Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

This 1993 comedy-mystery concerns Larry and Carol Lipton, a middle-aged couple on the Upper East Side who become convinced that their neighbor has done away with his wife. The plot turns on a stolen key, an urn beneath a kitchen sink, and a pair of reading glasses misplaced under a bed. The setting is affluent, white, and entirely self-contained. Nothing in the film pauses to instruct us about representation, justice, or the state of the world. The world, as far as these people are concerned, is the few blocks between Second and Third Avenue.

Diane Keaton's Carol is the engine of the picture. She snoops, she schemes, she drags her reluctant husband and a willing friend into an investigation that escalates from bad manners to an industrial furnace. The film grants her appetite and nerve, and it does so without ever framing her as a statement. She is a comic force. Woody Allen plays the wary straight man, Alan Alda the eager accomplice, Anjelica Huston a novelist pulled in by accident. Allen wrote the material with Marshall Brickman, and the plotting is the tightest work he produced that decade.

The finale, a shootout in a hall of mirrors, tips its hat to Orson Welles. It never preaches. There is no sermonizing about wealth, no climate dread, no lesson extracted from the publishing business, even though Larry works in publishing and a book deal briefly figures in the scheme. The film knows it is light. Allen called it an airplane book read, which is a fair self-assessment and an unusually honest one. There remains craftsmanship, comfort, and the plain fact that the most radical proposition on offer is a decent apartment with a view of the park.