Annie Hall is a 1977 American romantic comedy directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay co-written with Marshall Brickman and co-starring Diane Keaton.

Allen has described the film as "a major turning point",^[2] as it introduced a level of seriousness to his films that was not found in the farces and comedies that were his work to that point.^[3]

Critical reaction to the film is generally positive. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Film critic Roger Ebert described it as "just about everyone's favorite Woody Allen movie".^[3]

Plot[link]

The comedian Alvy Singer is trying to understand why his relationship with Annie Hall ended a year ago. Growing up in New York, he vexed his mother with impossible questions about the emptiness of existence, but he was precocious about his innocent sexual curiosity.

Annie and Alvy are in line to see a Bergman film and another man loudly misinterprets the work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan himself steps in to correct the mistake. That night, Annie isn’t interested in having sex with him; instead they discuss Alvy’s first wife, Allison, with whom there was little sexual pleasure. His second marriage was to a New York intellectual, but their sexual relationship was not enjoyable for him. With Annie, it is different. The two of them have uproarious fun making a meal of boiled lobster together. Alvy enjoys mocking the unusual men that Annie had been involved with.

Alvy met Annie on the tennis court. After the game, their awkward small talk led her to offer him first a ride up town and then a glass of wine on her balcony. There, what seemed a mild exchange of trivial personal data is revealed in "mental subtitles" as an escalating flirtation.

Their first date follows Annie’s audition for a singer in a night club (she wraps herself around “It Had to be You”). Alvy suggests they kiss first thing to get it out of the way. After their lovemaking that night, Alvy is "a wreck", while Annie relaxes with a joint.

Soon Annie admits she loves him; he buys her books on death and claims his feelings for her are more than just love. When she moves in with him, it gets very tense.

Alvy feels strange when they visit her family in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, for Easter. He has never felt more Jewish than with her “Jew-hating” grandmother, and his imagined conversation between their two families reveals a gulf in style, substance, and background.

Finding her arm in arm with one of her college professors, Alvy argues with Annie whether this is the flexibility they had discussed. He searches for the truth of relationships, asking strangers on the street about the nature of love, questioning his formative years, until he becomes an animated Snow White to Annie’s evil queen. It’s over.

Alvy returns to dating, but the effort is marred by neurosis, bad sex, and finally an interruption from Annie, who insists he come over immediately. It turns out she needs him to kill a spider. A reconciliation follows, coupled with a vow to stay together come what may. However, their separate discussions with their therapists make it evident there is an unspoken divide. When Alvy accepts an offer to present an award on television, they fly out to Los Angeles, but on the return they agree that it’s not working.

After losing her to her record producer, he unsuccessfully attempts to rekindle the flame with a marriage proposal. Back in New York, he stages a play of this episode but changes the ending: now she accepts.

The last meeting for them is a wistful coda on New York's Upper West Side when they have both moved on to someone new. Alvy’s voice returns with a summation: love is essential, especially if it's neurotic. Annie torches "Seems Like Old Times" and the credits roll.

Cast[link]

Several personal references in the film have invited speculation that it is autobiographical for the director. Both Alvy and Allen were comedians. His birthday appears on the blackboard in a school scene,^[4] certain features of his childhood are found in Alvy Singer's,^[5] Diane Keaton's real surname is 'Hall' and director and star were once romantically involved.^[6]

However, Allen is quick to dispel these suggestions. "The stuff that people insist is autobiographical is almost invariably not," Allen said. "It's so exaggerated that it's virtually meaningless to the people upon whom these little nuances are based. People got it into their heads that Annie Hall was autobiographical, and I couldn't convince them it wasn't".^[7] He told Björkman that, contrary to the interviewers' and commentators' beliefs, Alvy is not the character that is closest to himself; he identified more with the mother in his next film, Interiors.^[8]

Federico Fellini was Allen's first choice to appear in the cinema lobby scene because his films were under discussion,^[9] but Allen chose cultural academic Marshall McLuhan after both Fellini and Luis Buñuel declined the cameo.^[10]

Some cast members, Baxter claims, were aggrieved at Allen's treatment of them. The director "acted coldly" towards McLuhan, who had to return from Canada for reshooting, and Mordecai Lawner, who played Alvy's father, claimed that Allen never spoke to him.^[10] However, during the production, Allen began a two-year relationship with Stacey Nelkin, who appears in a single scene.^[10]

• Woody Allen as Alvy Singer
• Diane Keaton as Annie Hall
• Tony Roberts as Rob
• Carol Kane as Allison Portchnik
• Paul Simon as Tony Lacey
• Shelley Duvall as Pam
• Janet Margolin as Robin
• Colleen Dewhurst as Mrs. Hall
• Christopher Walken as Duane Hall
• Jeff Goldblum as LA party guy on phone
• Sigourney Weaver as Alvy's date outside theater
• Beverly D'Angelo as Actress in Rob's TV Show
• Tracey Walter as Actor in Rob's TV Show
• Shelley Hack as Street Stranger (as Shelly Hack)
• John Glover as Annie's actor ex-boyfriend
• Truman Capote (uncredited) as Winner of the Truman Capote Lookalike Contest
• Marshall McLuhan as Himself (Cameo)
• Laurie Bird as Tony Lacey's girlfriend
• Mark Lenard as Navy Officer
• Dick Cavett as Himself

Writing[link]

The idea for what would become Annie Hall was developed as Allen walked around New York with co-writer Marshall Brickman. The pair discussed the project on alternate days, sometimes becoming frustrated and rejecting the idea. Allen wrote a first draft of a screenplay within a four day period, sending it to Brickman to make alterations. According to Brickman, this draft centered on a man in his forties, someone whose life consisted "of several strands. One was a relationship with a young woman, another was a concern about the banality of life we all live, and a third an obsession with proving himself and testing himself to find out what kind of character he had."^[11]

Allen had himself turned forty in 1975. Brickman suggests that his "advancing age" and "worries about his death" had influenced Allen's philosophical, personal approach to complement his "commercial side".^[11]He was also influenced by Federico Fellini's 1963 comedy-drama 8½, which the Italian director had created at a similar turning point, and for both of which their director's psychoanalysis play a part.^[12]

The pair sent the screenplay back and forth between them until they were ready to ask United Artists for $4 million.^[12]

Many elements from the early drafts did not survive. It was originally a drama centered on a murder mystery with a comic and romantic subplot.^[13] According to Allen, the murder occurred after a scene that remains in the film, the sequence in which Annie and Alvy miss the Ingmar Bergman film Face to Face.^[9] Although they decided to drop the murder plot, Allen and Brickman made a murder mystery many years later: 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, also starring Diane Keaton.

The draft that Allen presented to the film's editor, Ralph Rosenblum, concluded with the words, "ending to be shot." It was "like a first draft of a novel ... from which two or three films could possibly be assembled," Rosenblum says.^[14]

Allen's working title for the film was "Anhedonia", a term for the inability to experience pleasure.^[15][16] However, United Artists considered this unmarketable, as were Brickman's suggested alternatives: It Had to Be Jew, Rollercoaster Named Desire and Me and My Goy.^[17] An advertising agency, hired by UA, embraced Allen's choice of an obscure word by suggesting advertising in tabloid newspapers using vague slogans such as "Anhedonia Strikes Cleveland".^[17] However, Allen tried several titles over five test screenings, including "Anxiety" and "Alvy and Me", before settling on "Annie Hall".^[17]

Production[link]

Alvy's childhood home was located under the Thunderbolt roller coaster at Coney Island^[4]

Principal photography began on 19 May 1976 on the South Fork of Long Island with the scene in which Alvy and Annie boil live lobsters; filming continued periodically for the next ten months.^[18]

The production deviated from the screenplay. There was nothing written about Alvy's childhood home lying under a roller coaster, but when Allen was scouting locations in Brooklyn with Willis and art director Mel Bourne, he "saw this roller-coaster, and... saw the house under it. And I thought, we have to use this."^[19] In a similar vein, there is the incident where Alvy scatters a trove of cocaine with an accidental sneeze: although not in the script, the happenstance emerged from rehearsal and stayed in the movie. In audience testing, this laugh was so big that a re-edit had to add a hold so that the following dialogue was not lost.^[20]

Rosenblum's first assembly of the film, which ran to two hours and twenty minutes, featured the "surrealistic and abstract adventures of a neurotic Jewish comedian who was reliving his highly flawed life and in the process satirizing much of our culture,... a visual monologue, a more sophisticated and visual version of Take the Money and Run".^[21] Annie Hall herself was less prominent, and the material that was cut dwelt "on issues just touched in passing in the version we know"^[14], with "some of the free-est, funniest and most sophisticated material that Woody had ever created, and it hurt him to lose it."^[21]

A screening for Marshall Brickman in late 1976 left him disappointed, finding it "nondramatic and ultimately uninteresting, a kind of cerebral exercise."^[14] He suggested a more linear narrative.^[22] Fortunately, the shooting schedule was budgeted for two weeks of post-production photography,^[23] so late 1976 saw three separate shoots for the final segment, two of which appear in some form. One featured Annie Hall taking her new boyfriend to The Sorrow and the Pity, which she had reluctantly seen with Alvy; the other, Alvy's monologue featuring the joke about 'we all need the eggs', was conceived during a cab journey to an early preview.^[24]

The title sequence of Annie Hall features a black background with white text in the Windsor Light Condensed typeface, a design that Allen would use on his subsequent films and become a trademark of his. Stig Björkman sees some similarity to Ingmar Bergman's simple and consistent title design, although Allen says that his own choice is a cost-saving device.^[25]

Music[link]

Very little background music is heard in the film, a departure for Allen influenced by Ingmar Bergman.^[25] Diane Keaton performs twice in the jazz club: "It Had to be You" and "Seems Like Old Times" (the latter reprises in voiceover on the closing scene). The other exceptions include a boy's choir "Christmas Medley" played while the characters drive through Los Angeles, the Molto allegro from Mozart's Jupiter Symphony (heard as Annie and Alvy drive through the countryside), Tommy Dorsey's performance of "Sleepy Lagoon",^[26] and the muzak version of the Savoy Brown song "A Hard Way to Go", playing over a party in the mansion of Paul Simon's character.

Style and technique[link]

For Allen, Annie Hall was the film where, he says, he "had the courage to abandon ... just clowning around and the safety of complete broad comedy. I said to myself, 'I think I will try and make some deeper film and not be as funny in the same way. And maybe there will be other values that will emerge, that will be interesting or nourishing for the audience.'"^[2]

Technically, too, the film marked an advance for the director. He selected Gordon Willis as his cinematographer—for Allen "a very important teacher" and a "technical wizard,... I really count Annie Hall; as the first step toward maturity in some way in making films."^[19] Willis shot Annie Hall in varying style; "hot golden light for California, grey overcast for Manhattan and a forties Hollywood glossy for the dream sequences", most of which would later be cut.^[27]

Other techniques reflect Allen's artistic influences. The main characters visit Alvy’s childhood as in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries and the school scenes are reminiscent of Federico Fellini's later work. The Jewish humor—particularly the character of the oversexed Jewish man—draws on Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint.^[28]

Although the film is not essentially experimental, at several points it undermines the narrative reality. In one famous scene, Allen's character, in line to see a movie with Annie, listens to a man behind him deliver misinformed pontifications on the significance of Fellini and Marshall McLuhan's work. Allen pulls McLuhan himself from just off camera to personally correct the man's errors. Later in the film, when we see Annie and Alvy in their first extended talk, "mental subtitles" convey to the audience the characters' nervous inner doubts. An animated scene—with artwork based on the comic strip Inside Woody Allen -- depicts Alvy and Annie in the guise of the Wicked Queen from Snow White.

While Allen uses most of these techniques only one time, he "breaks the fourth wall" several times when Alvy directly addresses the audience. In one, he stops several passers-by to ask questions about love, and in one of the film's last scenes, he makes modest excuses for the fact that a scene from his "first play" (which the audience has just seen) is his wish-fulfillment version of his breakup with Annie. Allen chose to have Alvy break the fourth wall, he explained, "because I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them."^[2]

Themes[link]

Alvy Singer is identified with the stereotypical neurotic Jewish male; Annie is not Jewish, and this forms the backdrop for the "list of common Allen preoccupations which show up in this film," that, says John Carvil of Oomska magazine, include "New York (in general, and as opposed to Los Angeles), neurosis, sex, the travails of the nebbish, modern-day male-female relationships, death, existential angst, city versus country, paranoia, the role of the artist, the meaning of life, or lack thereof,... and politics."^[29]

The differences between the couple are often related to the perceptions and realities of Jewish identity. Vincent Brook notes that “Alvy dines with WASP-y Hall family and imagines that they must see him as a Hasidic Jew, complete with payess (ear locks) and a large black hat”.^[30]

Reception[link]

The film was first screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival in March 1977.^[15]

Film critic Roger Ebert described it as "just about everyone's favorite Woody Allen movie". ^[3]

Willis utilized long takes, with some shots, unabridged, lasting an entire scene. Allen has commented, "It just seems more fun and quicker and less boring for me to do long scenes." For Ebert, they add to the dramatic power of the film, saying, "Few viewers probably notice how much of Annie Hall consists of people talking, simply talking. They walk and talk, sit and talk, go to shrinks, go to lunch, make love and talk, talk to the camera, or launch into inspired monologues like Annie's free-association as she describes her family to Alvy. This speech by Diane Keaton is as close to perfect as such a speech can likely be ... all done in one take of brilliant brinkmanship." He cites a study that calculated the average shot length of Annie Hall to be 14.5 seconds, while other films made in 1977 had an average shot length of 4–7 seconds.^[3]

Allen says he gets approached "all the time" about making a sequel to Annie Hall,^[31] but has repeatedly declined. He admitted in a 1992 interview that for a time he considered it, saying,

Awards and honors[link]

Annie Hall won four Oscars at the 50th Academy Awards on April 3, 1978. Producer Charles H. Joffe won Best Picture, Allen for Best Director and, with Brickman, Best Original Screenplay, and Keaton for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Allen was also nominated for Best Actor, but lost to Richard Dreyfuss for The Goodbye Girl.^[33]

The film won one Golden Globe Award, for Best Actress in Musical or Comedy (Diane Keaton). It was nominated for three more: Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), Best Director (Woody Allen), and Best Actor in Musical or Comedy (Woody Allen). The film also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film.

• In 1992, this film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
• Zagat Survey Movie Guide (2002) ranks Annie Hall one of the top ten comedies of all time, one of the top ten movies of the 1970s and as Allen's best film as a director.
• In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the forty-second greatest comedy film of all time.
• The film is number 28 on Bravo's 100 Funniest Movies.

Influences[link]

The film had an influence on the fashion world during the late-70s, with many women adopting Keaton's distinctive look, layering oversized, mannish blazers over vests, billowy trousers or long skirts, and boots. Keaton's wardrobe also included a tie by Ralph Lauren. The look was often referred to as the "Annie Hall look". An example of the influence this look has had on the culture can be found in a 1970s Doonesbury comic strip, where Garry Trudeau depicts radio interviewer Mark Slackmeyer asking the fictional Iranian revolutionary leader Dr. Ali Mahdavi if the Ayatollah Khomeini would approve of "The Annie Hall look" for Iranian women. Mahdavi's response: "If worn with a veil, fine."^{[citation needed]}

Allen recalled that Keaton's natural fashion sense (the outfits that Keaton wore in the film were her own clothes) almost did not end up in the film. "She came in," he recalled in 1992, "and the costume lady on Annie Hall said, 'Tell her not to wear that. She can't wear that. It's so crazy.' And I said, 'Leave her. She's a genius. Let's just leave her alone, let her wear what she wants.'"^[34]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Baxter, John (1999). Woody Allen: A Biography (Revised paperback ed.). London: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-00-638794-2. 
• Björkman, Stig (1995) [1993]. Woody Allen on Woody Allen. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17335-7. 
• Björkman, Stig (2004) [1993]. Woody Allen on Woody Allen (Revised ed.). London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-22317-6. 
• Brook, Vincent (2006). You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern Jewish Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 
• Cowie, Peter (1996). Annie Hall. London: British Film Institute. ISBN 0-85170-580-4. 
• Girgus, Sam B. (1993). "Philip Roth and Woody Allen: Freud and the Humor of the Repressed". In Ziv, Avner; Zajdman, Anat. Semites and stereotypes: characteristics of Jewish humor. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-26135-0. 
• Lax, Eric (2000). Woody Allen: A Biography (New ed.). Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80985-0. 
• Rosenblum, Ralph; Karen, Robert (1986). When the Shooting Stops... The Cutting Begins. DaCapo Press. ISBN 0-306-80272-4. 
• Spignesi, Stephen J. (1992). The Woody Allen Companion. London: Plexus Publishing. ISBN 0-85965-205-X. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Annie Hall

• Annie Hall at the Internet Movie Database
• Annie Hall at AllRovi
• Annie Hall at the TCM Movie Database
• Annie Hall at Box Office Mojo
• Annie Hall at Rotten Tomatoes
• Good Small Films (Unofficial Woodypedia and blog)