Annie Hall is a nervous romance, and it knows it. Woody Allen’s 1977 film runs 93 minutes and follows New York comedian Alvy Singer as he tries to work out why his relationship with Annie Hall ended a year earlier. Diane Keaton plays Annie, a role written specifically for her. The film opened in the United States on April 20, 1977, after a screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival on March 27, 1977. It won four Academy Awards from five nominations: Best Picture, Best Director for Allen, Best Original Screenplay for Allen and Marshall Brickman, and Best Actress for Keaton.
Trailer, via Woody Allen.
Alvy Singer and the man in the ticket line
The film’s most famous scene is not a love scene. Alvy and Annie stand in a movie theater line waiting to see The Sorrow and the Pity. A man behind them holds forth about Federico Fellini and Marshall McLuhan. Alvy imagines McLuhan himself stepping in to tell the man he understands nothing of his work. It is a comedian’s revenge fantasy, and it lands because the film has already shown us how much Alvy needs to be right.
The plot moves through Alvy’s past. He grows up in Brooklyn, vexing his mother with impossible questions about the emptiness of existence. At six he kisses a classmate and cannot understand why she does not reciprocate. He marries twice before Annie. His first wife he devalued because she was interested in him. His second, a New York writer, did not share his enthusiasm for sports and could not reach orgasm.
With Annie it is different. They cook boiled lobster together. He teases her about the unusual men in her past. They met playing tennis doubles with friends, and after the game she offers him a ride uptown, then a glass of wine on her balcony. What looks like small talk is revealed in “mental subtitles” as an escalating flirtation. Their first date follows her singing audition for a nightclub, where she performs “It Had to Be You.” After sex that night, Alvy is “a wreck” while Annie relaxes with a joint.
Diane Keaton called Annie an affable version of herself
Keaton’s Annie is the reason the film holds. She considered the character an “affable version” of herself — both were “semi-articulate, dreamed of being a singer and suffered from insecurity.” She was surprised to win an Oscar for the performance. The role was written for her, and the film was her fourth with Allen, after Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975).
The supporting cast is deep and strange in the way Allen’s best ensembles are. Tony Roberts plays Rob, his second film with Allen after Play It Again, Sam. Carol Kane is Allison. Paul Simon plays Tony Lacey. Shelley Duvall is Pam. Colleen Dewhurst plays Mrs. Hall, Christopher Walken plays Duane Hall, and Marshall McLuhan appears as himself.
“The stuff that people insist is autobiographical is almost invariably not.”
Allen has spent decades pushing back on the idea that Annie Hall is his life. “It’s so exaggerated that it’s virtually meaningless to the people upon whom these little nuances are based,” he said. “People got it into their heads that Annie Hall was autobiographical, and I couldn’t convince them it wasn’t.” He says Alvy is not the character closest to him; he identified more with the mother, Eve, played by Geraldine Page, in his next film, Interiors. Keaton has said the relationship between Alvy and Annie was partly based on her relationship with the director. Both things can be true.
Gordon Willis and a major turning point
Principal photography began on May 19, 1976, on the South Fork of Long Island and continued periodically for ten months. The film marked Allen’s first collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis. Allen has called the result “a major turning point,” because unlike the farces and comedies that were his work to that point, it introduced a new level of seriousness.
That seriousness is not heaviness. Annie Hall is funny in nearly every scene, but the jokes are load-bearing. Academics have noted the contrast in the film’s settings between New York City and Los Angeles, along with the stereotype of gender differences in sexuality, the presentation of Jewish identity, and the elements of psychoanalysis and modernism. The film does not spell out what those settings mean for Alvy; it leaves the contrast to the viewer.
Why the four BAFTAs followed the four Oscars
The Academy Awards and the BAFTA Awards tell the same story from two sides of the Atlantic. Annie Hall took four BAFTAs, among them Best Film and Best Direction. A comedy that wins Best Picture in the United States and Best Film in Britain is not winning on charm alone. Voters in two separate industries looked at a 93-minute romantic comedy and decided it was the best film of its year. That is a rare thing for the genre, then or now.
What Annie Hall gets right
The film’s central insight is that Alvy is the problem and also the victim, and it refuses to choose. He buys Annie books on death and tells her his feelings are more than just love. When she moves in with him, things become very tense. Eventually he finds her arm-in-arm with one of her adult-education professors. The film does not pretend this is a betrayal of equal weight to his own behavior. It just shows it.
The published critical score sits at 9.2 out of 10, with a Metacritic score of 92 out of 100.
The verdict here is that Annie Hall earns that number. The McLuhan cameo is a stunt, and it works. The “mental subtitles” device is a gimmick, and it works. The boiled lobster is a scene about two people being happy, and it works because the film has already shown us how rare that is. Keaton’s performance is the anchor. Allen’s script with Brickman is the engine. Willis’s camera is the thing that made it look like more than a comedy.
The detail that matters most is the one the film keeps returning to: Alvy’s need to explain. He narrates, he addresses the camera, he rewrites the past in his head. The film never states why the relationship ends, and it does not need to. Annie Hall is more interested in the person doing the remembering than in the reason. That is why it still plays, and why the score holds.
The numbers
- Release date: April 20, 1977 (US); festival screening March 27, 1977
- Runtime: 93 minutes
- Director: Woody Allen
- Writers: Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
- Principal cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall
- Academy Awards: 4 wins from 5 nominations
- BAFTA Awards: 4 wins, including Best Film and Best Direction
- Critical score: 9.2/10 (Metacritic 92/100)
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