One of the things I love about Woody Allen films is that they feel like good novels. His stories are interesting and interwoven, his characters quirky and complex, and he tells his tales with a unique voice and vision. Watching his movies is a bit like curling up with a good book. The Movieplex channel happened to show one of my all-time favorites this week: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). This is a dark comedy, possibly the darkest of all Woody Allen films to date, and it runs as smoothly as a fine-tuned clock. Allen follows two main story lines in the film:

Martin Landau plays Judah, a rich man and an important community philanthropist who makes the mistake of having an affair with an airline stewardess. This woman, Delores (Angelica Huston), turns out to be unstable and threatens to reveal the affair to Judah’s wife Miriam. Judah decides that he can’t let that happen, so he enlists his brother Jack (Jerry Orbach), a man with connections to the Mafia, to take care of the problem for him.

The second story is the comic tale of Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) who finds himself in a joyless marriage with his wife. Cliff is a documentary filmmaker getting nowhere in his career. Cliff’s brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), an incredibly successful producer of trashy sitcoms, deigns to offer Cliff a job directing a documentary about, well, Lester. Cliff’s wife pressures him into taking the job, which becomes a nightmare for him, with the lone exception of the lovely production assistant Halley (Mia Farrow), whom Cliff meets and quickly falls for.

Allen inter-cuts these two stories brilliantly, the dark and the light, the comic and the tragic. The stories gently dovetail off one another until the two main characters, Judah and Cliff, meet by chance at the wedding of a mutual friend. They sit and talk about their “hypothetical situations.” The tale comes together then and tragically comes apart. We lose all hope that justice will be served in one situation and that romance will win out in the other. And yet, as a testament to the complexity of the film and its characters, both Judah and Cliff end up happier in the end than they were in the beginning.

I don’t want to get too much more into the fine and subtle movement of the film. It’s better if you watch it. But I will cite Crime and Misdemeanors as a terrific movie for book-lovers and creative writers to enjoy, admire, and learn from. (By the way, did you notice the cast? Wow!): Highly recommended.

PS: Melinda and Melinda (2004), Deconstructing Harry (1996), and Broadway Danny Rose (1984) will yield similar rewards, even if the punches don’t land quite as hard. Of course, I’d suggest just about any of Allen’s films. I’m a fan, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Of further interest…

10 Questions for Woody Allen: TIME Magazine.