0 Annie Hall (1977)

USA, 93 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: Woody Allen's record collection
Editors: Wendy Greene Bricmont, Ralph Rosenblum
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Russell Horton, Marshall McLuhan, Dick Cavett, Jeff Goldblum, Shelley Hack, Sigourney Weaver, Truman Capote

A lot of things that Woody Allen is good at—tormented narratives shattered by revision, pieces playing just so where they land, tender ruminations buoyed by comfort music and nostalgia and surprising jokes, and streaming patter of gags, to name three—arguably found their best homes in Annie Hall. The fine points of this very fine picture, the easiest and most obvious movie of the year I've had to pick yet and maybe ever, is a very long list as it also includes that indelible chemistry with Diane Keaton, that wonderful self-flattering feeling of grown-up sophistication in the cultural markers (from Groucho to Kierkegaard), that certain casting touch that goes down to the smallest roles, and being so funny generally. But you get the point. It is arguably both the best movie Woody Allen ever made and the best Woody Allen movie ever made, which are not necessarily the same thing.

So what to say? It's going on 40 years now and the template that Annie Hall established for romantic comedy has positively dominated since then, replacing the slightly shopworn screwball model, which had gotten to be a little stuffy or inane or both since its own heyday. Woody Allen brought more genuine emotional engagement to the enterprise and obviated the whole idea of matrimonial happy endings, replacing them with the much more expedient joys and frustrations of connection (or lack thereof), which in turn grounded and made it more appealing. Remember (spoiler alert), Annie Hall does not have a "happy ending." As Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) mentions in the first minutes of the picture, the breakup is already in the past. Yet it rarely leaves me anything less than happy, tickled, pleased as punch, or downright joyful. It has a very good energy, as the saying goes, from beginning to end.



There's always trading in trivia, courtesy IMDb. Diane Keaton was born Diane Hall, and went by "Annie," for example. You probably already knew that. The working title was Anhedonia, but Allen couldn't convince the producers to go along with it—that intrigues me both because the first two syllables mimic the ultimate title and because "anhedonia" is the last thing I would associate with anything to do with this particular movie. More: The first cut ran an additional 50 minutes. Marshall McLuhan was not Allen's first choice for the famous inspired cameo—he first approached Federico Fellini and Luis Bunuel. The winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest is actually Truman Capote. The average shot length is 14.5 seconds. Danny Aiello and Brooke Shields both had parts that didn't make it into the final cut.

And more: Allen remains mostly disappointed with Annie Hall (also Hannah and Her Sisters, which tells me anyway what I need to know about how much credence to give this), telling interviewer Eric Eisenberg just last year, "The relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about. That was not what I cared about.... In the end, I had to reduce the film to just me and Diane Keaton, and that relationship, so I was quite disappointed in that movie."

It was originally conceived as more of a murder mystery (perhaps accounting for much of that original extra 50 minutes). For whatever reasons, Allen dropped it but finally developed the thread for 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, which interestingly, by circumstance, involved working again with Diane Keaton, who stepped in after Mia Farrow pulled out during the welter of the tabloid scandal.

Now I want to say a few words about Diane Keaton here, because she really made that latter movie, it's one of the few sparkling points for me in Allen's filmography since 1980 and the last great movie he made. And a lot of that, it's plain to see there and certainly in Annie Hall, is how good Diane Keaton is and how good she makes Woody Allen on film. It's a chemistry they have, they just draw it out of one another. Love and Death is worth seeing for that alone—I think it's his best straight comedy. She is the star of Annie Hall and Annie Hall is the landmark movie's most interesting character by far. She not only nails a certain upper Midwest personality type, but more broadly a whole way of being alive and sensible in the '70s, which was not an easy decade to navigate. Oh and also plus, the camera loves her.

Pieces of Annie Hall have systematically been torn away and imitated and grown cliché, and then enjoyed revitalization themselves again—several times over now. Did you see Frances Ha yet? Did you see (500) Days of Summer? Did you see When Harry Met Sally...? It is also a tremendous technical achievement, in terms of editing and shot setups. I love, for example, those long static street scenes with the line of the street running from lower left to upper right, which start as voiceover conversations until finally, long minutes later, the characters emerge within the frame, walking down the street, approaching the camera, which then begins tracking back with them once they are in medium. I love the ruminating nostalgic passages too, remembering Brooklyn and his childhood and family. Allen is very good at this type of filmmaking, as he would demonstrate later in Radio Days, but here it is casually sprinkled in for effect, powered by an energy of discovery.

Ultimately, I think, that may be the single greatest pleasure of Annie Hall, which is saying something. It brims with the energy of discovery. Examples: Opening and closing on jokes that are stale yet canny and resonant. Opening on Alvy Singer addressing the camera directly. Putting the rememberers in frame with the memory, and then enabling them to interact, sometimes in sly, nuanced ways. Allen is comfortable, and bold, with theatrical "fourth wall" exercises, and he's pretty good as well in Annie Hall at turning that fourth wall edgewise for cinematic split-screens, which are scattered across the film, used in slightly different yet always perfectly apt ways. It's also a really beautiful bittersweet romantic story, poignant and touching, and very funny too. A great one, that's all.

Top 10 of 1977
I think the glories of the decade may be more in the past starting with 1977, though the year certainly has some very bright flashpoints in the first three (or four) on my list, which is not even to start on the problem of Star Wars. I ended up relegating Star Wars to the "didn't like so much" category even though it is the only Star Wars movie that I like at all, and actually sometimes have liked very much. Call it blessing with faint censure. It's just that kind of year. I don't see that many significant gaps but by the lower echelons of my top 10 we are into recent finds and sentimental favorites, and meanwhile I kind of like some of the movies in the "didn't like" list. Even I can see that Between the Lines is not really that good. That leads me to believe it's just a weak year. Your opinions?
1. Annie Hall
2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
3. Saturday Night Fever
4. Suspiria
5. 3 Women
6. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
7. Slap Shot
8. Killer of Sheep
9. The Kentucky Fried Movie
10. Between the Lines

Didn't like so much: Fun With Dick and Jane; Julia; Martin; New York, New York; Star Wars

Gaps: The American Friend; The Duellists; The Goodbye Girl; Hitler: A Film From Germany; That Obscure Object of Desire

Detail: Annie Hall (1977)

0 Manhattan (1979)

USA, 96 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: George Gershwin
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne Hoffman, Bella Abzug, Wallace Shawn, Michael O'Donoghue

I was once pleased to call Manhattan my favorite movie, prized above all others, desert island selection (never mind how you play those), etc. By the early '90s and the time of the Woody Allen / Mia Farrow tabloid spectacle I was more interested in forgetting it. In the event of the movie question, I quietly started calling another movie my favorite—City Lights, which has distinctive affinities—and didn't even bother to look at Manhattan again for a very long time.

It's the Tracy character and narrative thread causing the problems, of course, with the awkward (and unmistakable) overtones of predatory sex. I don't actually believe Woody Allen is a pedophile, or anything other than a somewhat boorish and clueless person. I also don't think it's enough to say that his personal life doesn't matter, only the work does. That's a sensible approach and one that mostly works with, say, Roman Polanski. But looking at Manhattan again closely underscores how determinedly Woody Allen interjects himself, on a very personal basis, into the center of his pictures.



Start with the opening sequence, which has claims on a place as one of the greatest movie openings ever. The magnificent climax to George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" plays, and a montage of Gordon Willis's stunning black and white photography unfolds. I have a note to myself asking if this is Willis's greatest movie, and I mean it, though his credits elsewise are boggling (notably the whole Godfather franchise). Long shots of the New York skyline. Skyscrapers. Street scenes. Central Park. New York in winter. New York in spring. An unbelievable shot of Yankee Stadium with a passing train. And then fireworks. It is an amazing, brilliant tone poem, setting the mood perfectly for a love song to a city.

But just ahead of this beautiful mess sits Woody Allen (as Isaac) with his stammering patter and stand-up comic instincts, making cheap gags: "Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.... Oh, I love this.... New York was his town, and it always would be."

That's what struck me most. I was impressed all over again with the photography and music in Manhattan, and by other points as well, such as the complexities and mechanics of the story. It's a narrative worked out well, much better than Allen usually does. Diane Keaton (as Mary) is solid as a rock, as always (especially when working with Allen)—watch how good she is at phone calls. So is Mariel Hemingway (as Tracy)—and for that matter, the Tracy thread is not written to be particularly flattering to Allen. It actually comes with a good deal of sophistication and insight.

But the furshlugginer Woody Allen gags! They do not stop! Here he is early, discussing his own self-declared most profound question of courage: "That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it." Talking with his best friend: "When it comes to relationships with women, I'm the winner of the August Strindberg award." In a fight with an ex-wife (played by Meryl Streep in a delicious turn): "My analyst tried to warn me, but you were so beautiful I got another analyst." Running for shelter with Mary from a sudden storm: "Come on, it's an electrical storm! Do you want to end up in an ashtray?" Discussing Tracy with friends: "I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father. Can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father." On the way home from a date with Mary: "You look so beautiful I can hardly keep my eye on the meter."

Yes, I understand this is like complaining that Alfred Hitchcock movies are too suspenseful. It was this constant stream of gags as much as anything that appealed to me about Woody Allen movies in the first place, and for a long time. But Manhattan always was something different—far more ambitious, and, indeed, capable of realizing its ambitions. It is an absolutely gorgeous film. There is the famous opening, and nearly as well known a scene in a darkened planetarium museum space with Isaac and Mary getting to know one another, with brilliant use of black space and lines of white to define features, such as Mary's profile. Even small throwaway scenes, such as apartment interiors, are staged and shot memorably.

The story is blithe and chattery but intricately conceived, with a perfect impossible situation at the center of it in the characters of Isaac and Tracy, a story that actually plays out beautifully across the arc of the movie, and doesn't ever really cheat. It is an impossible situation. Isaac knows it and always knows it. Tracy doesn't begin to glean it until the very end. It is likely doomed, but there is still hope. It's a resolution for me on the order of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, with practically every point in harmony and believable and tied up neat as a bow. That's remarkable for anyone, but especially for Woody Allen.

So one forgives the instinct for gags, perhaps feeling sad noticing again as they come and come and come. But what are you going to do? One of the problems with classic comedy films—this is equally true for me with City Lights now, by the way—is that the magic of the comedy and the laughs can become thin and less predictable, even as stronger elements survive unblemished. I could speculate about the execrable Interiors from just the year before, which was suffocatingly parched of humor, let alone gags. Perhaps Allen felt constrained to bring that element back in.

Or perhaps, almost certainly we know now, it's the only way Woody Allen knows to play anything. So that's how he plays Isaac. Honestly, can you think of anyone else who could have? None of my complaints means he didn't create a stone masterpiece in Manhattan. When all is said and done, and for all my painfully enumerated difficulties with Woody Allen, this remains one of my very favorite movies.

Top 10 of 1979
During my time in the desert vis a vis Manhattan I claimed Apocalypse Now as my favorite of the year, and it is indeed a worthy effort. I don't hesitate to recommend the longer Redux version, though I like to have a copy of the original around too. The first time I saw the Richard Pryor movie is the hardest I have ever laughed anywhere, I believe, and Alien rounds out a very strong first four. After that it's rock 'n' roll movies, plus Cronenberg and Tarkovsky. Final tally: stupendously excellent year (hovering under: The Marriage of Maria Braun, The China Syndrome, Being There, The Black Stallion, Nosferatu the Vampyre).
1. Manhattan
2. Apocalypse Now
3. Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
4. Alien
5. Hair
6. Quadrophenia
7. Rock 'n' Roll High School
8. Stalker
9. The Brood
10. Breaking Away

Didn't like so much: All That Jazz, Kramer vs. Kramer, Mad Max, Quintet, The Tin Drum

Gaps: Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, Best Boy, Life of Brian, 1941, Real Life

Detail: Manhattan (1979)

0 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

USA, 103 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Carrie Fisher, Barbara Hershey, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, Tony Roberts, Julie Kavner, Lewis Black, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Joanna Gleason

One of the best formulations I know of the appeal of the Marx Brothers is found late in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, his best movie of the '80s. In an implausible scene of suicide considered and averted (a Woody Allen staple even then), he makes the familiar case for Groucho and crew—inspired zaniness equated to life affirmation, that sort of thing. It is of a piece with the usual accolades for the Marx Brothers, and others such as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Martin and Lewis, all that comedy of bygone times lost on me beyond certain undeniable quaint charms (e.g., Laurel and Hardy music). What's interesting to me, perhaps because I can't appreciate the Marx Brothers the way Woody Allen and so many others do, is how well it stands in as approximation of the way I feel about Woody Allen movies, and nearly as much as ever.

Even the bad ones validate ideals I hold dear—may even have learned in part absorbing Woody Allen's '70s movies—an irresistible vision of an urban lifestyle constructed around cultural markers and cityscapes, and at deeper levels identity, and ultimately alienation. Life, this self-absorbed and conflicted Woody Allen view seems to tell us, is about emotional connections, the rejection of commerce, and privilege, in about equal proportions. Or, as he puts it in Annie Hall, the world can be divided into the horrible and the miserable, and the best any of us can hope for is to be among the miserable. Which, in turn, is itself eternally belied by the easygoing roll and tumble of Woody Allen's jokes and situations, second nature by the time of Hannah and Her Sisters, enabling him in fact to pull off the rather remarkable stunt that I think distinguishes it.


Certain elements, which we may as well characterize as "feel-good" because that's how I take them, are constants in most Woody Allen movies: the loose approach and playful inventiveness, the sense of being (or pretending to be) at home with great works of art, from Mozart to Louis Armstrong to Willie Mays, and the tone that alternates abruptly between self-deprecation and chiseling passive-aggressive vibe. The pungent presence itself of Woody Allen, his performances, voice, words—the very presence so many find so noxious (a view I have come to appreciate over the years)—nevertheless provides a touchstone, even a comforting figure, across the broad swaths of imagination and creative energy his movies represent collectively.

It is as immersive in its way as anything the movies give us, this Woody Allen universe, raised to a new level in Hannah and Her Sisters by the sly, calculated way he begins to truck with improbable happy endings. This was the first of three remarkable movies by Allen, followed by Radio Days and Another Woman—a comparable performance on its own terms, to reach for the sports metaphor, to Michael Jordan's latter three championships. There is no other movie in Allen's entire career so clearly aiming for the fine balance and the complexity and simplicity of the final scene in City Lights (even as Manhattan, seven years earlier, had made the bigger play for updating the Chaplin classic whole), and damn, he did get close with Hannah and Her Sisters. "How ya gonna top that?" Mickey (Woody Allen) says to his wife Holly (Dianne Wiest) in that final scene. And then she does, with a perfect fantasy moment that reverberates still across certain indie quarters (consider Sideways), an ending that ought to break down even the most callous at least a little.

Along the way the jumble of pieces is handled expertly, with surprisingly confident rhythms of storytelling. It's a Gordian knot of a mess of a situation with the three sisters of the title, and numerous affairs, multiple generations, and two shared assignations, an intricate dance of human foible. Nothing Woody Allen had done in years at that point indicated he could pull it off, but he does. It never once gets lost in the detail, but simply proceeds with clarity and sense of purpose. Its remarkable screenplay is beautifully symmetrical in structure, starting virtually at the point it begins, with similar musical cues and shots of characters and even the same holiday, Thanksgiving, a brilliant choice itself. This may be the best Thanksgiving movie I know, in fact.

I suspect I may be making myself out to be an uncritical admirer and in many ways that's fair enough. But I don't have unmixed feelings about Woody Allen, and many of my problems with him actually started to crystallize with Hannah and Her Sisters. I'll start with music because, in terms of taste, going back to at least Annie Hall, I have always differed a good bit with him there. By all rights, I should regard him as a soundtrack artist on par with Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and other artists of the form. He's certainly good at matching album tracks to personal emotional moments. But I am not convinced, as he most outspokenly is, that everything worth saying in popular music was finished by 1959, nor that jazz and classical standards, however exquisite, can say enough in the perversely isolated way Woody Allen insists on using them. On top of that, the proto-Fox News tone of his endless complaints about any form of rock 'n' roll are a wall of hostility against which I find it difficult not to respond in kind. Or, to be perfectly clear about it, fuck Woody Allen and his antiquated taste.

Hannah and Her Sisters was also the first Woody Allen movie I remember noticing how old for the role he seemed. I was willing to overlook it because someone just on the wrong side of 50 could, plausibly, be caught up in the TV producer shenanigans in New York shown here, but my tolerance would never again be so generous, and Woody Allen's presence in practically everything from this point forward has always been a net downer. Other tropes getting old: the arch vocabulary of the dialogue (who ever actually says "contemptuous"?), the painful tin-eared jokes about pedophilia ("Don't you read the papers?" his character says to a network censor here. "Half the country is doing it"), the modern secular who shocks his bourgeois Jewish parents, the privileged New Yorker who can afford to indulge purity impulses and quit jobs to write a book and other such. Yes, some envy here on my part, no doubt. But isn't that also on some level what it is intended to provoke? People don't just imagine Woody Allen's hostility. It is also a constant.

Nowadays, in fact, Hannah and Her Sisters has to work harder than ever to overcome a lot of my general impatience with Woody Allen movies, all the problems I see with them more clearly than ever, their insularity and preening narcissistic impulses, and worst of all their endless sameness (which of course is their virtue when I am inclined the other way). Hannah is remarkably well done and winning every step of the way, and it certainly belongs on the short list of his best. Even if I feel compelled to apologize for liking him, I can also say that I found surprising new pleasures last time through (in addition to the usual ones) playing spot-the-player with John Turturro, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (looking straight off the set of Desperately Seeking Susan), Richard Jenkins, and others.

Top 10 of 1986
Looks like 1986 might be behind only 1980 and 1982 for me as best movies years of the '80s, which I don't think I had realized until I put together this list. That's a pretty amazing top 5. After about #6, my top 19 bunches up pretty tight, so titles that could as easily have bobbed in as out include: Aliens, Down by Law, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Jean do Florette (with Manon of the Spring, which I think I'd argue as a one-fer, though really need to see them again), Manhunter, River's Edge, Smooth Talk, and Stand by Me. I almost wish I liked River's Edge a little bit more so I could see Dennis Hopper in three titles in my top 10. Maybe another time. I should also say that I had a very hard time again with the last two picks for things I didn't like, whatever that might mean. (And also that yes, for the record, Peggy Sue Got Married is my #5 Francis Ford Coppola.)
1. Hannah and Her Sisters
2. Blue Velvet
3. The Fly
4. Something Wild
5. Sherman's March
6. The Sacrifice
7. Platoon
8. Hoosiers
9. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
10. Peggy Sue Got Married

Didn't like so much: The Color of Money, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, She's Gotta Have It, Sid and Nancy, True Stories

Gaps: Big Trouble in Little China, The Green Ray, Melo, Mona Lisa, Tampopo

Other write-ups: River's Edge

Detail: Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)