I noticed the other day that our 'on demand' cable movies have a number of old Woody Allen flicks listed this month, and I revisited this one the other evening. I was once a big fan of his films, and a lot of my friends use the excuse of his messy personal improprieties to explain his films falling out of their favor in recent years, or the fact that he has a bad habit of pairing himself with younger and younger leading ladies leaving a bad taste in their mouth.
My falling away has more to do with his insular vision, the way he sets his stories in the same comfortable environs of priviledge and class, and the few times he ventures outside of it, the tone comes across as condescending, or as if he's 'slumming'. You may say that he makes films about 'what he knows', and that's fair I suppose, and you gotta applaud the guy for regularly churning out halfway decent material without spending a gazillion dollars a picture, and still attracting talented actors to work with him picture after picture.
I saw this one only once many years ago in the theater, and I remember it quite vividly, because it was the night before my son's birth. Two interweaving storylines, of which the Martin Landau one is definitely the more interesting, because it seems to step outside that usual 'Woody Allen Comfort Zone', and could be one of the only movies in which a cold blooded murder, where the body and blood is displayed and lingered over.(I know, there were murders in 'Manhatten Murder Mystery', and 'Radio Days', etc, and his jokes frequently drop names like Leopold and Loeb, or Charlie Starkweather etc - but even with the serious undertones they were mainly played for laughs - ) Martin Landau gives a terrific performance as a man wracked by guilt, but ultimately having to live with the punishment of his own culpability rather than the tidy retribution of the authorities. The Woody Allen storyline concerning his shallow but successful brother-in-law and an extramarital unrequited romance with his producer (Mia Farrow of course) is much less interesting, but even so, manages a suitable payoff at the wedding scene. The movie tries for some heavy philosophizing while it wrestles with moral dillemas, regarding some subplots about an elderly life affirming jewish philospher who is the subject of Allen's struggling documentary and some heavy handed but effective symbolism regarding the blind Rabbi (Sam Waterston, another Allen regular) dancing with his daughter at his wedding to "I'll be Seeing You". Overall, not a laugh riot like many of his films, but there are some laugh out loud moments (Woody's reaction to his sister's 'dating experience' is one memorable example), and plenty of gristle on the philosophical bone to chew on long after the movie's done.