Annie Hall (Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe Productions, United Artists, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Next up on Turner Classic Movies’ February 16 night of Academy Award-winning films set in or around New York City was Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen’s Best Picture winner and also a movie I saw on its initial theatrical release and absolutely loved. I don’t need to rehash all the publicity Woody Allen has received since, both good and bad; he’s been hailed as the greatest comedy genius in cinema since Charlie Chaplin and reviled (mostly by his ex-partner, Mia Farrow) as literally a child molester. Allen famously announced in advance that he wouldn’t be attending the Academy Awards ceremony the year Annie Hall was nominated because he’d be playing his usual gig as a jazz clarinetist in a New York nightclub on Monday nights. (The Academy Awards were held on Mondays then; later they moved them to Sundays, where they are now: the next one will be March 2, 2025.) That was either a well-intended or unintended fuck-you to Hollywood and the entire movie industry, not all that surprising given that Annie Hall itself is largely about the clash of cultures between New York and Los Angeles. The film’s two central characters are mid-level stand-up comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and his girlfriend, aspiring (but not too aspiring) nightclub singer Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). They meet in New York and bond over a shared love of the arts and intellectual pursuits – though many of the movie’s laughs come from our realization that Alvy and Annie are as pretentious and surface-driven as the pseudo-intellectual acquaintances of whom they make fun.

Perhaps more than any of his other movies, Annie Hall is a compendium of Woody Allen’s Greatest Hits: during the scene in which he does stand-up in front of a largely student crowd at the University of Wisconsin, his jokes come almost completely from a comedy album he’d recorded for United Artists Records (United Artists was also the co-producer and distributor for Annie Hall) a decade earlier, including his marvelous line, “I was expelled from NYU during my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” Basically Annie Hall is about the culture clash not only between New York and L.A. but between crankily Jewish Alvy and white-bread shiksa Annie, who refers to her grandmother as “Grammy Hall” (“I’m dating a woman from a Norman Rockwell painting!” Alvy cracks). When Alvy spends a weekend with Annie’s family they’re accompanied by Annie’s ex, Duane Hall (a marvelous early performance by Christopher Walken back when he was still young and relatively cute), a thoroughgoing weirdo but one in “safe” Anglo-Protestant ways. When Annie spends a weekend with Alvy’s family they reminisce about how they were literally living in a house built into the Coney Island roller coaster when Alvy was born. The film periodically flashes back to sequences showing the prepubescent Alvy at school – the adult Alvy alternately sits back from the kids and takes his old place in the classroom – and in one of the film’s funniest moments he has the kids in class bark out about the careers they’re going to undertake as grown people. A number of them declare they’ll be financially successful in investment banking or finance. One boy says, “I used to be a heroin addict. Now I’m a methadone addict,” and an impossibly sweet-looking girl says, “I’m into leather.”

Alvy and Annie have something of a sex life together, though it runs into trouble when Annie insists on smoking pot before they make love and Alvy thinks his own masculinity (remember this is Woody Allen we’re talking about, hardly anyone’s idea – except maybe Allen’s own – of a sex god) ought to be enough to turn her on without chemical stimuli. Ultimately they drift apart and Annie takes up with rock musician Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) and moves to L.A. with him. Alvy flies there, ostensibly to appear as a presenter on an awards show (a gig he misses by oversleeping) but really to try to win Annie back. There’s a great scene at a party in which, this being the late 1970’s, the guests are all taking hits of a fairly large supply of cocaine. Rob (Tony Roberts), Alvy’s old childhood friend, is now a star on a terrible TV sitcom (Alvy visits him while in the mixing room where they’re adding laugh tracks to the show to make the lame gag lines sound funny; I’ve seen enough TV shows like that in real life I’d like to take the laugh-track machine aside and ask it, “What the hell do you think is so funny?”), and he brings along the coke supply and tells a thunderstruck Alvy the stuff costs $2,000 per ounce. “Two thousand dollars an ounce?” Alvy asks incredulously before he puts some up his nostril – and he sneezes, blowing the precious powder all over everything and everybody. Also at the party is a panicked young man who’s on the phone speaking his one line in the film, “I forgot my mantra!” I’d remembered that line – a spoof of the Maharishi and his whole meditation cult – but hadn’t realized until last night that the actor who delivered it was the very young Jeff Goldblum.

Annie Hall has become the archetypal Woody Allen movie, so much so that in 2004 writers Randy Mack and Zack Ordynans and director Van Flesher made a weird spoof of it called Burning Annie, filmed entirely at Marshall University in West Virginia and starring Gary Lundy as Max, a college student whose obsession with Annie Hall is ruining his love life because he insists on showing it to every woman he’s interested in, and they break up with him in similar ways to what Annie and Alvy go through in Annie Hall. The film even named its central character “Max” in imitation of Annie’s pet name for Alvy, and it features a punk band called “Anhedonia.” (Anhedonia – a psychological term meaning the inability to be happy – was Woody Allen’s original working title for Annie Hall.) I hadn’t seen Annie Hall in quite a while, but I had fond memories of it and this time around one of the pleasant surprises is Diane Keaton’s voice. No, she wasn’t one of the golden throats of the 20th century, but she wrapped her voice around a couple of 1920’s and 1930’s standards, “Seems Like Old Times” by Carmen Lombardo (Guy Lombardo’s brother) and John Jacob Loeb, and “It Had to Be You” by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn. She sang in a pleasant, earnest way that reminded me very much of Judy Holliday, while the use of old songs like that offered harbingers of Allen’s marvelous use of music in later films to establish who in the dramatis personae is romantically or sexually compatible with whom. Annie Hall is also the movie that started a short-lived fad for women wearing men’s neckties (Diane Keaton sports one in several sequences) and for adding the words “lah-dee-dah” to the language, reflecting Annie’s devil-may-care attitude about the world that Alvy first finds charming and then finds totally repulsive – especially when Annie gets behind the wheel of her yellow Volkswagen convertible and drives as if watching the road and looking where you’re going were strictly optional. While Annie Hall seems dated in many ways – it’s as old now as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was when producer Bob Evans, director Jack Clayton, screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola and stars Robert Redford and Mia Farrow made an excruciatingly boring movie of it in 1974 – it also holds up surprisingly well and is a testament to the enduring power of Woody Allen’s cinematic genius, whatever you think about the more sordid aspects of his life.