Elevator to the Gallows

There are two reasons to watch Louis Malle's stylish first feature, the languid noir Elevator to the Gallows, and unfortunately not much more than these two reasons: Jeanne Moreau and Miles Davis. The former appears, of course, in a starring role, though curiously she has little to say or do as the unhappy wife, Florence, of a successful businessman (Jean Wall), who is murdered by Florence's lover Julien (Maurice Ronet). Moreau's part mainly consists of walking the moody nighttime streets of Paris as she waits, in vain, for her lover to show up as planned after getting her husband out of the way. Malle films this aimless late night sojourn with an obvious love for the Hollywood noirs that inspired him, placing Moreau's perennially sad visage into a smoky, expressionist Paris of gleaming, reflective blacks and sudden downpours. Nobody did tristesse like the young Moreau, whose naturally down-turned mouth and soulful eyes could make her look either cruel or depressed, depending on the picture she was in and the character she was playing. Here it's a little bit of both, the harder edges showing in the way she casually sends her lover off to murder her husband without the least regret, while the rest of the film finds her in a more pensive, withdrawn mood as she wanders the rainy streets of Paris alone.

The second reason that this film is worth seeing is Miles Davis, who together with four other musicians improvised a masterful score that already shows signs of the development towards his soon-to-be-classic Kind of Blue. This propulsive score is driven along by the frenetic, sizzling drumming of Kenny Clarke, whose rhythms often imitate the hiss of the Paris rain; at one point, a crack of thunder on the soundtrack precipitates the introduction of the score, which rolls out of the aftermath of the thunder's roar as Moreau strolls the city. Davis' distinctive, warmly melancholy trumpet is the perfect complement to the film's more meditative moments. Despite the thriller premise, at moments like these the film often threatens to teeter into near-abstraction, in long dialogue-free stretches where Moreau walks around by herself, the jazz burbling away on the soundtrack, in the midst of a gorgeously shot Paris that has never looked better on film. The visuals alternate between sequences that locate the actress in this milieu, creating an almost documentary sense of place that is certainly to be expected from a director like Malle, who throughout his career has devoted his attention almost equally to fiction features and documentaries. But these naturalistic visions of Paris are also interrupted frequently by more expressionist closeups on Moreau's face, the Paris backdrop blurred into a stream of lights. In one remarkable shot, evocative of this approach, Moreau begins in the background of the scene, walking across a street roughly in the direction of the camera. She aimlessly comes forward, stops, then steps to the side and seems to, almost by chance, step into a closeup composition as the background begins to blur and her face comes into sharp focus. It's a beautifully executed moment, a masterful example of how Malle's careful planning and obvious technical proficiency sometimes conspire to create shots that almost seem accidental in their confluence of details and motions.

In these more abstract moments, it's easy to forget what's actually happening in the film, but elsewhere Malle is far too concerned with plodding, almost mechanically, through the thriller plot. Things of course go very wrong for Julien, which is why he never shows up for his rendezvous and leaves poor Florence out in the rain. Not only is he stuck in the film's eponymous elevator immediately following the murder, but he left behind a crucial bit of evidence at the scene. Moreover, his car is quickly stolen by a flower shop girl and her delinquent boyfriend, who go on a joyride into the country and wind up, somewhat improbably, committing two more murders in the guise of Julien. There are moments of poetic beauty even here, like the obvious joy that Malle takes in photographing the elevator's dark interior, lit only by the shaky flame of Julien's lighter, or the wonderful shots of a rain-slicked highway outside Paris as the two young car thieves race with a Mercedes, the headlights and street lights just hazy circles through a thick gray fog. Malle takes so much pleasure in such purely visual moments that it's very easy to forget just how rote and joyless the actual narrative is, saddled as it is with cheap ironies and an almost complete absence of convincing character delineation.

Indeed, most of the characters aren't developed very far beyond the noir archetypes they're based on, given little to do besides strike the requisite poses and look good in the high-contrast lighting. With that in mind, the young lovers on the lam are perhaps too much of a cliché to be taken too seriously, but they do seem like something of a blueprint for the sullen criminal lovers who would soon appear in Godard's first feature Breathless, there given sharper focus by the dialogue and Godard's willfully elliptical style. Here, the girl (Yori Bertin) with her cropped hair and cheerful demeanor is a harbinger of Jean Seberg, while the guy's (Georges Poujouly) faux-gangster attitude, complete with stolen trenchcoat and revolver, points the way forward to Belmondo. There's one beautiful, simple moment between this pair, when they're staying at a small motel and Malle sets up his camera behind the girl, her bare back to the screen as she sits up in bed, beckoning to her lover to join her. In the background, the boy walks by, shirtless and too skinny, and stands by the window as the rain streams down outside. It's a wonderfully evocative and private moment, the boy looking kind of straggly and no longer hip without the rain coat and leather jacket to bulk him up, and the girl suggesting her sensuality and sexiness with just the slender curve of her back to the camera. It's scenes like these that prove Malle's ability to get the most out of even the smallest moments, to wring out emotional nuances and resonances even from characters and situations that seem to have none.

On the whole, it's as though there were two separate films fighting against each other here: a by-the-numbers noir thriller and an abstracted mood piece on Paris by night. Neither film quite wins the battle, but it should be obvious which one I was rooting for, at least. Whenever Malle allows the film to shake the confines of its narrative and simply bathe in the Paris darkness, walk the streets with Moreau, or race into the suburbs in a stolen car, the film is luxuriant, stunning, strangely moving. These are moments one can stretch out in, get lost in, lapsing into deep thought like Moreau's character, who as she wanders the streets is constantly murmuring to herself, her lips moving with no sound coming out. Malle's fidelity to the noir genre is more unfortunate, though, especially since he seems to be stuck with a totally standard script and no idea how to spruce it up other than to divert attention from it as often as possible. The result is a film where the diversions are much more pleasurable than the main line, and where the simple experience of walking in the rain trumps all the drama of murders and police investigations.

Innocents With Dirty Hands

A wife's plot to kill her husband, inherit his money, and run off with her young lover goes wrong in incredibly complicated ways (and for very interesting reasons) in Claude Chabrol's Innocents With Dirty Hands. The story is appropriately convoluted, packed with twists, betrayals (and seeming betrayals), and enough reversals to fill up years of a daytime soap opera. In fact, towards the end, a few of these sudden reversals are so dramatically implausible that they seem to be ripped right from a soap plot themselves. What saves the film from being just another needlessly twisty thriller — indeed, what elevates it to the level of a truly great film — is Chabrol's wry, ironic, even bleakly comic eye, which sees in this morbid material the elements of a fantastic farce, as well as a dark commentary on issues of justice and gender.

This ironical slant should be evident from the very opening moments of the film, in which the young writer Jeff (Paolo Giusti) first encounters the lovely Julie (Romy Schneider, in a hypnotizing performance of equal parts iciness and passion). Julie is unhappily married to the much older Louis (Rod Steiger), who was once kind to her but since a heart attack a year earlier has been sinking ever deeper into alcoholism, depression, and unpredictable aggression. In the first few shots of the film, Chabrol shows a closeup of Julie's face, her icy green eyes covered by sunglasses, the sky mirrored in their reflective surfaces. The camera abruptly pulls back, disrupting this contemplative moment and revealing her naked body lounging in the sun, as an orange kite suddenly falls from the sky and lands on her exposed butt. "Do you want your kite back?" she asks Jeff when she sees him standing by, looking embarrassed, and Chabrol is clearly relishing the awkward humor of the situation. Once Jeff has gingerly retrieved his kite, Julie casually turns over, exposing her breasts as she murmers, "And is there anything else you'd like?" This playful seductiveness, coupled with the everyday absurdity of the situation — it's like something out of a teen boy's hyperbolic daydream — infuses the opening with a sultry energy that is soon channeled into much darker emotions as the story progresses.

Nevertheless, Chabrol never completely abandons this ironical tone, carrying his sense of humor and playfulness through the film even when the plot becomes much more serious. This is especially true of Chabrol's treatment of the pair of police inspectors (Pierre Santini and François Maistre) who investigate the mysterious disappearance of Louis. These detectives are introduced as they wait outside Julie's door for her to answer, and when one of them makes an offhand comment about the salt air making his underwear itch, it's hard to miss exactly how seriously Chabrol takes these officers of the law. Indeed, the law and the justice system are not favored with a great deal of respect in this film; Chabrol takes a very dim view of such institutions and their ability to fairly dispense justice. These two detectives, with their smirking inquiries, sexual insinuations, and tendency to latch onto pet theories with very little evidence, are constantly hectoring Julie, at times it seems more out of their own perverted curiosity than for any professional reasons. In one scene, Chabrol frames the two officers on either side of her blank countenance, smiling with barely controlled prurience as they question her about her husband's impotence and ask about the "sexual relations" she had with him.

These officers also have the distinction of lagging just behind the plot in figuring things out. As new revelations are made, the officers, in completely separate scenes from the main action, without actually knowing what's going on, somehow come to conclusions that gibe with what was just shown. Their logic is infallible, their evidence-gathering abilities somewhat less so, but this never stops them from seizing onto each new theory and running with it. The problem is, though the detectives appear to be correct each time they make these assumptions and deductions, the film is filled with so many twists that their theories are soon contradicted by new facts, unbeknownst to these perpetually clueless cops, but revealed to the audience. The film's process of advancing and then deflating such deductive theories mocks the conventional police procedural conventions in which the master detective simply thinks his way through the crime until he finds a solution. The solutions here are almost totally divorced from evidence or even observation, based as they are entirely on preconceptions and clichés. The cops see a pretty young wife, a missing husband, and an also-missing young neighbor, and they don't need to see any more; they're practically blinded from seeing any more by the amassed weight of stereotyping that connects the dots of the little narrative they imagine. Not that the other side of the justice system is depicted as being any better. Julie's lawyer similarly assumes her guilt and begins spewing out, unprompted, an outrageous series of lies that's he concocted for her "defense" without even consulting her.

There's also a real element of sexual politics in Chabrol's critique of the justice system. Perhaps the single thread running throughout the whole film is the rampant misogyny that is expressed, sometimes explicitly, by virtually every male character who encounters Julie. The detectives sneer to each other that Julie is a "slut," again without any evidence for the accusation, while she can hardly meet even one man, even in very official and serious capacities, who fails to remark on her great beauty. Her lawyer's first words to her are that she's a "superb woman," while her husband's financial adviser remarks, as a complete non-sequitur, that she's very pretty. Such comments carry with them all sorts of insinuations — not only of the unconsummated desire these men jealously feel for her, but of the certainty that she must have cheated on her husband and killed him. Her very beauty itself becomes an accusation, evidence of her guilt, and even the judge who hears her case can't help remarking on her looks as though they weighed against her.

It's also interesting that although Julie begins the movie as a plotter, a rather stereotypical manipulative, scheming wife, as the film progresses she becomes more and more the victim, betrayed and used even when she tries to atone for her crimes. Her greatest crime, being a woman, cannot be corrected, and some characters — like the financial adviser whose advances she spurned, and who tells her outright that he hates and distrusts women — can never forgive her for it. She started as a would-be murderess, but she winds up a prostitute for her own husband, humiliated and paid for sex. In a startling sequence of perverse sensuality, he forces her to reenact her love scenes with Jeff, taking the illicit lover's place himself, and later this dynamic is reversed yet again when, in a horrifying scene, Jeff rapes and attacks her for rejecting him. Although the film begins as a rather standard murder thriller, it soon becomes clear that Chabrol is just as interested in teasing out the dense psychological undercurrents of the characters and their relationships as he is in following the curvy road traversed by the narrative. Julie sets out to free herself from an increasingly miserable marriage, but instead she finds herself trapped anew at every turn. She is acted upon but never allowed to really act. And even when it seems that she might find some measure of contentment anyway, various masculine forces will not allow her to, claiming her femininity as their own privilege. This is a film about powerful men, outraged at the idea that this woman does not obey them or give in to their desire. It's no coincidence that a scene towards the end of the film closes with Julie, her clothes torn and her body partially exposed after a brutal rape, lies in a car surrounded by police, all of them gaping in at her, their faces seen above her, leering down. They are in the position of power, observing her defilement with detached irony.

To some extent, this critique of masculine privilege is aided, ironically, by Schneider's own beauty. Her stern, hard-edged classical beauty makes the desire of these men for her not only believable, but palpable. And Chabrol surely does not forget that his own film essentially opens with an invitation to leer at the actress' naked body, a moment of sexual exploitation that takes on new significance by the end of the film, as Chabrol systematically shows the devastating effects of such attempts at sexual control. At the end of the film, Schneider's body is again exposed, but this time the audience is placed at one remove, watching the police watch her instead of directly ogling her form. Innocents With Dirty Hands is a masterfully executed film from Chabrol, who dedicates equal effort to his thriller's complex plot mechanics and to the dense layers of satire embedded within the narrative. The result is a film that works on multiple levels, completely satisfying its generic obligations even as it interrogates the gender assumptions so often at the heart of the thriller genre.

Duelle (une quarantaine)

Jacques Rivette's Duelle (une quarantaine) is, like many of his films, a beguiling mystery, a film whose unsettling charm and emotional impact are much clearer than the hazy outlines of its plot. It is perhaps Rivette's most satisfying ode to femininity in its various forms, a celebration of the female in her many guises and roles. There's the flirty, charming, manipulative Viva (Bulle Ogier); the harsh, sexually ambiguous Leni (Juliet Berto), who sometimes dresses like a man and dances with women; the stolid proletarian working woman Jeanne (Nicole Garcia), who disguises her common origins with the more stylish name Elsa; the naïve but resourceful young Lucie (Hermine Karagheuz). This quartet of women, derived from cinematic "types" but endowed with their own strongly defined personalities, form the film's mysterious core, engaging in a battle of wits and magic that seems to be largely happening behind the scenes. Rivette's deployment of the film's plot gives the impression that unseen forces beyond human control are conspiring in secret, and what's seen on screen is only the tip of a very large iceberg indeed. The narrative revolves around Viva and Leni, immortal supernatural beings who are limited by arcane forces to only 40 days on Earth per year, and who are battling each other for control of a mystical diamond which they believe will allow them to remain in the land of the living indefinitely. The film's sole male character, Lucie's brother Pierrot (Jean Babilée), possesses the stone and is attempting to keep either woman from finding it.

Rivette expends very little energy on the details of this superhuman struggle, which is largely shrouded in mystery and unexplained even after the film's final frame. Instead, Rivette focuses his attention on the interactions of the women and the ways in which they pair off, compete, and speak with each other. The "duel" of the title refers most obviously to a literal, magical duel between Leni and Viva, which is scheduled to occur towards the end of the film but never actually does. In place of this unfulfilled promise, the film is structured as a series of smaller duels, confrontations between one woman and another, or between one of the women and Pierrot. In one scene after another, these women warily stalk and circle each other, taking turns following each other or engaging in tense stand-offs where it's not clear what's at stake, and whether violence may erupt at any moment. Duelle was part of a planned quartet of films, each of which would concern these supernatural characters, and each one was meant to be Rivette's response to a particular cinematic genre. Duelle is the film noir of the series, which is apparent in the way that Rivette commandeers the device of the detective following a suspect, shifting the context by making the stakes shadowy and the character motivations even more opaque for most of the film. When Lucie trails Viva in a perfect parody of a detective thriller, it's unclear just why she does so, what she expects to find, and who she'll tell about it when she does. The water only gets even murkier when she catches up to the other woman, initiating a tense conversation where the characters speak in poetic riddles and nothing is resolved; at the end of the scene, Viva simply melts into the shadows and disappears, after writing a note which also fades away, unread, as soon as she is gone.

Rivette films these scenes with a languid, constantly tracking camera that stalks warily around the women even as they circle one another. Rivette's camera is constantly hiding and revealing, creating pairs and then isolating the individual characters again, playing with the friction created by placing two powerful feminine personalities against each other. In fact, Rivette toys with virtually every possible permutation of the pairings allowed by these four characters. Very rarely are more than two of the women together in one place — the one exception being the central scene at a disco where the four women briefly converge — but they are continually coupling off, testing their wits against one another even as they each work towards varying, often obscure, ends. Similarly, Pierrot is given duo scenes with each of the women in turn, and the interplay between his shifting persona and the different women is revelatory of the way that male and female identities shape one another. With the sensual Viva, Pierrot is tough, masculine, sinewy, both in a lengthy seduction sequence and a scene of magical confrontation, bathed in blue light, where the diminutive Pierrot becomes domineering, intimidating. He's more brotherly and paternal with his sister Lucie, more standoffish with the chilly Leni, and more sensitive and gentlemanly with the needy, lovelorn Jeanne. It's fascinating to watch this chameleonic performance, as Babilée adapts to reflect the nature of whichever woman he's with; the male is defined by the female, and vice versa.

In that vein, the film is also about dominance and control, about the shifting balance of power between men and women, and among the women themselves. Interestingly, the film depicts the struggles between the women as being motivated, not by men — the seduction and manipulation of Pierrot is just a diversion in this contest, and Pierrot a self-admitted pawn in their cosmic chess game — but by secret aims known only to themselves. Rivette is such a fantastic director of actresses because he allows them to have their own hidden motivations, to maintain their mystique, and to act independently of sexual politics. Rivette's characters, even when they're in a love story, are never driven solely by the desire for sexual union, and here such motivations are so far beyond the film's concern that they barely figure at all. There's a certain sexual frisson to the scene where Viva slowly, almost whimsically seduces Pierrot, leading him on by feigning drunkenness and continually pulling her lips away just seconds before a kiss; when she finally does kiss him, it's an electrifying moment of pure lust. That kiss is palpable in a way movie kisses seldom are. But such scenes are rare here, and as likely to occur between two women: there's a similar sexual energy in a scene between Leni and Jeanne, when Leni leans in and tenderly kisses the other woman.

The film is, above all, a mood piece, with Rivette perfectly balancing the languidly paced visuals against a soundtrack which is as intriguing and complex as always. Rivette seems to have conceived of the film as a silent movie at times. This is especially true of the denouement, a taut standoff accompanied by a near-complete absence of sound, this crushing silence almost imperceptible until the confrontation ends and, with a sudden crash, the sounds of the city suddenly come roaring back onto the soundtrack. Rivette frequently plays with this kind of artificiality, alternating between a realistic soundtrack that reflects the urban spaces the film supposedly takes place in, and a drained, dampened soundtrack that's fitting for the eerie underground aquarium sequence but comes across as more stylized when it's used in other locales. There's a similar tension involved in the way Rivette uses the piano music of Jean Wiener, whose tinkly improvisations sometimes pop up at the oddest moments. At one point, when Lucie is looking around the room for something to write on, the piano kicks in from silence just a second before she turns her head, creating the brief impression that she's looking around for the source of the music. The music isn't quite as disrupting elsewhere, but its uniqueness and the way Rivette tends to cut it in right in the middle of a scene rather than at natural breaking points, definitely calls attention to itself in a way other scores don't. Moreover, Wiener himself appears in the background of some scenes, playing the piano, so that his score is sometimes incorporated into the surroundings while at other times it is distanced from the film's spaces in the way a traditional score is. As with virtually every aspect of the film, Rivette is setting up friction in the soundtrack between the realistic and the stylized.

In some ways, all this talk of friction and tensions is deceiving, because Duelle is a disarmingly smooth film, one that downplays the mysterious forces working beneath its surfaces at almost every moment. Rivette's camera glides between characters, subtly linking them and weaving around them as they engage in their verbal, mystical, and physical pas de deux. It's a typically puzzling and enigmatic work from Rivette, whose films seldom have a "point" so much as they result in an accumulation of impressions and emotions. This is, perhaps, why Rivette is so difficult to pin down, why his films are so often off-putting and impenetrable to all but those few tuned into his peculiar wavelength. With Duelle, Rivette's filmmaking is at its most obtuse and enigmatic, but also, perversely, at its most lushly sensual. Between the fluid camerawork and the gorgeously understated color palette, subdued to a twilight mix of rich blues and pale reds, the look of the film is stunning, creating the atmosphere of an eternal urban evening. This visual richness reaches its apotheosis in the central dancehall sequence, where the four women finally arrive in one place, and are further multiplied and refracted by the multitude of mirrors decorating the bar's interior, suggesting an infinity of possible women derived from these template figures. This film is teeming with such moments of secret significance, scenes where the film's feminine, lunar glow spills over into giddy explosions of imagination.

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Manhattan Murder Mystery is clearly a film particularly dear to director Woody Allen, for a multitude of reasons. Allen had long nursed the idea of making a comedic murder mystery set in New York City and involving ordinary people stumbling into danger, a plot that had been gestating ever since 1977, when a similar narrative thread was dropped from the already lengthy Annie Hall. And of course the film is notable for marking the return of Diane Keaton to Allen's films, in a starring role for her ex again for the first time since Manhattan. Allen obviously gets a lot of pleasure out of starring opposite Keaton again, falling back into the familiar pattering dialogue that nobody does with Allen quite as well as Keaton, not even Mia Farrow. It's hard to tell what Woody's enjoying more in this film, finally getting to film what was obviously a pet project for him, or finally getting back his best comedic foil.

Ironically, Allen and Keaton play a very comfortable couple who have fallen too deep into familiar routines, and both of them are feeling the onset of dullness and dissatisfaction, even if neither quite realizes it. Woody clearly takes great delight in taking this stock couple, seemingly carbon-copied from any number of his earlier films, and throwing them into the midst of a murder plot ripped straight out of a film noir, though the full contours of the mystery don't become obvious until the very end. On one level, the film deals with some rather typical issues for Allen, namely the discontent and restlessness that often crops up in lengthy monogamous relationships, as Keaton and Allen are drawn away from each other by other people. Keaton gravitates, innocently at first, towards the couple's divorced friend (Alan Alda), who seems far more adventurous than her skittish husband, and who actually takes her seriously when she starts to believe that their next-door neighbor (Jerry Adler) has murdered his wife (Lynn Cohen). Alda even excitedly seizes on the mystery, both for its latent thrills and for the chance to get closer to the woman he not-so-secretly covets. Meanwhile, Allen is similarly tempted by a worldly authoress (Anjelica Huston), who offers him more sedate, cerebral thrills by teaching him how to play poker, in a hilarious scene where Woody captivates all attention simply by the way he holds and continuously reshuffles his hand of cards. These relationship hijinks increasingly take a back seat, though, as the murder mystery itself takes over the film, gently nudging the characters further and further from the familiar territory of a Woody Allen dramatic comedy and into the midst of a noir thriller.

This subtle metafictional playfulness, in which the film and its characters are steadily shifted from one cinematic world to another, is paid off brilliantly in the film's series of cinematic references, culminating in the full-on pastiche of the climactic scene. The Keaton/Allen dynamic in the early scenes, as they spy on their possibly murderous neighbor, definitely recalls Hitchcock's Rear Window, with the distance of spying reduced, in cramped modern Manhattan, from across a courtyard to across the hall. Especially great is the sequence where Keaton gets trapped inside the neighbor's apartment, and her frantic demeanor strikes a delicate balance between playing it for laughs and generating real tension; Allen wants to gently spoof these mysteries even as he revels in their suspense and vicarious thrills. Even more obviously, the world of the 40s and 50s noirs provides the aesthetic building blocks for Allen's mystery caper, and two films in particular stand in as metaphors for the shifting aesthetics of the film as a whole. Early on, the central couple and some friends go to see Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, one of the archetypal masterpieces of the genre and one of the best examples of noir's twisty plotlines, multiple betrayals, and moralistic overtones. It's a true classical noir. But Allen's other cinematic touchstone, cleverly incorporated into his film's dazzling climactic scene, is decidedly less traditional: Orson Welles' bizarre and slapdash The Lady From Shanghai, which makes only token nods towards plotting in a frantic race towards its marvelous funhouse finale. These films represent two extremes of the noir aesthetic, and of film storytelling in general, one in which narrative is everything and the story drives the characters, and another in which narrative exists only as a loose framework, while the real interest lies elsewhere, perhaps with the character psychology and the look of the film. Welles' film gets recycled for the finale of Manhattan Murder Mystery, with Allen's hilarious and ingenious multi-leveled recreation of Welles' infamous funhouse mirror sequence. The characters even parrot lines of dialogue, as images from the black and white film are projected in multiple mirrors that fragment the screen. "I'll never say life doesn't imitate art again," Allen breathlessly mutters when it's all over, and it's a great homage in addition to being a thrilling sequence of its own. It's also a great joke, in that life winds up imitating even the most unlikely and exaggerated of art, the pieces subtly falling into place for a cleverly reconstituted version of Welles' wildly stylized final scene.

In addition to being an exceedingly clever metafictional riff on the film noir, Manhattan Murder Mystery is a visually intriguing film in its own right, even when it's not incorporating nods to Welles or Hitchcock. The characters in the film are constantly conspiring, breaking into groups with heads nodded towards each other and plotting, and even the camera gets in on the mood of conspiracy. The darting, swooping camera familiar from many of Allen's films with DP Carlo di Palma here seems even more playful and purposeful than usual, ducking around corners and playing games of hide and seek with people and objects. In true noir fashion, the scene is often set devoid of life, just waiting for the hero or the murderer to creep onto the screen and skulk through the shadows. The joke is that di Palma deploys this trick even in brightly lit apartment interiors or in wide-open public places. In several scenes where Keaton and/or Allen snoop around their neighbor's rooms, the camera stalks between rooms, swinging back and forth to obscure and reveal the spies, the camera peeking around walls to catch just a glimpse of movement or swinging away suddenly as though to reveal a clue that never does appear. The camera's movement frequently plays with expectations, particularly the familiar mystery convention that the snooping detective always gets caught by the suspect. The sweeping arcs of the camera frequently hint at this scenario, teasing the audience by setting up a danger that never comes, that is only suggested by camera movements that we've come to think of in a certain way. It's as though the camera is playing its own metafictional game with the material, adapting the style of the noir even when it's not particularly appropriate to the scene in question, or when the expected noir payoff is not forthcoming.

Such games of visual hide and seek are also frequently a vehicle for the film's humor, and particularly for Woody's verbal tirades of puns and non-sequiturs. In one scene, Keaton and Allen are strolling around a fountain in a public park. The camera swoops in the opposite direction as they walk, with Woody stammering through his usual nervous patter at rapid-fire speed. After a while, the fountain obscures the couple as the camera continues to track around it, and Woody's constant stream of dialogue continues to flow on the soundtrack until the camera dodges around the fountain and reveals the two of them again. Woody even utilizes complete darkness for a few scenes, both bedtime conversations where the lights turning on and off hardly check the couple's banter, and for a madcap dash through a pitch-black basement where a murderer may be lurking, the whole thing more heard than seen, except for brief flashes as Woody frantically lights some matches. This aesthetic of obscuring is carried over more broadly into the film as a whole, most noticeably in the way characters (particularly Woody himself) are frequently filmed with their faces turned away from the camera. Indeed, Woody's character is practically introduced in this way, stammering out jokes as he rides up in an elevator with his wife and the couple from next door, the whole time with his back to the camera. Elsewhere, Woody's turned back represents his anxiety, as he peers nervously around for signs of danger while Diane Keaton makes a phone call, or else his total disinterest in the mystery, signaling his disconnection from his wife and her interests. The fact that Woody is so often offscreen, shrouded in darkness, or turned away when delivering his patented humor suggests that he is stepping back from his movie persona a bit, distancing himself in some way, perhaps only to better serve the noir material.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is a truly charming and hilarious film from Allen, a moving tribute to some of his cinematic favorites, even as it imagines what some of his own stock characters might behave like if thrown into a very different kind of movie. Murder has always been a fascination for Allen, but here he treats it very differently than in his darker ruminations on the subject. There is none of the moral hand-wringing and philosophical inquiry of Crimes and Misdemeanors or Cassandra's Dream, where murder is very real and disarmingly prosaic, with real consequences, both psychological and physical, for the people involved. Here, Allen opts instead for an examination of movie murder, a send-up of Hollywood's accumulated decades of fantasies surrounding murder, detectives, and the "perfect crime."