Annie Hall

The idea for what would become Annie Hall was developed as Allen walked around New York City with co-writer Marshall Brickman. The pair discussed the project frequently, 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 with the banality of the life that we all live, and a third an obsession with proving himself and testing himself to find out what kind of character he had. Allen himself turned forty in 1975, and Brickman suggests that "advancing age" and "worries about death" had influenced Allen's philosophical, personal approach to complement his "commercial side".[14][15] Allen made the conscious decision to "sacrifice some of the laughs for a story about human beings".[8] He recognized that for the first time he had the courage to abandon the safety of complete broad comedy and had the will to produce a film of deeper meaning which would be a nourishing experience for the audience.[1] He was also influenced by Federico Fellini's comedy drama 8½ (1963), created at a similar personal turning point, and similarly colored by each director's psychoanalysis.[15]

Brickman and Allen sent the screenplay back and forth until they were ready to ask United Artists for $4 million.[15] 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.[16] 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 (1976).[17] Although they decided to drop the murder plot, Allen and Brickman made a murder mystery many years later: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), also starring Diane Keaton.[18] The draft that Allen presented to the film's editor, Ralph Rosenblum, concluded with the words, "ending to be shot."[19]

Allen suggested Anhedonia, a term for the inability to experience pleasure, as a working title,[20][21] and Brickman suggested alternatives including It Had to Be Jew, Rollercoaster Named Desire and Me and My Goy.[22] An advertising agency, hired by United Artists, embraced Allen's choice of an obscure word by suggesting the studio take out newspaper advertisements that looked like fake tabloid headlines such as "Anhedonia Strikes Cleveland!".[22] However, Allen experimented with several titles over five test screenings, including Anxiety and Annie and Alvy, before settling on Annie Hall.[22]

Several references in the film to Allen's own life have invited speculation that it is autobiographical. Both Alvy and Allen were comedians. His birthday appears on the blackboard in a school scene, and "Alvy" was one of Allen's childhood nicknames;[23] certain features of his childhood are found in Alvy Singer's;[24] Allen went to New York University and so did Alvy. Diane Keaton's real surname is "Hall" and "Annie" was her nickname, and she and Allen were once romantically involved.[25] 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".[26] Contrary to various interviewers and commentators, he says, Alvy is not the character that is closest to himself; he identified more with the mother (Eve, played by Geraldine Page) in his next film, Interiors.[27] Despite this, Keaton has stated that the relationship between Alvy and Annie was partly based on her relationship with the director.[28]

The role of Annie Hall was written specifically for Keaton, who had worked with Allen on Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975).[28] She considered the character an "affable version" of herself—both were "semi-articulate, dreamed of being a singer and suffered from insecurity"—and was surprised to win an Oscar for her performance.[28] The film also marks the second film collaboration between Allen and Tony Roberts, their previous project being Play It Again, Sam.[8]

Federico Fellini was Allen's first choice to appear in the cinema lobby scene because his films were under discussion,[17] but Allen chose cultural academic Marshall McLuhan after both Fellini and Luis Buñuel declined the cameo.[29] Some cast members, biographer John 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.[29] However, during the production, Allen began a two-year relationship with Stacey Nelkin, who appears in a single scene.[29]

Woody Allen saw the Coney Island Thunderbolt when scouting locations and wrote it into the script as Alvy's childhood home.[23]

Principal photography began on May 19, 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,[30] and deviated frequently 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."[24] Similarly, there is the incident where Alvy scatters a trove of cocaine with an accidental sneeze: although not in the script, the joke emerged from a rehearsal happenstance and stayed in the movie. In audience testing, this laugh was so sustained that a much longer pause had to be added so that the following dialogue was not lost.[31]

Editor Ralph Rosenblum's first assembly of the film in 1976 left Brickman disappointed. "I felt that the film was running off in nine different directions," Brickman recalled.[32] "It was like a first draft of a novel... from which two or three films could possibly be assembled."[33] Rosenblum characterized the first cut, at two hours and twenty minutes,[34] as "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 more philosophical version of Take the Money and Run".[34] Brickman found it "nondramatic and ultimately uninteresting, a kind of cerebral exercise."[35] He suggested a more linear narrative.[36]

The present-tense relationship between Alvy and Annie was not the narrative focus of this first cut, but Allen and Rosenblum recognized it as the dramatic spine, and began reworking the film "in the direction of that relationship."[37] Rosenblum recalled that Allen "had no hesitation about trimming away much of the first twenty minutes in order to establish Keaton more quickly."[35] According to Allen, "I didn't sit down with Marshall Brickman and say, 'We're going to write a picture about a relationship.' I mean the whole concept of the picture changed as we were cutting it."[36]

As the film was budgeted for two weeks of post-production photography,[19] late 1976 saw three separate shoots for the final segment, but only some of this material was used.[38] The narration that ends the film, featuring the joke about 'we all need the eggs', was conceived and recorded only two hours before a test screening.[38]

The credits call the film "A Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Production"; the two men were Allen's managers and received this same credit on his films from 1969 to 1993. However, for this film, Joffe took producer credit and therefore received the Academy Award for Best Picture. The title sequence features a black background with white text in the Windsor Light Condensed typeface, a design that Allen would use on his subsequent films. 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.[39]

Very little background music is heard in the film, a departure for Allen influenced by Ingmar Bergman.[39] 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",[40] and the anodyne cover of the Savoy Brown song "A Hard Way to Go" playing at a party in the mansion of Paul Simon's character.

Annie Hall was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival on March 27, 1977,[20] before its official release in the United States on April 20, 1977.[41] The film ultimately earned $38,251,425 ($185 million in 2022 dollars) in the United States and Canada against a $4-million budget, making it the 11th highest-grossing picture of 1977.[41] On raw figures, it currently ranks as Allen's fourth-highest-grossing film in the United States, after Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and Midnight in Paris; when adjusted for inflation, the gross figure makes it Allen's biggest box office hit.[42] It played for over 100 consecutive weeks in London and grossed over $5.6 million in the United Kingdom.[43] It was first released on Blu-ray on January 24, 2012, alongside Allen's film Manhattan (1979).[44] Both releases include their original theatrical trailers.[44]

Diane Keaton received widespread critical acclaim and numerous accolades for her performance.

Annie Hall met with widespread critical acclaim upon its release, with major praise directed towards the film's script and the performances of Allen and Keaton.

Tim Radford of The Guardian called the film "Allen's most closely focused and daring film to date".[45] The New York Times' Vincent Canby preferred Annie Hall to Allen's second directorial effort, Take the Money and Run, since the former is more "humane" while the latter is more a "cartoon".[46] Several critics have compared the film favorably to Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973),[46][47][48] including Joseph McBride in Variety, who found it Allen's "most three-dimensional film to date" with an ambition equal to Bergman's best even as the co-stars become the "contemporary equivalent of ... Tracy-Hepburn."[47]

More critically, Peter Cowie commented that the film "suffers from its profusion of cultural references and asides".[49] Writing for New York magazine, John Simon called the film "unfunny comedy, poor moviemaking, and embarrassing self-revelation," and wrote that Keaton's performance was "in bad taste to watch and indecency to display," saying that the part should have been played by Robin Mary Paris, the actress who appears briefly in the scene where Alvy Singer has written a two-character play nakedly based on himself and Annie Hall. Simon's review of Annie Hall "It is a film so shapeless, sprawling, repetitious, and aimless as to seem to beg for oblivion. At this, it is successful."[50]

The film has continued to receive positive reviews. In his 2002 lookback, Roger Ebert added it to his Great Movies list and commented with surprise that the film had "an instant familiarity" despite its age,[2] and Slant writer Jaime N. Christley found the one-liners "still gut-busting after 35 years".[48] A later Guardian critic, Peter Bradshaw, named it the best comedy film of all time, commenting that "this wonderfully funny, unbearably sad film is a miracle of comic writing and inspired film-making".[51] John Marriott of the Radio Times believed that Annie Hall was the film where Allen "found his own singular voice, a voice that echoes across events with a mixture of exuberance and introspection", referring to the "comic delight" derived from the "spirited playing of Diane Keaton as the kooky innocent from the Midwest, and Woody himself as the fumbling New York neurotic".[52] Empire magazine rated the movie five out of five stars, calling it a "classic".[53] In 2017, Claire Dederer wrote, "Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century [...] because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism that lurks at the center of all comedy."[54]

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited Annie Hall as one of his favorite films.[55][56]

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 97% based on 108 reviews, with an average rating of 9.10/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Filled with poignant performances and devastating humor, Annie Hall represents a quantum leap for Woody Allen and remains an American classic."[57] Metacritic gave the film a score of 92 out of 100 based on 20 critical reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[58]

Woody Allen in New York City in 2006

Sociologists Virginia Rutter and Pepper Schwartz consider Alvy and Annie's relationship to be a stereotype of gender differences in sexuality.[59] The nature of love is a repeating subject for Allen and co-star Tony Roberts described this film as "the story of everybody who falls in love, and then falls out of love and goes on."[8] Alvy searches for love's purpose through his effort to get over his depression about the demise of his relationship with Annie. Sometimes he sifts through his memories of the relationship, at another point he stops people on the sidewalk, with one woman saying that "It's never something you do. That's how people are. Love fades," a suggestion that it was no one's fault, they just grew apart and the end was inevitable. By the end of the film, Alvy accepts this and decides that love is ultimately "irrational and crazy and absurd", but a necessity of life.[60] Christopher Knight believes Alvy's quest upon meeting Annie is carnal, whereas hers is on an emotional note.[61]

Richard Brody of The New Yorker notes the film's "Eurocentric art-house self-awareness" and Alvy Singer's "psychoanalytic obsession in baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions".[62]

Singer is identified with the stereotypical neurotic Jewish male, and the differences between Alvy and Annie are often related to the perceptions and realities of Jewish identity. Vincent Brook notes that "Alvy dines with the WASP-y Hall family and imagines that they must see him as a Hasidic Jew, complete with payot (ear locks) and a large black hat."[63] Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen highlight the scene in which Annie remarks that Annie's grandmother "hates Jews. She thinks they just make money, but she's the one. Is she ever, I'm telling you.", revealing the hypocrisy in her grandmother's stereotypical American view of Jews by arguing that "no stigma attaches to the love of money in America".[64] Bernd Herzogenrath also considers Allen's joke, "I would like to but we need the eggs", to the doctor at the end when he suggests putting him in a mental institution, to be a paradox of not only the persona of the urban neurotic Jew but also of the film itself.[11]

Christopher Knight points out that Annie Hall is framed through Alvy's experiences. "Generally, what we know about Annie and about the relationship comes filtered through Alvy, an intrusive narrator capable of halting the narrative and stepping out from it in order to entreat the audience's interpretative favor."[65] He suggests that because Allen's films blur the protagonist with "past and future protagonists as well as with the director himself", it "makes a difference as to whether we are most responsive to the director's or the character's framing of events".[66] Despite the narrative's framing, "the joke is on Alvy."[67] Emanuel Levy believes that Alvy Singer became synonymous with the public perception of Woody Allen in the United States.[68] Annie Hall is viewed as the definitive Woody Allen film in displaying neurotic humor.[69]

Upper East Side of New York City

Annie Hall "is as much a love song to New York City as it is to the character,"[70] reflecting Allen's adoration of the island of Manhattan. It was a relationship he explored repeatedly, particularly in films like Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).[8] Annie Hall's apartment, which still exists on East 70th Street between Lexington Avenue and Park Avenue is by Allen's own confession his favorite block in the city.[71] Peter Cowie argues that the film shows "a romanticized view" of the borough, with the camera "linger[ing] on the Upper East Side [... and where] the fear of crime does not trouble its characters."[72] By contrast, California is presented less positively, and David Halle notes the obvious "invidious intellectual comparison" between New York City and Los Angeles.[73] While Manhattan's movie theaters show classic and foreign films, Los Angeles theaters run less-prestigious fare such as The House of Exorcism and Messiah of Evil.[72] Rob's demonstration of adding canned laughter to television demonstrates the "cynical artifice of the medium".[72] New York City serves as a symbol of Alvy's personality ("gloomy, claustrophobic, and socially cold, but also an intellectual haven full of nervous energy") while Los Angeles is a symbol of freedom for Annie.[70]

Annie Hall has been cited as a film which uses both therapy and analysis for comic effect.[74] Sam B. Girgus considers Annie Hall to be a story about memory and retrospection, which "dramatizes a return via narrative desire to the repressed and the unconscious in a manner similar to psychoanalysis".[75] He argues that the film constitutes a self-conscious assertion of how narrative desire and humor interact in the film to reform ideas and perceptions and that Allen's deployment of Freudian concepts and humor forms a "pattern of skepticism toward surface meaning that compels further interpretation". Girgus believes that proof of the pervasiveness of Sigmund Freud in the film is demonstrated at the beginning through a reference to a joke in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and makes another joke about a psychiatrist and patient, which Girgus argues is also symbolic of the dynamic between humor and the unconscious in the film.[75] Further Freudian concepts are later addressed in the film with Annie's recall of a dream to her psychoanalyst in which Frank Sinatra is smothering her with a pillow, which alludes to Freud's belief in dreams as "visual representations of words or ideas".[75]

Peter Bailey in his book The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, argues that Alvy displays a "genial denigration of art" which contains a "significant equivocation", in that in his self-deprecation he invites the audience to believe that he is leveling with them.[76] Bailey argues that Allen's devices in the film, including the subtitles which reveal Annie's and Alvy's thoughts "extend and reinforce Annie Hall's winsome ethos of plain-dealing and ingenuousness".[76] He muses that the film is full of antimimetic emblems such as McLuhan's magical appearance which provide quirky humor and that the "disparity between mental projections of reality and actuality" drives the film. His view is that self-reflective cinematic devices intelligently dramatize the difference between surface and substance, with visual emblems "incessantly distilling the distinction between the world mentally constructed and reality".[76]

In his discussion of the film's relation to modernism, Thomas Schatz finds the film an unresolved "examination of the process of human interaction and interpersonal communication"[77] and "immediately establishes [a] self-referential stance" that invites the spectator "to read the narrative as something other than a sequential development toward some transcendent truth".[78] For him, Alvy "is the victim of a tendency toward overdetermination of meaning – or in modernist terms 'the tyranny of the signified' – and his involvement with Annie can be viewed as an attempt to establish a spontaneous, intellectually unencumbered relationship, an attempt which is doomed to failure."[77]

Annie Hall won four Oscars at the 50th Academy Awards on April 3, 1978, and was nominated for five (the Big Five) in total. Producer Charles H. Joffe received the statue for Best Picture, Allen for Best Director and, with Brickman, for Best Original Screenplay, and Keaton for Best Actress. Allen was also nominated for Best Actor.[79] Many had expected Star Wars to win the major awards, including Brickman and executive producer Robert Greenhut.[8]

The film was also honored five times at the BAFTA awards. Along with the top award for Best Film and the award for Best Editing, Keaton won for Best Actress, Allen won for Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay alongside Brickman.[80] The film received one Golden Globe Award, for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical (Keaton), in addition to four nominations: Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (the latter three for Allen).

In 1992, the United States' Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in its National Film Registry that includes "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" films.[4] The film is often mentioned among the greatest comedies of all time. The American Film Institute lists it 31st in American cinema history.[81] In 2000, they named it second greatest romantic comedy in American cinema.[81] Keaton's performance of "Seems Like Old Times" was ranked 90th on their list of greatest songs included in a film, and her line "La-dee-da, la-dee-da." was named the 55th greatest movie quote.[81] The screenplay was named the sixth greatest screenplay by the Writers Guild of America, West[82] while IGN named it the seventh greatest comedy film of all time.[83] In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the forty-second greatest comedy film of all time, and the seventh greatest romantic comedy film of all time.[84] Several lists ranking Allen's best films have put Annie Hall among his greatest work.[85][86][87]

In June 2008, AFI revealed its 10 Top 10—the best ten films in ten classic American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community and Annie Hall was placed second in the romantic comedy genre.[88] AFI also ranked Annie Hall on multiple other lists. In November 2008, Annie Hall was voted in at No. 68 on Empire magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.[89] It is also ranked #2 on Rotten Tomatoes' 25 Best Romantic Comedies, second only to The Philadelphia Story.[90] In 2012, the film was listed as the 127th best film of all time by the Sight & Sound critics' poll.[91] The film was also named the 132nd best film by the Sight & Sound directors' poll.[91] In October 2013, the film was voted by the Guardian readers as the second best film directed by Woody Allen.[92] In November 2015, the film was named the funniest screenplay by the Writers Guild of America in its list of 101 Funniest Screenplays.[93]

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

• 1998: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – #31[94]
• 2000: AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs – #4[95]
• 2002: AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions – #11[96]
• 2004: AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs:
  • "Seems Like Old Times" – #90[97]
• 2005: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
  • Annie Hall: "La-dee-da, la-dee-da." – #55[98]
  • Alvy Singer "I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light." – Nominated.
  • Alvy Singer "Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love." – Nominated.
• 2007: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #35[99]
• 2008: AFI's 10 Top 10:
  • #2 Romantic Comedy Film[100]

1992 – National Film Registry.[101]

In 2006, Premiere magazine ranked Keaton in Annie Hall as 60th in its list of the "100 Greatest Performances of All Time", and noted:

It's hard to play ditzy. ... The genius of Annie is that despite her loopy backhand, awful driving, and nervous tics, she's also a complicated, intelligent woman. Keaton brilliantly displays this dichotomy of her character, especially when she yammers away on a first date with Alvy (Woody Allen), while the subtitle reads, "He probably thinks I'm a yoyo." Yo-yo? Hardly.[102]

Diane Keaton's dress style as Annie Hall; an influence on the fashion world during the late 1970s

Although the film received widespread critical acclaim and numerous awards, Allen himself was disappointed with it, and said in an interview, "When Annie Hall started out, that film was not supposed to be what I wound up with. The film was supposed to be what happens in a guy's mind ... Nobody understood anything that went on. The relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about. That was not what I cared about ... In the end, I had to reduce the film to just me and Diane Keaton, and that relationship, so I was quite disappointed in that movie".[103] Allen has repeatedly declined to make a sequel,[104] and in a 1992 interview stated that "Sequelism has become an annoying thing. I don't think Francis Coppola should have done Godfather III because Godfather II was quite great. When they make a sequel, it's just a thirst for more money, so I don't like that idea so much".[105]

Diane Keaton has stated that Annie Hall was her favorite role and that the film meant everything to her.[106] When asked if being most associated with the role concerned her as an actress, she replied, "I'm not haunted by Annie Hall. I'm happy to be Annie Hall. If somebody wants to see me that way, it's fine by me". Costume designer Ruth Morley, working with Keaton, created a look which had an influence on the fashion world during the late-70s, with women adopting the style: layering oversized, mannish blazers over vests, billowy trousers or long skirts, a man's tie, and boots.[107] The look was often referred to as the "Annie Hall look".[108] Some sources suggest that Keaton herself was mainly responsible for the look, and Ralph Lauren has often claimed credit, but only one jacket and one tie were purchased from Ralph Lauren for use in the film.[109] Allen recalled that Lauren and Keaton's dress style 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.'"[110]

The film's script topped the Writers Guild of America's list of 101 funniest screenplays ever, surpassing Some Like It Hot (1959), Groundhog Day (1993), Airplane! (1980), and Tootsie (1982).[111] James Bernardoni states that the film is "one of the very few romantic comedy dramas of the New Hollywood era and one that has rightly taken its place among the classics of that reverted genre", likening the seriocomic meditation on the couple relationship to George Cukor's Adam's Rib (1949), starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.[13] Since its release, other romantic comedies have inspired comparison. When Harry Met Sally... (1989), Chasing Amy (1997), Burning Annie (2007), 500 Days of Summer (2009) and Allen's 2003 film, Anything Else, are among them,[91][112][113][114][115] while film director Rian Johnson said in an interview for the book, The Film That Changed My Life, that Annie Hall inspired him to become a film director.[116] Karen Gillan stated that she watched Annie Hall as part of her research for her lead role in Not Another Happy Ending.[117] In 2018, Matt Starr and Ellie Sachs released a short film remake starring senior citizens.[118][119]