Crimes and Misdemeanors, directed by Woody Allen, is another great film that has a lot of deep meaning to it. This film focuses on two separate men and their life decisions and suffering from those choices. The first being Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) and the second being Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau). During this films run time, we see both of their stories unfold in an unique way. Unlike many other Hollywood films, this film takes the audience for a ride of unexpected turns and surprises. With that being said, lets take a look at the two characters and see how they all play a major role in the film. The first character worth talking about is Cliff. Cliff is a married documentary filmmaker that falls in love with another woman. Cliff sees that his marriage is bad and that it won't last much longer. Instead he falls for Halley Reed (Mia Farrow) who he meets as he is working for Lester (Alan Alda). During the film he shows her what he is working on and is nice to her. Towards the end, he tells her he loves her and she refuses, saying she is not ready. In the end Cliff ends up being single and Halley ends up with Lester. As for Judah Rosenthal, he is a married man who has an affair with Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston). Dolores starts getting mad that Judah isn't doing anything to fix the situation and she threatens to tell his wife about the affair. After a couple more attempts, Judah gets fed up and scared that she will ruin his life and asks his brother, Jack, to hire a hit man to take her out. As he is making his decision on whether or not he should have Dolores assassinated, we see him confronting two people. The first being Ben, the Rabbi, and the second being jack, his brother. These two characters act like the angel and devil on his shoulders. Or as James Mooney says, "Ben and Jack may be considered as the two sides of Judah, which Judah is attempting to reconcile." After the deed is done, we see Judah struggling with his beliefs (as seen in the video below) and becoming very unstable. We assume that he is going to turn himself in, but instead he ends up accepting it and moving on with his life. This leads me on to my next topic, and that's the theme of blindness in this film. As Allen once said, "Crimes and Misdemeanors is about people who don't see. They don't see themselves as others see them. They don't see the right and wrong situations. And that was a strong metaphor in the movie." This film puts a lot of focus on the use of glasses. When a character was glasses on, it means that he believes in a higher power or something higher than their own self interest. As for the characters that don't have glasses, they believe in individual happiness and more down to earth kind of thinking. (This is better explained in the video down below). This theme is very important because we see characters that are affected by it. In the beginning, Halley wears glasses and doesn't like Lester. This changes at the end, when we see that she is no longer wearing any glasses and is with Lester. This change in Halley shows that she is now doing things for her own happiness and no longer is hoping for help from some higher being. The same can be said about Judah. In the beginning we see that he is wearing glasses and as he has Dolores assassinated, he starts to bring back his religious beliefs. After the time skip, we see Judah not wearing glasses anymore and he has finally gotten past his conflict with the killing of Dolores. Meanwhile, Cliff wears glasses all throughout the film and even at the end, still has hope that his beliefs will help him. In some ways this film can be looked at as atheist, since the believers are supposed to be represented as the blind ones and the ones that don't see the true reality. Ben suffers from blindness at the end of the film and even though he takes it well, the film is saying that his beliefs in god have blinded him. This theme of blindness corresponds with the film's way of changing up the expectations of the audience. We see that Cliff is an honest man that believes, yet he is unable to get the girl he wants. Would this have been any other film, he would have ended up being happy with Halley and Judah would have been punished. Troy Francis talks about this idea and says, "Brought up on Hollywood movies, viewers are conditioned to think that Judah should be punished for the terrible deed that he has committed and that Clifford, the hardworking artist with integrity should get the girl. But neither of these eventualities is to play out. This unexpected turn of events is what makes this film different from others. Cliff does everything right and follows the laws, and yet he is punished the most. While Judah is a wealthy man that orders someones death and is not punished for it. This sense of the film being unfair makes it more relative to the real world and the saying that life in unfair. This film is made in a sense where, "Both men play out parallel stories, both tragic, before meeting in the last minutes of the film to discuss what they have and haven't learnt." At the end Judah comes up to Cliff and tells him about a film plot where he uses his own story as the main plot of the film. After this, Cliff tells Judah that it wouldn't work because the character should turn himself in. In which Judah responds that in the real world the character wouldn't turn himself in. The video down below shows this scene play out. The final bit I want to talk about is the similarities between Crimes and Misdemeanors and Husbands and Wives. Both films are directed by Woody Allen and this is seen a lot throughout the film, as a lot of the plots and themes are similar. In both films there is the conflict of marriage and how it doesn't last. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Cliff and his wife are about to get a divorce and Judah has an affair. In Husbands and Wives, Jack and Sally have a divorce and then end up back together. During their marriage we learn that Jack was also having an affair. As for Gabe and Judy, they end up breaking up as well and don't get back together. So in a sense, both Cliff and Gabe end up in the same situation. They are both married and because of some events in the film, they both end up divorced, as well as single. Gabe refuses to date Rain and Cliff loses Halley to Lester. As for Jack and Judah, they both have affairs and are married, yet they end up happy at the end. Jack and Sally get back together and Judah never tells his wife about the affair. This use of how marriages that seem happy and great on the outside, are always the ones that end up being broken is similar in both films. There are a lot of similarities between the two films, that it almost seems like you are watching an adaptation of his own work. Though they may have different plots, the main ideas and themes are the same. Overall this film takes the audience for a ride and does things that they are not expecting. Woody Allen once again takes a simple plot and adds a deeper theme into it, making the story a lot more interesting and complex. Like Husbands and Wives, he introduces a complex love story between multiple characters that inevitably leaves the kindest guy single, alone and betrayed.
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