The 1990s. Was this the decade when doing-a-Woody-Allen-movie became a thing that actors wanted on their resumé? It was definitely happening then. Look at the cast of Shadows and Fog: Madonna (Madonna!), Jodie "Two Oscars" Foster, John "Being John" Malkovich, John "Kick boxing" Cusack, Kathy "Norman" Bates (did she get an Oscar for Misery?), and a clutch of other thesps and wannabees on the cusp of greater fame; maybe even a young Peter "Tyrion" Dinklage, according to IMDB. From working with a small crew of reliable, talented actors, not very starry, suddenly Allen has a film full of Names and Faces. No wonder he tried to lose them in the fog.
Allen has always ploughed his own furrow, never one to do something just because it was commercial. Shadows and Fog, his biggest production in terms of set building on the lot, is both an adaptation of his play, Death (itself a comedic take on an existing serial killer drama) and also an hommage to German Expressionist cinema. Sounds good, right? Of course right.
The thing is, it isn't. Don't get me wrong, there are some amusing, thoughtful moments, ones that happen, just as in The Purple Rose of Cairo, when a thoughtful, intelligent young man enters a brothel. But these scenes are not the meat, merely the garnish, and the meat is thin, dry and stringy.
The hunt for a serial killer by first one mob, then by more than one, doesn't prove to be very funny. Allen's protagonist, Kleinman, is a non-entity, so much so that one struggles to believe that anyone would drag him out of bed to join a posse, given how ineffectual he appears to be. Despite seeing the movie multiple times I cannot recall what goes down with the travelling circus, except maybe that Malkovich's character is cheating on one woman with another, or something like that? But it all feels very by the way, by the by.
The usual vintage records on the soundtrack.
The best things about Shadows and Fog are that it brought actors like Bates and Cusack into Allen's cinema. Cusack was excellent in the celebrated gangster comedy, Bullets over Broadway, and Bates was also very good in the much later, box office smash, Midnight in Paris. Allen's reflections upon this 1991 venture, and the studio exec's' reaction to the first screening, which you can read in his autobiography, are hilariously funny. Too bad he couldn't have imported some of that metatheatricality from Stardust Memories into this feature.
Recommended to Woody Allen completists only.
Allen has always ploughed his own furrow, never one to do something just because it was commercial. Shadows and Fog, his biggest production in terms of set building on the lot, is both an adaptation of his play, Death (itself a comedic take on an existing serial killer drama) and also an hommage to German Expressionist cinema. Sounds good, right? Of course right.
The thing is, it isn't. Don't get me wrong, there are some amusing, thoughtful moments, ones that happen, just as in The Purple Rose of Cairo, when a thoughtful, intelligent young man enters a brothel. But these scenes are not the meat, merely the garnish, and the meat is thin, dry and stringy.
The hunt for a serial killer by first one mob, then by more than one, doesn't prove to be very funny. Allen's protagonist, Kleinman, is a non-entity, so much so that one struggles to believe that anyone would drag him out of bed to join a posse, given how ineffectual he appears to be. Despite seeing the movie multiple times I cannot recall what goes down with the travelling circus, except maybe that Malkovich's character is cheating on one woman with another, or something like that? But it all feels very by the way, by the by.
The usual vintage records on the soundtrack.
The best things about Shadows and Fog are that it brought actors like Bates and Cusack into Allen's cinema. Cusack was excellent in the celebrated gangster comedy, Bullets over Broadway, and Bates was also very good in the much later, box office smash, Midnight in Paris. Allen's reflections upon this 1991 venture, and the studio exec's' reaction to the first screening, which you can read in his autobiography, are hilariously funny. Too bad he couldn't have imported some of that metatheatricality from Stardust Memories into this feature.
Recommended to Woody Allen completists only.