In his new picture, The Curse
of the Jade Scorpion, Allen plays C.W. Briggs, an investigator
for an insurance company in New York City in 1940, and in the
opening scenes he's seen striding, or rather stomping, down the hall
of the company offices to confront the newly-hired efficiency
expert, who is commonly addressed as Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt), to
tell her that he wants his files put back where they were
"RIGHT NOW." The way Allen's character says the word
"right," it comes out with a swoop of emphasis, as if this
were the kind of guy who puts things down and expects them to be
there, no matter where he set them, when he wanted to pick them up
again, and he's not about to change his habits, now. For her part,
Helen Hunt's tall, unflappable Fitzgerald looks imperiously down at
Briggs and tells him, no, the office files are being consolidated to
make things easier and less costly in the long run, and, after all,
this is 1940, a new age, and if he doesn't like it, try not stepping
off the curb in front of a bus and getting mangled beyond all
recognition. Upon which, Allen's Briggs is reduced to blustering his
way back out the door to her office, and you know that the two of
them are going to end up together, somehow, by the time the end
credits roll.
As you may have gathered, Allen's
new film turns out to be an essentially sweet-spirited homage and
evocation of the old-style comedy mystery, ones like the 1943 A
Night to Remember, where Brian Aherne and Loretta Young traded
affectionate wisecracks while poking around their Greenwich Village
apartment house; and with a dash of the sexual sparring of films
like His Girl Friday, where the barbs only went to further
reveal how much the leading man and lady really and truly loved each
other. Whenever they have a set-to, Briggs resorts to telling
Fitzgerald that the only other person he possibly dislikes more than
her is "that little German chancellor with the mustache,"
while she invariably categorizes him as something like "a slimy
little inchworm"; when he goes to sit on her couch, she jumps
and tells him not to or else she'll have to have it
"fumigated." So, of course, it is these two who end up
participating in a nightclub act -- performed, no less, on the floor
of the Rainbow Room, in Rockefeller Center -- by a stage magician
(David Ogden Stiers, who's perfect in the film): he puts them under
a trance and has them make like they're madly in love with each
other, but he's also setting them up for something far more
nefarious. Upon the utterance of a key word, either of them can fall
immediately into a trance, after which they follow his instructions
on how and where to carry out a burglary, under the cover of night,
and then wake up the next morning with no recollection of what
they've done. "The Jade Scorpion so commands!" says the
magician to his hapless lackeys, just like in the old radio mystery
programs.
There's even a femme fatale: Laura
Kensington, who looks like both of General Sternwood's daughters in The
Big Sleep rolled into one. She's played by Charlize Theron, with
a cascade of blond hair down one side of her face and a wiggle in
her chassis, and Theron is wonderful, making her character into a
voluptuously tempting Pandora's Box wrapped up in chenille and furs
and tied with a bow (Theron previously played the fashion model in
Allen's Celebrity, who took to the runway, both legs pumping,
like a steam engine). She's only in a couple of scenes, albeit
important ones, but she's gangbusters and pretty much steals most of
the movie in the process.
Allen's C.W. Briggs is initially
presented as being a swaggering braggart who's a womanizer (at one
point, he explains that all women "look the same
upside-down") and flirts with all the pretty office girls (one
of whom is played by Elizabeth Berkley, who looks great as a
brunette, by the way). This is the type of character you would not
expect to see Allen playing in a movie, and in fact is the sort that
he used to ruthlessly parody in his earlier films. By chance, he
learns that Fitzgerald is having an affair with the boss (Dan
Aykroyd) of the insurance company, who keeps stringing her along
with the promise that he'll be getting a divorce from his wife
(shades of Billy Wilder's The Apartment). Briggs then tries
to help Fitzgerald: shouldn't a smart, strong woman like her know
better than to get mixed up with a guy like this? And that's when
the comically nervous, scrambling little guy whom Allen usually
plays starts coming through and takes control. For her part,
however, Helen Hunt comes across as frankly intimidated, by the part
and by playing opposite Woody Allen (In fact, she admitted as much
in the press, recently). In many scenes, she seems sullen, spiky,
and dispirited, but she gives it a good try, even though when she
does work up some steam in her comic exchanges with Allen, her
delivery sounds, surprisingly, like Diane Keaton in the films Keaton
made with Allen, with the exception that Keaton knew how to hold her
own onscreen while not letting it affect her comic timing or the
freshness of her performance.
