(1993) A pair of opposites, Carol (Diane Keaton) and Larry Lipton (Woody Allen, who directed and co-wrote the script with Marshall Brickman) - an editor with Harpers, he enjoys hockey while she, no longer working but considering opening a restaurant, prefers Wagner's operas ("I start to get the urge to conquer Poland," he complains) - make acquaintance with their neighbors in the hallway, Paul House (Jerry Alder) and his wife of 28 years Lillian (Lynn Cohen), for the first time.

Shortly afterward (Carol asks Larry if they're "becoming like them, another dull, aging couple") Lillian dies of a heart attack. Meeting Paul outside their building, Carol remarks to Larry on the widower's appearing "too perky." With plenty of time on her hands, Carol, her suspicions raised when she accidentally finds an urn of ashes in Paul's kitchen cupboard (earlier the older couple had spoken of having purchased twin plots in a cemetery), begins delving into a mystery that takes on Hitchcockian proportions.

She engages the active imagination (cremation to avoid an autopsy to discover poisoning) of her friend Ted (Alan Alda), a playwright and divorcé with lingering romantic reminiscences (not of his ex-wife), whom Larry sets up for a date with one of his writers, Marcia Fox (Anjelica Huston), who gives her editor lessons at playing poker. For Larry, it's "Too much Double Indemnity."

However, Carol's snooping in Paul's apartment turns up two tickets to Paris (Paul had said he was going to visit his brother in Florida) and an overheard phone conversation with Helen Moss (Melanie Norris), who turns out to be an attractive young model. "We could be living next to a murderer," she tells Larry. "Save a little craziness for menopause," he advises.

While at a wine-tasting party with Ted, Carol, looking through a bay window, sees Lillian pass by on a bus. "The dead person's bus," mocks Larry when she shares her latest revelation. Nevertheless, worried that Carol's becoming more attracted to Ted's adventurousness in this developing drama ("We've got plenty of time to be conservative," she says to Larry), Larry enlists in the sleuthing.

At the Waldron Hotel they see Lillian enter, follow her up to the room with the ruse of a gift, and discover her on the floor. "I think she's dead!" cries Carol; "Try giving her the present," suggests Larry.

Events get scarier and creepier - "most exciting thing in our whole marriage," exults Carol - including getting stuck in an elevator ("neurotic's jackpot," recoils panicky Larry), a wedding band the police failed to find, a body dropped into a vat of molten metal.

Joining Ted and Marcia at a restaurant, Larry and Carol discuss the plethora of possibilities, resulting in Marcia's brilliant theory of what has taken place along with her idea (taken from Max Schindler's novel, Murder in Manhattan) for catching the killer. The climax of this hilarious thriller, after numerous references to other cinematic classics, pays homicidal homage to the hall-of-mirrors scene in Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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