 Exchange Place
The Art Deco skyscraper supplies the exterior of the insurance company offices.
Old Westbury Gardens
The estate provides the exterior for the wealthy Kensington property targeted during the first robbery.
235 East 22nd Street
Gramercy House is used for the exterior of Betty Ann Fitzgerald’s apartment building.
Financial District
The streets around the insurance world reinforce the hard-boiled urban atmosphere of Briggs’s profession.
A Period City Recreated
Real architecture and Loquasto’s interiors combine to make the contemporary city convincingly belong to an earlier detective era.
Awards and Recognition
Out of Competition
The film screened out of competition at the 58th Venice International Film Festival in 2001.
Santo Loquasto
Loquasto recreates 1940 New York through offices, apartments and nightclub interiors rooted in classic detective cinema.
Zhao Fei
The film was the third consecutive Allen feature photographed by Zhao Fei after Sweet and Lowdown and Small Time Crooks.
Detective Comedy
The screenplay combines a genuine insurance mystery with screwball hostility and a romantic-comedy structure.
1940 New York
The music, design and locations make the period setting one of the film’s strongest pleasures.
A Comic Noir
The film stands as one of Allen’s clearest attempts to place his familiar screen persona directly inside the visual and narrative world of classic American noir.