Manhattan Murder Mystery

Sometimes a movie just rubs me the wrong way. Woody Allen was going for a “Nick and Nora” sort of story, with a little Rear Window added in. Woody and his wife, Diane Keaton, live in an apartment next door to a much older couple. They don’t know them well, having been in their apartment only once, where Woody was bored out of his mind with the man’s stamp collection. Then the wife drops dead … but Diane refuses to believe it. She suspects murder, and the chase is on.

What annoyed me was that not until halfway through the story is there even a shred of real evidence, or even something that a rational person would see as just a bit off-center, that anything sinister happened. Her suspicions are far too far-fetched for me; she is simply behaving recklessly and stupidly, and not doing a very good job as a sleuth. By the time some real evidence began to emerge, I was too fed up with both of them—her bull-headedness and his usual Woody cowardice—to really give a damn what happened. If the initial clues had been just a wee bit more interesting they might have pulled this off, because the ending does have a lot going for it. But it didn’t work for me.