The Great Movies III

Cliff is offered a job directing a documentary about Lester. "You weren't my first choice," the Alda character cheerfully tells him. "I'm doing it as a favor to my sister."While making the film, Cliff meets a production assistant named Halley (Mia Farrow) and falls for her. They have a little non-affair; Cliff is not made for big affairs, but for modest displays of erotic self-deprecation. He proposes marriage to her, despite the fact that he has barely kissed her and is obviously married to Wendy.

So now we have two married men discussing marriage with other women. That Judah will not really marry Dolores destroys her ("I was at a low point when I met you!" she cries in raw emotion. "You turned everything around!"). That Cliff might actually marry Halley, or thinks he might, is fielded by her with tact: she announces a trip to London, thinks they ought to "have some time apart," and returns engaged to-yes, Lester. Cliff is morally offended by her choice, despite the inarguable fact that Lester is single and available (and also rich and successful), and Cliff is married, poor, and has been fired from the documentary after a scene comparing Lester to Mussolini.

The Woody Allen scenes provide the kind of stand-up self-analysis and kvetching that his characters are famous for. But what happens in the Martin Landau scenes are as calmly shocking as anything Allen has ever done. In that imaginary conversation with the rabbi, Judah refers to his brother's offer to "take care" of Dolores. "God is a luxury I can't afford," he says. "Jack lives in the real world. You live in the kingdom of heaven."After Judah learns that Dolores has been killed, he visits Dolores's apartment, sees that she is indeed dead, and takes her address book and other papers that might link him with her.

"Four months later," we're told in a subtitle, the principal characters are gathered at a wedding. Cliff wanders off, outraged at seeing Halley with the despised Lester. Why should a worthless parasite like Lester get the girl? Judah wanders in the same direction, and the two men have a curious conversation. It turns on the idea of a perfect murder. Judah describes "a murder plot" to Cliff. It is the murder he has gotten away with.

But how does it feel to be responsible for the death of another person? Can you live with yourself? "Suddenly it's not an empty universe at all," Judah tells Cliff. God occupies it, and has eyes, and sees. "The man is an inch away from confessing to the police." Then suddenly one morning, he wakes up, the sun is shining, his life is good, and he has returned to "his protected world of wealth and privilege." The moral of this story? "We define ourselves by the choices we make,"Judah says. By choosing to have Dolores murdered, Judah has defined himself as a man of wealth and privilege, respected by society, "idolized" by his wife, and a murderer. He can live with that.

The implications of Crimes and Misdemeanors are bleak and hopeless. The evil are rewarded, the blameless are punished, and the rabbi goes blind. To be sure, justice is done in the low-road plot: Cliff does not succeed in leaving his wife to marry a girl for whom he would be the worst possible partner, and the rich and triumphant Lester gets the girl and will possibly make her happy, or at least rich. But in the main story Dolores lies in her grave, and Judah finds that life goes on-for him, at least. For Martin Landau, the performance is a masterpiece of smooth, practiced diplomacy, as he glides through life and leaves his problems behind. Landau is never more effective than when he is shocked and dismayed at his own behavior. It's as if he's regarding himself from outside, with a kind of fascination. He sees what he does, and does nothing to stop it. In his own world, he is the eyes of God.

rumb is a meeting between two eccentrics in sympathy with each other. The artist R. Crumb created such bizarre images in his underground comic books that the art critic Robert Hughes named him "the Brueghel of the last half of the zoth century."The director Terry Zwigoff knew him before he had any notion of making this documentary. They shared a love for obscure musicians on 78 rpm records from the 192oS and 193os, and they once played in the same band. Long before he knew the inhabitants of Crumb's childhood home would be the keys to this film, Zwigoff had slept the night there and met Crumb's brother Charles, who is perhaps the key to the whole Crumb story.

The old 78s led Zwigoff to his first film, Louie Bluie (1986), about a musician named Howard Armstrong, whose forgotten recordings from the 1930s fascinated him. Learning that Armstrong was still alive, he made a film about a man who was ageless, gifted in music and art, a clown and mimic, a life force. Zwigoff was now a filmmaker, and knew that his next subject was obviously his fellow music lover, Robert Crumb.