Crimes and Misdemeanors
- Jun 7
- 2 min read
Of the 50-some movies that Woody Allen has written and directed in his long career, one of my favorites is Crimes and Misdemeanors. It’s a boldly original, provocative film about crime and punishment and questions of morality.
“The eyes of god are always watching”.
Made in 1989, the film stars Martin Landau as Judah Rosenthal, a wealthy, happily married ophthalmologist and respected pillar of his community. Raised in a religious family, Judah’s father taught him that “the eyes of god are always watching”. Do the right things in life, his father said, and God will reward you. Do wrong and you will be punished. And now those words haunt Judah because for the past two years he’s been having an affair with another woman who wants Judah to make good on a promise to divorce his wife and start a new life with her. But Judah knows that confessing his adultery will destroy his wife and shatter his image in the community. He desperately tries to placate his lover, but it’s no use. She threatens to confront Judah’s wife and bring the truth into the open.
Out of his mind with fear, Judah begins to consider the unimaginable. If his lover were to die, then his secret would be safe and his charmed life would continue. But the fly in the ointment, of course, is Judah’s conscience. The idea of God watching him commit murder eats Judah alive. He is tormented with indecision.
As this dark tale unfolds, Crimes and Misdemeanors brilliantly intersects it with a comedic and cynical story also about adultery. In it, Woody Allen plays Cliff Stern, a witty, self-deprecating documentary filmmaker at odds with his wife because of his going-nowhere career and his utter contempt for her brother, a successful TV producer named Lester. When someone defends Lester by calling him an “American phenomenon,” Cliff responds: “Yeah, like acid rain.” Lester is a pompous, narcissistic womanizer. Worse, Cliff has been given the job of filming a PBS documentary that celebrates Kester’s popularity. The only saving grace for Cliff is that working on the film introduces him to a smart, beautiful woman named Halley. Before long, Cliff is pursuing her, ready to abandon his marriage.
I won’t spoil what happens next in the stories of Judah and Cliff, except to say that in facing their dilemmas both men find themselves dealing with the question of whether or not there is a moral order to our world. What if doing good is a dead end? What if doing wrong is rewarded, not punished?
With a cast that also includes Alan Alda, Angelica Huston, Mia Farrow and Jerry Orbach, I give Crimes and Misdemeanors four out of four stars. It’s a true work of greatness that deals with a subject rarely seen in American films.
