SHADOWS AND FOG (1992) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Woody Allen
Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, John Malkovich,
John Cusack, Lily Tomlin, Donald Pleasence,
Jodie Foster, Fred Gwynne, Julie Kavner,
David Ogden Stiers, Kathy Bates, Madonna,
Kate Nelligan, Josef Sommer, Robert Joy,
Kenneth Mars, John C. Reilly, Wallace Shawn
The first thing you see is a man's shadow, shrouded in fog. The man's short and round and vaguely resembles Peter Lorre in "M". The second thing you see is another man, tall and gaunt, with a bald head. He vaguely resembles Max Schreck in "Nosferatu". The second man approaches the first man with a piece of piano wire and strangles him. The visual references to Schreck and Lorre are no coincidence, and neither is Kurt Weill's music. The picture looks like something out of Germany between the wars. The story's about a fidgety little nebbish named Kleinman (Woody Allen), who's enlisted to be part of a late-night street patrol out to track down a serial killer (the guy who looks like Schreck). So Kleinman goes out on the street, not knowing what role he's supposed to play in the manhunt, and soon finds himself a suspect, and then a target of the mob, when the Schreck figure, now working with the vigilantes, fingers him as the murderer. It's a nightmare that gets progressively more sinister and unsettling, and it's not going to end when he wakes up, because he's not asleep. It's a comic study in mass hysteria and the psychology of lynch mobs, and it's one of Woody Allen's best movies, not like anything else he's done, though it's hard to imagine anybody else doing it. There are passing references to Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus" and Tod Browning's "Freaks", and scenes often play out with key characters outside the frame, off screen. Characters in other Woody Allen films found temporary salvation at the movies, with the Marx Brothers, or Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Here they turn up at a circus, or a brothel, seeking relief, or at least a diversion, from a world gone horribly wrong, an evil it's not in their power to prevent. Kleinman's solution is the ultimate magician's trick, an escape into pure illusion. When you're trapped in the night in the shadows and fog, that's as close to a happy ending as you're likely to get.
