Plot: 1940, New York City. CW Briggs and Betty Ann Fitzgerald, a sixteen year investigator and a six month efficiency expert at North Coast Fidelity & Casualty Company respectively, have hated each other ever since she started working for the company, they often butting heads. CW is considered the best in the business with a highly successful track record, he primarily using his gut instinct and a small pool of loyal but somewhat shady street snitches to solve cases. Betty Ann, a recent Vassar graduate, is all logic, her measures to improve the efficiency of the office clashing with his way of working. Betty Ann was hired by Magruder Jr. - Chris - after the retirement of Magruder Sr. as head of the firm, the hiring of anyone in that position for which CW just does not understand the need. The need is that Chris and Betty Ann are secretly having an affair, he promising to leave his wife to marry her. The situation between CW and Betty Ann gets even more antagonistic when Betty Ann implements a trial project in light of two robberies of North Coast clients: contract out the investigation to a private investigation company, the company in question being Coopersmith run by the Coopersmith brothers. With no scuttlebutt on the streets as to who committed the robberies, CW, trusting his gut, ultimately believes that Betty Ann may have had something to do with them, based on her suspicious behavior, such as supposedly working late nights day after day (in reality those being her trysts with Chris). Conversely, the Coopersmiths uncover some evidence which leads them and thus Betty Ann to believe that CW is the culprit. However, something deep inside her makes her look beyond the logic to think CW incapable of committing such acts. As CW and Betty Ann go through one phase after another of believing then not believing the other, they, to discover the truth, will have to look to the night of an office party at a nightclub when they were called to assist Voltan, the stage act, who placed a post-hypnotic suggestion on both of them... But to discover the truth, one or both may have to elude the police.
Alternative Plot: Woody Allen stars as CW Briggs, the top insurance investigator in New York in 1940-or so he keeps telling the firm's new efficiency expert, Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt). Briggs prides himself on being able to crack any insurance caper by getting into the mind of the thief, but now, thanks to the hypnotic powers of the Jade Scorpion, the mind of a thief is getting into Briggs.
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