Annie Hall

Annie Hall

No other film in history has ever won the Best Picture Oscar for its wit and cultural references as much as “Annie Hall” did. In 1977, when it beat “Star Wars” for the award, that was an unthinkable outcome. The triumph marked the beginning of Woody Allen’s career as a serious filmmaker (his early work had been funny but inconsequential) and also signaled the end of Hollywood’s golden age or, at least, the 1970s’ golden age of American movies.

With “Star Wars,” we entered the era of the blockbuster; films this quirky and idiosyncratic would soon find themselves jostled off screens by Hollywood’s lust for mega-hits. “Annie Hall” brought in about $40 million less than any other recent Best Picture winner, and less than many of their budgets.

Seeing it again now, 25 years after its premier in April 1977, I am struck by how scene after scene is instantly familiar; some of its lines have become part of the common language, known even to people who have never seen the movie: Jack Nicholson’s chicken salad speech from “Five Easy Pieces”; Groucho Marx saying he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. I’ve always said spiders were “as big as a Buick,” but this may be where most people first heard that line.

Alvy Singer, played by Allen himself in his first successful attempt to portray someone other than himself on screen (and arguably still his best), is his template neurotic comic character: smart, wisecracking, insecure about everything except sex itself about all the time and trouble it takes up. Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) sets the form for most of Allen’s girlfriends on screen henceforth: pretty, smart but scatterbrained younger women whose affection gradually turns into exasperation. Women put up with a lot in Allen’s movies but, as they say, it is always something.

Alvy Singer, like so many other Allen characters and also like Allen himself, never experiences anything without running commentary; he lives to talk about living. And his interior monologues provide not just the analysis but also an alternative: After making love to Annie for the first time, Alvy rolls over exhausted and says “As Balzac said: There goes another novel.”

But Alvy is smarter than the ground rules of Hollywood permit at present. Watching even the best recent movies (the more creative they are, in fact), one becomes aware of a subtle censorship being imposed on them: The characters cannot talk about anything that might be unfamiliar to most members of the audience. This produces characters driven by plot and emotion rather than ideas; they use catch-phrases instead of witticisms.

Take the famous scene where Annie and Alvy are standing in line for a movie and a blowhard behind them starts pontificating loudly on Fellini; when he switches over to McLuhan, Alvy loses patience, confronts him and then triumphantly produces Marshall McLuhan himself from behind a movie poster to inform him “You know nothing of my work!” Today this scene would be penciled out under the assumption that nobody in the audience will have heard of either Fellini or McLuhan.

Annie Hall is built on dialogue, and is about conversation and monologue. It is probably everyone’s favorite Woody Allen movie, it won the Oscar, it is a romantic comedy few viewers, I imagine, notice how much of it consists of people talking, simply talking. They walk and talk and sit and talk and go to shrinks together and make love and talk, or they 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 may be as close to perfect as such a speech can be; it ends with the memory of her narcoleptic Uncle George falling asleep in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner “He was waiting for the cranberry sauce to come around again” and dying while he was waiting in line for a free turkey. And she does it all in one take. It is brinksmanship of a high order; she (or Annie) dances right on the edge.

But “Annie Hall” moves so quickly that we may not notice how long some Allen takes are; he’s famous for shooting most scenes in master shots with all of the actors onscreen all of the time, instead of cutting on every line of dialogue. David Bordwell has an illuminating article in the Spring 2002 issue of Film Quarterly that points out that Allen’s average shot length (ASL) ranges high: 22 seconds for “Manhattan,” 35.5 seconds for “Mighty Aphrodite.”

He tells me “Annie Hall” has an ASL of 14.5 seconds (he says other 1977 films he clocked had an ASL ranging from 4 to 7 seconds). By comparison, this season’s hit thriller “Armageddon” has an ASL of 2.3 seconds, which might make intelligent dialogue impossible.

Alvy and Annie take a sly delight in their conversational skill; they’re attracted to each other not by pheromones but by pacing. In the first conversation they have, after meeting as tennis partners, they fall naturally into verbal tennis:

Alvy: You want a lift?

Annie: Oh why? Uh, you got a car?

Alvy: No I was going to take a cab.

Annie: Oh no I have a car.

Alvy: You have a car? I don’t understand. If you have a car, so then why did you say ‘Do you have a car?’ like you wanted a lift?

Annie: I don’t, I don’t, geez, I don’t know. I wasn’t. (I got this VW out there) “What a jerk,” yeah. “Would you like a lift?”

Alvy: Sure. Which way you goin’?

Annie: Me? Oh downtown.

Alvy : Down I’m going uptown.

Annie : Oh well, you know I’m going uptown too.

Alvy: You just said you were going downtown!

Annie : Yeah well but I could

It is not just a dialogue; it’s a duo that is yet to find itself. We start believing that Annie and Alvy rarely meet individuals who can keep pace with them as we listen to them speak. When she complains about her apartment being small and having bad plumbing and bugs after Alvy hesitates to let her move in with him, who else but Alvy could take “bugs” as his cue, responding, “Entomology is a rapidly growing field.” Only Annie could translate this into “You don’t want me to live with you.”

Alvy: I don’t want you to live with me!? Whose idea was it?

Annie: Mine.

Alvy: Yeah, it was yours actually, but I approved it right away.

Naturally, there are other women in Alvy’s life such as the Rolling Stone correspondent (Shelley Duvall) who is a Rosicrucian (Alvy: “I can’t get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics”). And the liberal Democrat (Carol Kane) who he marries but splits up with later over their disagreements about the second gun theory of the Kennedy assassination.

That Annie Hall is the love of his life becomes apparent immediately, and from his opening monologue where he mournfully observes that they were in love one year ago today before beginning his analysis of what went wrong which ends when he realizes happiness found him but he couldn’t accept Groucho’s line “is the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.”

According to imdb.com trivia for “Annie Hall”, Diane Keaton (who lived together with Allen at this time) was born Diane Hall and nicknamed Annie. The film originally had a murder subplot that was completely removed; an editor friend Ron Rosenblum wrote about how they trimmed down from 140 minutes rough cut to 95 minute release print called When the Shooting Stops.

Watching the final version, I not only noticed how tightly everything fit together but also how it had no right to fit so well. Think about all of Allen’s amazing visual strategies: characters directly addressing each other through splitscreen; Annie’s spirit sitting up in a chair while her body continues having sex with Alvy; autobiographical flashbacks; subtitles showing what people are actually thinking; children speaking like adults (“I’m into leather”); an animated sequence that pairs him with Snow White’s wicked witch; and most famously, his trope-breaking habit of speaking outside character to us.

This is a movie whose tone relies on constantly shifting tones not as a reflection of its surface-level character but because the director’s mind can’t help but dart away from any scene’s given topic in search of its hidden punchline. The “Annie Hall” attitude is that life isn’t worth living without finding all the flaws. Because finding all the flaws means turning them into jokes and if there’s one thing Woody Allen wishes he could do, it’s not turn everything into a joke.

Watch Annie Hall For Free On Gomovies.