Monday, April 23, 2012

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY (1993)

I love this film.

Larry and Carol Lipton (Allen and Keaton) meet the older couple, Paul and Lilian House, who live in the next door apartment. It's an exciting evening spent discussing such subjects as stamp collecting, health issues and twin cemetery plots. The next night Larry and Carol walk out into the hallway to find the paramedics toting Lilian out on a stretcher covered by a sheet. Dead of an heart attack.

Carol is saddened by Lilian's passing even though she didn't really know her...but there's something just not right. Carol is suspicious by Paul's lack of mourning. A few day's after Lilian's death, Carol and Larry run into Paul on the street and he seems almost cheerful. This rubs Carol the wrong way and despite Larry's "forbidding" her to investigate she does it anyway and eventually gets him in on the case too.

If, like me, you're a huge fan of both Woody Allen and the witty and playful banter between Nick and Nora Charles in THE THIN MAN films then you'll be in movie heaven with MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY. There's nothing fancy going on, it's just a fun, breezy film that is a delight from beginning to end. Highly recommended.

One thing that I like to do whenever I watch MMM is to imagine that Alvy Singer and Annie from ANNIE HALL got back together, married and this is them 16 years later!  It's like ANNIE HALL 2 that way!
Camera crew visible in broken mirror.