Shadows and Fog (1991)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

Given his profound love of European cinema, it was inevitable that Woody Allen would one day get round to paying an affectionate tribute to one of the most stylish and enduring of film aesthetics, namely German expressionism of the 1920s and early 1930s. It's a shame that this only happened towards the end of Allen's 'golden run' before his creativity and inventive flair began to desert him amid personal crises in the early 1990s. Had it been made half a decade earlier, Shadows and Fog could have been a comedy tour de force to rival Mel Brooks' similarly tongue-in-cheek horror pastiche Young Frankenstein (1974). As it was, Woody Allen's billet doux to the precursor of film noir is a somewhat understated affair, offering surprisingly little of tangible merit beneath its striking visuals. It's a film that lives up to its name - there is so little to grab hold of and it just slips from your grasp like fragments of dream, never really coalescing into anything of real substance. Yet, for all that, it is a film with an unmistakable allure.

When Shadows and Fog was first released in 1992 it was almost universally given the thumbs down by the critics (even those who had previously been favourable to Allen's work). It bombed at the box office and remains one of the director's least commercially successful films - and yet it is a long, long way from being his worst cinematic offering. To dismiss Shadows and Fog as purely a self-indulgent exercise in style is unfair. It may not be Woody Allen's most profound, most inspired or funniest film, but it remains a seductively stylish piece of film art, a homage to the work of such legendary directors as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau that positively glows with reverence and mischief. The menacing, silhouetted ghoul that brings terror to a mist-shrouded city dreamscape is an obvious amalgam of the fiends that stalk Lang's M (1931), Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), but the bleakly suffocating mood of the piece is most strongly redolent of of G.W. Pabst's  The Three Penny Opera (1931), and the fact that the film liberally borrows Kurt Weill's music from the original opera Die Dreigroschenoper adds greatly to this impression.

Here, Allen's familiar schlemiel persona becomes a passive Josef K. figure straight out of a Franz Kafka story - an innocent forever adrift in a vaguely constructed world that he fails to connect with and which becomes his relentless tormentor. Fearful of his landlady, his fiancée and his boss (three familiar Kafka fetishes), Allen wanders through the foggy urban wilderness like a lost soul, and ends up being threatened not only by an anonymous maniac killer but fascistic police officers and rival vigilante factions pursuing their own plans whose aims are as deadly as they are nebulous. It's an opportunity for Allen to rehearse his favourite themes of whether life has any meaning, whether God exists, and whether life is worth living. On this occasions there are few nougats of profundity - Allen is just replaying well-worn ideas like someone lazily dipping into an old record collection. There's little in the way of a plot and the story is basically just a scruffy collection of cliché's lifted from horror films of the '20s and '30s. Hardly any effort seems to have gone into the script at all. When the film ends, with shocking abruptness, you have a sense that you have hardly sat through a film at all - rather that you have merely dozed off and experienced the strangest of dreams.

The plethora of big name actors who are wheeled in and out of the film with indecent haste did little to endear the film to the critics. Madonna was the kiss of death to many a film of this era, but mercifully she is on screen for barely a few seconds and is surprisingly good in her temptress cameo role. Donald Pleasence is less well-used - he owes his presence in the film no doubt to his long association with the horror genre, but he is dispatched even before he has made any impression. John Malkovich is just plainly miscast and John Cusack looks awkwardly anachronistic. Of Allen's supporting artists, only Mia Farrow appears comfortable in this film, once again playing one of those sad, put-upon wretches that she inhabits so easily (it's virtually a carbon copy of the bruised heroine she played in Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)).

With the film disgracing itself somewhat in both the acting and script departments, you wonder what there is left to redeem Shadows and Fog and make it worth watching. The film does have one spectacular ace up its sleeve, which is its exceptional production design, for which Santo Loquasto should take the lion's share of the credit (he'd perform a similar miracle on Allen's later Bullets Over Broadway). Loquasto oversaw the construction of what was, at the time, the largest studio set ever made for a movie in New York. With its claustrophobic alleyways, huddled ogre-like buildings, bridges and archways, all constantly wreathed in a thick and sinister fog, the sprawling city set becomes the most enigmatic and powerful character in the film, and Carlo Di Palma's stunning black and white photography gives it a solidity and depth of expression that no other character in the film can match.

It is the ultimate in movie expressionism - where the sets, the design and the cinematography take it upon themselves to convey all of the feeling, whilst the actors are left resembling faceless puppets, soulless shells in human form that are incapable of showing any real emotion. There is one stark exception to this - the beautiful little scene when there is a break in the mist and Mia Farrow's pitiful character is able to glimpse a starry patch of sky above her. Because light has taken such a long time to reach her (naturally circus sword-swallowers have a good basic understanding of physics), she knows that the stars she sees have long ceased to exist, and this prompts her and her deranged companion (Woody) to wonder if life isn't all an illusion. And maybe that's all that life is: a dream of shadows and fog that go on swirling forever in a sea of nothing.  It's all a trick of the imagination.

Film Synopsis

In the 1920s, a town swathed in fog is terrorised by a mysterious serial killer who roams the streets, strangling men and women unlucky enough to cross his path. One night, a cowardly bookkeeper, Kleinman, is coerced into joining a vigilante committee to hunt down and arrest the killer. Unaware of the danger that lurks in her midst, a young woman named Irmy arrives in the town, having turned her back on her life as a circus performer and her unfaithful husband, Paul. She finds a temporary refuge in a brothel, where she reluctantly takes 700 dollars from a student in return for satisfying his carnal needs. Not long afterwards, Irmy is picked up by the police for soliciting without a licence and runs into Kleinman, a fellow lost soul looking for meaning in life. At Irmy's insistence, Kleinman gives the money she earned as a prostitute to the church, and is thereupon menaced on four fronts - by the killer, the police, rival gangs of vigilantes and his unforgiving employer. He then gets to meet his hero, the legendary magician Armstead, and together they find a way to bring to an end the strangler's reign of terror.