Largely considered Woody Allen’s greatest and best-loved
film, Annie Hall was released in 1977 to
wide critical and commercial success. The film, which Allen cowrote,
directed, and starred in, tells the story of a failed romance within
the frame of 1970s–era New York City—a romance
based loosely on Allen’s real-life relationship with actress Diane
Keaton, whose given name was Diane “Annie” Hall. Annie Hall won
four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and firmly established
the comic genius of Woody Allen and the remarkable acting talent
of the young Diane Keaton. It is a hilarious but poignant work,
remembered as much for its culturally referential wit as for the
endearing relationship that unfolds amid the punch lines.
Allen made Annie Hall after releasing
five previous films, all of them satires of specific film genres
or literary canons. These films, which include Take the
Money and Run (1969) and Love
and Death (1975), benefited from
frequent moments of slapstick. With Annie Hall, Allen
set out to make a broader film focused less on comedy and more on
storyline. Cowritten with Allen’s cabaret colleague Marshall Brickman, Annie
Hall was originally conceived as a murder mystery, but
the mystery idea was soon dropped as the quirky romance storyline
began to stand out in the script. At the time, the Hollywood movie-making
system was in full gear, and the studios were preoccupied with large-scale
blockbusters, as well as dealing with some major embarrassments—director
Roman Polanski fled the United States to escape a statutory rape
conviction, and director Francis Ford Coppola’s huge project Apocalypse
Now (1979) was costing so much time
and money that it became a prime target of media mockery. In this
cinematic environment, Annie Hall stood apart as
a refreshing comic masterpiece made entirely outside of the glamorous,
profit-oriented Hollywood system.
Making movies seems to serve an almost therapeutic function
for Allen. Though relatively reclusive in his personal life—he refused
to go to the Academy Awards, where Annie Hall took
home four Oscars, in favor of playing his weekly jazz gig in a Manhattan club—he
has few qualms about exposing his innermost thoughts on screen.
Allen’s own struggles and complexes, especially in relation to women
and sex, saturate many of his films, and it often becomes hard to
separate Allen from the characters he writes and inhabits as an
actor. Alvy, the protagonist of Annie Hall, is,
like Allen, a pessimistic, Jewish stand-up comedian who is constantly
paranoid. Add to those similarities the fact that the film is based,
albeit loosely, on Allen’s real-life romance, and it becomes difficult
to distinguish autobiography from fiction. Allen uses this confusion
to his benefit and experiments with direct address and other self-conscious
techniques in the film.
Allen’s work is not drawn solely from his own experiences,
however. In Annie Hall, he takes comic inspiration
from the Marx Brothers and cinematic inspiration from filmmakers
like Federico Fellini, who gets a tongue-in-cheek nod in a theater
lobby scene, and Ingmar Bergman, whose onscreen tricks inform much
of Annie Hall’s visual invention. But what most
permeates the film is the ideology of Sigmund Freud, whose theories
about the mind Allen treats both seriously and irreverently within
the film. Annie Hall uses what could be called
a Freudian chronology, as its story is told with a trajectory that
seemingly parallels Alvy’s stream of consciousness. Allen pays tribute
to Freud’s influences at several points in the film, perhaps most
notably during the second joke he tells in his opening monologue,
which refers to both Freud and Groucho Marx. Allen also found a
muse in his hometown of New York City, which plays a significant
part in Annie Hall. Almost as a rule, Allen shoots
and edits his films in New York. Annie Hall is
shot on location, primarily in Manhattan but also with some scenes
from Alvy’s Brooklyn childhood as well as a handful of scenes in
Los Angeles, the butt of numerous jokes.
Annie Hall at once established Allen’s
reputation as a top American filmmaker and arguably the best comic
filmmaker of the latter half of the twentieth century. The film
is hilarious to be sure, but its humor never supersedes its story
and indeed would dim without it. The combination of endearingly
awkward romance and agitated, self-absorbed humor sets Annie
Hall apart as a different sort of intelligent romantic
comedy—one that doesn’tend in marriage and one
that remains firmly ingrained in its time period and geographical
space. And although some of the film’s 1970s–specific
one-liners might seem foreign to younger viewers, the image of Alvy,
nervous and sweaty after a game of tennis, and Annie, decked out
in her now-famous vest and tie, is lasting.
