Forty years after its release, our love affair endures
Forty years ago, Woody Allen released an iconic and semi-autobiographical comedy – but it was meant to be a very different film, says Tim Robey
We think of Annie Hall as Woody Allen’s archetypal film: a sad comedy about a great but dwindling love affair, told against the New York backdrop no other filmmaker would claim more iconically as his own. But this Oscarwinning romance, which celebrates its 40th anniversary today, wound up being a very different film from the one Allen had in mind when he shot it.
Right through production, the original title was Anhedonia – meaning the inability to experience pleasure in normally enjoyable circumstances. To match the off-putting name, Allen’s first cut of his passion project, the philosophical odyssey of a middle-aged stand up comedian called Alvy Singer, ran to some two and a half hours, maybe even as many as three.
“I wanted to take a step forward towards more realistic and deeper films,” Allen explained. Still, asking fans of his “early, funny ones” – goofball exercises in sketch-comedy form such as Bananas (1971) and Love and Death (1975) – to settle in for such a solipsistic marathon might have been pushing the envelope a little too far. When Alvy (Allen) and his girlfriend Annie (Diane Keaton) are stuck in a box office queue, listening to some windbag dismiss the latest Fellini film as “indulgent”, you wonder if Allen and his co-writer, Marshall Brickman, began to feel a little worried about attracting the same criticism.
The solution was one of Allen’s Eureka moments – an inspired act of salvage which in itself showed a great leap forward in his artistic instincts. While keeping Alvy’s perspective – he addresses the camera directly in the first scene, and often breaks the fourth wall – the finished film refocused itself as a kaleidoscopic commentary on one relationship, giving us its beginning, middle and end, just not necessarily in that order.
The loose structure enabled a freeassociative playfulness which kept the film fresh, a tombola of jokes and insights tumbling out incessantly. It became a comedy about profound things, in which the profundity and the laughs fed off each other beautifully, and left a more lasting impression than anything Allen had done before.
For the new title, Allen looked no further than his muse, who was born Diane Hall in 1946. They’d met when she auditioned for the Broadway version of Play it Again, Sam in 1969, and their personal relationship shifted by degrees into a professional one, meaning that Annie Hall worked, on one level, as a semi-autobiographical post-mortem for their affair. They would only make one more film together, Manhattan (1979), before a long hiatus broken by the we’re-allfriends-again reunion of Manhattan
Murder Mystery (1993). Funnily enough, Anhedonia was originally to contain a murder element, repurposed for this later picture by Allen and Brickman, but discarded as tangential to Alvy and Annie’s story. They meet at a mixed-doubles tennis match, striking up a delightfully awkward rapport, with Annie dressed in that gender-queer bowler hat, tie, waistcoat and baggy dun slacks. Keaton came up with the outfit, a boho-androgynous reappropriation of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp look, even though costume designer Ruth Morley thought it made her look “crazy”. But this ultimate in “meetcutes”, inspiring countless romcoms to follow, was crucially not their first scene. We’ve already seen them bickering in the death throes of their affair, giving all these earlier, happier scenes a haunted and unstable quality.
Despite being an obvious advance in maturity in almost every way, Annie
Hall could hardly be called a step away from comedy: it’s more like a grounding of Allen’s comedy in more emotive and personal concerns. And it remains almost constantly funny. Ask a casual film viewer to quote one joke they remember from an Allen film, and it’s even money they’d pick one from this: the one about masturbation (“it’s sex with someone I love”), “we can walk to the kerb from here”, the old ladies discussing food portions, the great one about the man who thinks he’s a chicken at the end.
But this isn’t just Allen and Brickman showing off their verbal wit in a series of stand-up routines. The film’s cinematic sophistication is continually beguiling and wrong-footing. When Alvy complains that Annie is being distant in bed, and then a ghostly image of her materialises on the end of it while they continue to make love, it’s a perfect visual joke to make a serious point – in this case about their sexual incompatibility.
No one, in 1977, would have been prepared for the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan being wheeled out from behind a foyer poster, to resolve an argument with that grating Fellini agnostic, in one of the most justly famous set-pieces. (Allen’s first choice was to have Fellini himself come and do it, but the director didn’t want to travel.)
Allen had already established his working relationships with Keaton and Brickman (who co-wrote 1973’s sci-fi parody Sleeper). The two new ingredients which really magicked this film to immortality were Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis and the city of New York.
The Big Apple, at last, became the playground for Allen’s filmmaking that it would remain for the next quarter-century. The script placed Alvy’s rattling childhood home under the Coney Island roller-coaster, not far from where Allen grew up. And his and Annie’s riverside walks established a new association in filmgoers’ minds between the city’s geography and the workings of the human heart. In essence, Annie Hall’s use of Manhattan created a genre; the Katz Deli scene in When Harry Met Sally (1989), for instance, is unthinkable without it.
What of Girls? Its creator, Lena Dunham, couldn’t avoid Allen comparisons when her debut film Tiny
Furniture (2010) came out, even though she has taken a staunch side against him in the debate about his alleged sexual misconduct.
But it’s hard not to wince at one particular scene in Annie Hall now. It’s when Tony Roberts’ character brags about the two 16-year-old twins he was in the process of bedding, when summoned to bail Alvy out of jail. This is in Los Angeles, and if Allen intended their exchange to satirise the city’s blasé sexual mores, it has come back to bite him quite badly.
The city is presented as New York’s vapid negative, anathema to everything Alvy wants out of living. “They do nothing but give out awards here!” he complains, a near-perfect irony for a film which dazzled the industry to the tune of four Oscars: Actress, Screenplay, Director and Picture. (He even succeeded in beating Star Wars, but unlike his collaborators, Woody didn’t bother showing up to collect.) For Woody and Alvy alike, the whole town is a sun-drenched nightmare of health-food hotspots, where Alvy blithely orders “alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast” before begging Annie for a last chance.
She sees his point about LA, but only insofar as it applies to him, because, like New York, he is “an island unto himself.” We know they want different things, but then every scene has made the same point in some way or another. It’s the differences between them, tiny or irreconcilable, that are both the spark to their love and the impediment to its survival. Years later – a period the film covers in a mere flash – they can share a joke at a Manhattan corner spot, and then go their separate ways down the street. But Allen lets the shot linger once they’ve gone, on passing cabs and a New York waiting in its mournful, hopeful way for the next 40 – hell, 100 – years of love stories.
Ask someone to quote one joke they remember from an Allen film, and it’s even money they’d pick one from Annie Hall