Annie Hall

A Nervous Romance

Peter Cowie

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780851705804
• eBook ISBN: 9781838714406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

For an entire generation, 'Annie Hall 'embodied the notion of a New York peopled by sophisticated intellectuals - all sent up by the deadpan comedy genius of Woody Allen, writer, director and of course star. It also confirmed the sparkling acting talent of Diane Keaton as a partner for Woody on screen. The film has survived as a popular comedy, however, by virtue of Allen's inventiveness as a director and the timelessness of his satire. Peter Cowrie's study of 'Annie Hall 'recaptures the mood of the 70s, and examines the myriad imaginative touches that distinguish this film from other American productions of the period. The book also includes a glossary of the many cultural references which give the film its distinctively 'intellectual' tone.

INSIDE 'ANNIE HALL'

The opening scene of Annie Hall manages to acknowledge both Ingmar Bergman and the vaudeville tradition from which stand-up comedians like Woody Allen emerged. Seen in amiable if stark close-up, Alvy Singer starts talking to his audience, striking an acutely personal note from the very outset. He tells a couple of Jewish jokes and confesses his emotional problems: a mid-life crisis in the wake of his fortieth birthday (Allen himself had turned forty on 1 December 1975) and the break-up with Annie Hall.

Bergman pioneered this kind of 'confessional' close-up, in films like Winter Light, Persona and Shame, trapping his character in a tight frame, without benefit of make-up or the averted gaze. In Annie Hall, this scene telegraphs to the audience an instant table of references: we have the impression that this man has come on set wearing the same clothes as he does in everyday life; that he the director, Woody Allen, rather than Alvy Singer, is addressing us, taking us into his confidence, and turning to Chaplinesque advantage the familiarity of his face and gestures, his habitual garb of tweed jacket, plaid shirt and black-framed spectacles.

'I think the way you begin a film is important,' notes Allen. 'This comes probably from my cabaret training. It's important for the beginning and ending to have a special quality of some sort, a special theatrical quality, or something to arrest the audience immediately.'¹⁹

This avuncular tone persists as Alvy recalls his childhood in a small house in Brooklyn, reverberating beneath the gigantic Coney Island roller-coaster, to the discreet tones of Tommy Dorsey's music on the soundtrack. Studious, arch and aggressive by turns, the young Alvy exhibits the latent characteristics of his adult personality. Allen takes gleeful revenge on his schooldays, mocking teachers and fellow pupils alike, and even materialising as his adult self to defend his having kissed a little playmate at the age of six ('I was just expressing a healthy sexual curiosity'). Indulging the daydream of returning in some magic time capsule to our childhood, Alvy asks his schoolmates where they are today. One boy runs a dress company. A little girl confesses that she is 'into leather', while another boy says, 'I used to be a heroin addict. Now I'm a methadone addict.' Allen told biographer Eric Lax that he 'hated the concept of school in every way because, emotionally, I wasn't prepared for readjustment.'²⁰ As he stands in line for The Sorrow and the Pity, though, he tells Annie that he's 'comparatively normal for a guy raised in Brooklyn'.

Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) talking to his audience

Already Allen has introduced some unexpected visual conceits, and the film continues to dart back and forth in time, conflating (but never confusing) memories and present-day experiences. The distinction between Woody Allen and Alvy Singer becomes increasingly difficult for the audience to sustain, and soon we abandon ourselves to the comfortable intimacy of the situation. When 'Alvy' appears on the Dick Cavett show, the videoscope image is undeniably 'real' to New Yorkers, who know that Allen himself really did feature on that selfsame show, and that he is referring to himself as much as to Alvy Singer when he declares that he became a comedian and then cracks the joke about being rejected by the Army and classified as '4-P – yes, in-in-in-in the event of war, I'm a hostage!'

Alvy's bosom pal Rob (played by Tony Roberts) is introduced in a deft and audacious shot that begins with voices off-screen and the camera staring the length of a quiet Manhattan sidewalk. Little by little, the figures of Alvy and Rob emerge from the distance, engaged in conversation. Alvy's agitated gait contrasts wittily with Rob's calm, complacent, upright walk. Alvy expostulates, Rob absorbs. Alvy's contention that he is the victim of some Jew-baiting conspiracy makes little impression on the WASPish Rob, who suggests that relocating to California will banish all such prejudicial afflictions. 'We move to sunny L.A.,' he intones. 'All of show business is out there, Max' – 'Max' being obviously a private joke between them. It so happens that Allen idolised Max Shulman, the writer, when he was young and toyed with the idea of

AIvy back in school

Alvy/Woody on the Dick Cavett show

Woody Allen and Tony Roberts on the sidewalk in Manhattan

adopting Max as his first name when, in 1952, he decided to relinquish his real name of Allen Konigsberg in favour of something simpler and more appropriate to a comedian.

Another nod to Bergman occurs in the ensuing sequence, as Alvy waits on Second Avenue for Annie to arrive at the Beekman cinema. Posters for Face to Face (released in 1976) dominate the background of several shots, and while an obnoxious stranger keeps pestering Alvy about his appearances on TV, Alvy mutters an aside for the benefit of the audience – 'I need a large polo mallet ' - invoking the imagery of Chaplin's silent comedy which Allen so adores. The man's bumptious request for an autograph anticipates a female fan's demand in Stardust Memories that Allen should sign her left breast.

With the arrival of Diane Keaton's Annie by cab, the references to 70s 'civilisation' proliferate (see Glossary). Alvy tells her that he has been standing with the cast of The Godfather, and in his next line refers to his unwelcome fans as 'two guys named Cheech'. He accuses her of being in a bad mood because of her period. 'Jesus, every time anything out of the ordinary happens, you think that I'm getting my period!' exclaims Annie. The exchange recurs later in the film, and it's a homage to Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, released in the United States in 1974. Erland Josephson chides Liv Ullmann in almost identical fashion, and her reply echoes Annie's: 'Even if my period is due on Monday, that's not necessarily why I feel like blowing my top!' Allen's relationships resemble Bergman's in their unpredictable changes of mood, switching from childish exhilaration one moment to vindictive squabbling the next.

Exasperated at the thought of entering the movie two minutes after it has begun (even though Annie assures him that they'll only miss the titles – and they're in Swedish), Alvy drags his date across to the Upper West Side to another film buff's mecca, The New Yorker.

Time and again in his films, Allen shows a knack of creating hilarious situations in the very thick of his narrative, milking them for all they're worth – and not a second more – before passing to the next stage in a relationship. Now in the line at the New Yorker, Alvy and Annie make small-talk and when she outrages him by mentioning 'my sexual problem', he says earnestly, 'Wasn't that a novel by Henry James? A sequel to The Turn of the Screw?' Behind them, an intellectual pontificates to his companion about Fellini's indulgence as a film-maker. Alvy listens with mounting frustration, and then suddenly leaves the line and comes forward to address the camera: 'What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you?'

This gimmick may lose its effect with repetition, but Allen caps it with a coup de théâtre that only he among contemporary comedians could engineer with such aplomb. As the objectionable academic type boasts that he teaches the work of Marshall McLuhan in classes at Columbia University, Alvy announces that he happens to have Mr McLuhan right there. And from behind a signboard in the lobby of the theatre a distinguished, if rather bemused, McLuhan actually appears. Such magical effects occur also in Play It Again, Sam, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Oedipus Wrecks and other Allen works, as Diane Jacobs has pointed out.²¹ Allen had asked Federico Fellini to 'appear' in this scene, 'because it would be more natural if people were standing in line talking about movies, that they would be talking about Fellini.'²² But the Italian maestro disliked travelling, and could not come to the US for shooting.

In putting down Alvy's tormentor, McLuhan satirises himself with the impeccable line, 'You know nothing of my work; you mean, my whole fallacy is wrong.' The casual misuse of words belongs to the essence of Allen's wit and to his years of training as a stand-up comedian. In a later scene, Alvy refers to a magazine called Dysentery. His wife Robin corrects him with a patronising look: 'Commentary.' But Alvy persists: 'Oh really, I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged to form Dysentery.' Such quips sparkle in the pages of Allen's early routines, such as 'The Great Renaldo', and in the New Yorker items collected in the volume Without Feathers (1975). Commentary had already been referred to in Allen's earlier feature, Bananas.

Each flashback in Annie Hall illustrates some watershed or vignette in Alvy and Annie's life, and revives the savour of a certain period. As a chance remark by Annie triggers a sequence involving Alvy meeting his first wife Allison at a political rally for Adlai Stevenson, we can deduce from the dialogue that it must be early 1960 and the final months of the Eisenhower administration (or perhaps even 1956, when Stevenson actually won the Democratic nomination for a second time). Allison wears an 'Adlai' button, and Alvy, shrewdly assessing the needs of the moment, does his thing on stage and makes a joke at Eisenhower's expense. Much later in the film, when Alvy and Annie are splitting up, they sift through a box full of buttons: 'Impeach Nixon', 'Impeach Johnson', 'Impeach Eisenhower'.

In a smooth, almost subliminal transition, Alvy and Allison are discovered in bed. Our first assumption is that they've only just met. But here they are arguing about the Kennedy assassination, several years after the night of the Stevenson rally, and the relationship has run its course. Alvy, the archetypal conspiracy theorist, exasperates Allison, who tells him with withering resignation that she loves 'being reduced to a cultural stereotype '. Allen's genius extrapolates from the general to the particular, compressing the debate of a generation into a brief bedroom scene, just as the fashionable late 60s–early 70s obsession with mysticism fuels the later sequence involving Alvy and his girlfriend from Rolling Stone.

Allen's films concern themselves with emotional politics, not with political life. Over the years, the Democrats have won most elections in New York City, and Allen fits the slightly left-of-centre profile of the typical Manhattan Democrat. Just before shooting Annie Hall, he had taken a leading role in Martin Ritt's The Front, which revived the days of Senator McCarthy and the Hollywood bl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Personal Side
• The Origins of Annie Hall
• The Adoration of Manhattan
• Inside Annie Hall
• Visual Invention
• Cultural Stereotypes
• A Perennial Appeal
• Glossary of Cultural References
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright