Just Funny Isn't Enough

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN

WRITERS: WOODY ALLEN AND MARSHALL BRICKMAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Amiable and unambitious, a new comedy at once amuses and dissatisfies.

Women are the suspicious sex: so a certain amount of husbandly experience -- as well as a long-established convention of popular culture -- teaches us. For decades Blondie has been routing Dagwood out of bed to investigate strange noises downstairs. And Nora Charles always sniffed out foul play ahead of blithe Nick, despite the fact that he was the professional detective.

A feminist might argue that this proves the male is inherently less intuitive than the female. Or, more radically, that exploited womankind has better reason to be on guard than guys do. Woody Allen might argue that it is just plain funnier if supposedly ditsy Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) insists there's something odd about the death of a neighbor while her husband Larry (Allen) patronizes her misgivings.

Though this is the least ambitious movie Allen has made in decades -- for better or worse the return to "pure" comedy his critics have urged on him -- he seems to have a little more on his mind than updating The Thin Man. For one thing, Double Indemnity, which he quotes directly and indirectly. For another, the classic New Yorker's ambivalence about neighbors; the Liptons lament not knowing the folks they see on the elevator, but they live in fear of being drawn into boring, alien lives.

Attempting to overcome their standoffishness, they accept an invitation for coffee with Paul and Lillian House (Jerry Adler and Lynn Cohen). But Paul's insistence on showing Larry his stamp collection makes Larry realize anew the wisdom of minding one's own business, a course he keeps urging on his wife after Lillian dies suspiciously a few days later.

Carol is, of course, deliciously undeterrable -- sneaking into the widower's apartment looking for clues, shadowing him on the street, eventually even catching sight of his supposed victim (she suddenly materializes on a passing bus). Her husband flaps along, squawking wisecrack warnings, but in time she persuades him, as well as a couple of bystanders (Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston), that something fishy (and much more convoluted than a simple murder) is going on. In a grand farcical sequence, all these characters manically manipulate tape recorders carrying provocative pre-recorded messages designed to elicit a confession from Paul.

It's an inspired passage. Allen and Marshall Brickman, the co-writer who worked with him so brilliantly in the past (Annie Hall, Manhattan), have concocted a steady stream of badinage that buoys the whole movie along. But these exchanges evaporate, and the movie is surprisingly flat visually. There comes a moment when you realize how wrong just being funny is for Allen. Ambition is an essential goad to his sensibility. It pushes him toward the rueful resonances of those previous Brickman collaborations and toward the magical transformations of reality in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days.

Given his recent circumstances, the distracted, unpolished air of this movie is understandable. It may even be that an air of modest amiability is -- for him, for now -- the right stance. But he has taught his devotees to expect more, and, perhaps cruelly, we continue to do so.