Woody Allen's September (1987)

Dead Johnny Stompanato. Mob enforcer killed by an 8th grade girl.

I never understood why Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, was in trouble for sticking a knife in Johnny Stompanato. The girl deserved a medal for killing that subhuman. But, for courageously killing a mobster who was attacking her mother, the girl was made a ward of the state.

This story made its way into Woody Allen's September. Mia Farrow plays a woman who, years earlier, shot and killed her mother's abusive gangster boyfriend. Strangely, her aging movie star mother (Elaine Stritch) is now married to a physicist. Why a physicist? Does this make sense? Lana Turner married Lex Barker who played Tarzan and later a hypnotist con man. She was married eight times, never to any an academic or intellectual.

Mia Farrow's character says twice that she wants to go see "the new Kurosawa film" which sounds affected. I've been to new Kurosawa movies and I went to a Kurosawa film festival, but I referred to the movies by name. Kurosawa movies tend to be rather masculine and don't seem like something a woman traumatized by a girlhood homicide would be drawn to.

I don't think I'm giving it away here, but Mia Farrow is trying to sell the house in the movie but suddenly learns that she doesn't own it. It's her mother's property. The mother had said something in passing about giving it to her years earlier and Mia Farrow just assumed it was hers. Wasn't she paying taxes on the place all those years? It seems like she would know whether the house was in her name. It means realtors had been working and spending money trying to sell a house that wasn't hers to sell.

Allen's serious movies tend to have these peculiarities, like he doesn't quite know how the world works. I liked it in Interiors in which Diane Keaton plays a celebrity poet, something I don't think exists, but in September it's just annoying.