Woody Allen’s Annie Hall has stood the test of time
Woody Allen’s Annie Hall celebrates 40 years
We think of Annie Hall as director 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 recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, 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.
“I wanted to take a step forward toward more realistic and deeper films,” Allen said. Still, asking fans of his “early, funny ones” — goofball exercises in sketch-comedy form, to settle in for such a solipsistic marathon might have been pushing the envelope a little too far.
The solution was one of Allen’s Eureka moments — an inspired act of salvage that 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 free-associative 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.
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 make only one more film together, Manhattan (1979), before a long hiatus broken by Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).
Anhedonia was to contain a murder element, repurposed for this later picture by Allen and co-writer Marshall 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 genderbending 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 “meet-cutes,” inspiring rom-coms 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.
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”), the old ladies discussing food portions, the great one at the end about the man who thinks he’s a chicken.
But this isn’t just Allen and Brickman showing off their wit in a series of standup routines. The film’s cinematic sophistication is continually beguiling and wrong-footing. When Alvy complains that Annie is distant in bed, and then a ghostly image of her materializes 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.
Allen had already established his working relationships with Keaton and Brickman (who co-wrote scifi parody Sleeper in 1973). The two new ingredients which really magicked this film to immortality were Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis and New York City.
The Big Apple became the playground for Allen’s filmmaking that it would remain for the next quarter-century. Years later — a period the film covers in a mere flash — Annie and Alvy 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.