The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Woody Allen · a film · 1977 · the theatrical cut, about 93 minutes · directed by Woody Allen, written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
Mode
Romantic comedy turned memoir; a revue of comic devices made the grammar of memory
Mythos
Pygmalion inverted, the shaped woman leaving her maker; the schlemiel among the gentiles; death presiding over the jokes
Phase
The affair from a game of doubles to a last meeting, told after its end and out of order, framed by a man talking to the camera
Presentation
Feature film in colour, flat widescreen, about 93 minutes, in English; no original score, only source music and two standards sung on screen
Register
From stand-up jokes and a cartoon queen to a song in a half-empty club and a last meeting held in long shot without a joke
Scale
One affair, one consciousness, two cities
Governing Proposition
A comedian turns to the camera, says that he and the woman he loved have broken up, and goes back through the affair to find out why. The wager of the film is that a love affair is also an education, that when the education succeeds the teacher is outgrown, and that once a love is over it exists only as memory worked over, a room the man can walk into and cannot change.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a man talking to the camera. Alvy Singer, a comedian, played by Woody Allen, tells two old jokes, one about bad food served in small portions and one of Groucho Marx’s, about a club. Both are jokes about not belonging. Then he says, in plain words, that he and Annie have broken up. That is the subject, announced before anything has been shown, and everything after it is a man going back over what he has lost.
What follows is memory, and it does not keep to order. The affair runs from a first meeting at a game of tennis doubles to the break and a last meeting, but the film reaches it by way of Alvy’s Brooklyn childhood, his two earlier marriages, his parents and Annie’s, and two trips to Los Angeles. It moves by association, as a comedian’s mind moves, and it uses every device a revue would use: the address to the camera, characters stepping into their own remembered scenes, a split screen, subtitles that run against the spoken lines, a man brought from off frame to settle an argument, passers-by stopped and questioned, a cartoon, and a play that stages a scene again with another ending. At the close Alvy speaks to the camera once more.
Allen directed the film and wrote it with Marshall Brickman; Charles H. Joffe produced it, and United Artists released it in April 1977, in colour, in flat widescreen, about 93 minutes long. Gordon Willis photographed it and Ralph Rosenblum edited it. There is no original score, only source music and songs, two of them standards sung on screen by Diane Keaton, who plays Annie Hall. Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Janet Margolin, Christopher Walken and Colleen Dewhurst are in the cast, and Marshall McLuhan appears as himself. The film won four Academy Awards for 1977, for Best Picture, Director, Actress and Original Screenplay, and Allen was nominated as an actor.
Movement II
Alvy grew up in Brooklyn, in a house under the Coney Island roller coaster. As a boy he stops doing his homework because the universe is expanding. The joke is the first statement of the film’s preoccupation with death, and it is made by a child.
The adult Alvy does not remember his childhood; he walks into it. With Annie and his friend Rob he stands in the house under the roller coaster and watches his family. He sits, grown, in his first-grade classroom and argues with the teacher. Later he and Annie stand in her past and comment on her earlier boyfriends. Memory is a room he can enter and cannot change, and the comic device carries the knowledge the film is built on.
In a cinema queue a bore behind them holds forth on McLuhan, and Alvy, rather than argue, produces McLuhan himself from behind a poster to settle it. The gag is also the method: Alvy’s consciousness governs everything in the film, and it can summon whatever it needs, a theorist, a childhood, a subtitle. What it cannot summon is a different outcome.
Movement III
Annie and Alvy meet at tennis doubles. Afterwards she stammers, says “la-di-da”, and wears clothes that soon passed into fashion. On a balcony they make awkward talk, and subtitles under the dialogue give what each of them is thinking while the words say something else. What is said and what is meant run at once, and the film has found its sharpest instrument.
In the first summer there are the lobsters, Annie laughing with him, and the scene has a giddy joy few comedies reach. Annie sings in a half-empty club, and the song is “Seems Like Old Times”; the film holds on her. Then Alvy begins to teach her. He buys her books on death, The Denial of Death among them, and sends her to adult classes and to analysis. The education is the affair, and it will work.
Easter with the Halls in Chippewa Falls is a meal among people who do not speak as Alvy speaks, and Grammy Hall looks at him and sees, for a second, a Hasid. The screen splits: on one side the Halls at their table, on the other the Singers at theirs, two families eating, two physics of speech. A night drive with her brother Duane touches dread. Class, ethnicity and religion are disclosed with exactness, and almost wholly by comedy.
Movement IV
The affair strains as the education succeeds. Annie grows past her teacher, and Alvy is jealous of the professor from her classes. Their two analysts are seen side by side in split screen. In bed, a figure steps out of a body during sex. Alvy stops passers-by on the street and questions them.
Los Angeles enters as a joke and stays as an argument. Willis photographs it in a flat, bleached light set against the walks and dusk of New York. Alvy sneezes into the cocaine; at a Hollywood party the guests are single jokes; the satire is broader here than anywhere else, and the city is mocked by the film more than by its narrator. Elsewhere Alvy is drawn as a cartoon arguing with a cartoon wicked queen from Snow White, who is Annie, a fantasy the film itself calls one.
Annie chooses Los Angeles. The break comes because she has become someone who can live in a city he cannot. In another summer, with another woman, Alvy tries the lobsters again, and the woman does not laugh. The rhyme is exact and costs the film nothing to state: the first scene was the affair, and the second is what is left of it.
Movement V
Alvy writes a play. In rehearsal, actors restage the breakup, and this time the couple are reconciled. The film shows its own act at the moment it performs it. Art revises what life refused, and the film itself is one such revision, told by the man who lost.
The last meeting is on the Upper West Side, a quiet scene that Willis holds in long shot, and there is no joke in it. Then the film runs back through the affair in a montage, to the same song, “Seems Like Old Times”, with Alvy’s voice over it. The comedy that has joked away its losses gives itself a lament.
Alvy closes as he opened, to the camera, with a joke, and its last words are “we need the eggs”. The affair was absurd, and he knows it, and it was needed, and he says so. Forty-nine years on the film survives whole, in its one version, in the National Film Registry since 1992; it has been watched since the 1990s through its director’s life, which has narrowed some of its exhibition and added questions rather than answering them. The question the film itself left open is still the first one asked of it: whether Alvy has drawn his own portrait or his own indictment, and whether the film knows which.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The film was found in the cutting room, and what was kept resists the subtractive test better than its looseness suggests. The opening joke about a club and the closing joke about eggs make one argument: why a man stays in what he knows is absurd. The lobsters of the first summer return in the second, with another woman, who does not laugh. The awkward talk on the balcony is answered by Annie singing in a club, and her songs return at the close. The trips to Los Angeles are required, because the break is Annie choosing a city Alvy cannot live in. The form permits more than it compels: the cocaine sneeze, the Los Angeles party and several street interviews are single jokes the film could lose without losing a fact it needs.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a love affair is also an education, and when the education succeeds, the lover who gave it is outgrown. Alvy buys Annie books on death, sends her to adult classes and to analysis, and is jealous of the professor who is one result; the film makes him see this and not stop. Beside it, the man who cannot enjoy knows the affair is absurd and needs it, which the closing joke puts in four words. The Easter dinner in split screen discloses class and ethnic division in America with exactness: two families eating, two physics of speech. And the form discloses how a love is held afterward, rehearsed and revised in memory and in art. The limit: Alvy’s consciousness bounds the disclosure, and Annie is seen fully only through him.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Comedy is the register, and elevation is not its usual mode, but the film rises, and it rises by tenderness. Keaton singing “Seems Like Old Times” in a half-empty club, held in a still frame, lifts it toward grace; the closing montage of the affair to the same song, under Alvy’s voice, gives the film a lament it otherwise jokes away. The lobsters of the first summer have a giddy joy few comedies reach, and Willis’s long walks along Manhattan streets and the river at dusk have a quiet beauty. Dread is touched only, in Alvy’s obsession with death and the night drive with Duane. What holds the axis lowest, with The Encompassed, is frequency: the summits are two or three, and most of the film is wit, which delights rather than elevates.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The patterns are present, and one of them shapes the plot. Pygmalion runs underneath, inverted: Alvy shapes Annie with books, classes and analysis, and the woman he shaped leaves her maker for another city. That is the curve of the affair from first meeting to last, and it carries the figure. Around it the patterns are evoked. The schlemiel and the comic Jew among gentiles, from Yiddish tradition through Groucho Marx, whose joke opens the film, become visible for a second when Grammy Hall sees a Hasid at her table. Death presides, in The Denial of Death, The Sorrow and the Pity and the expanding universe that stops a Brooklyn boy doing his homework. A cartoon casts Annie as the wicked queen of Snow White. The limit: these are allusion and joke more than construction, and the particulars stay sharply particular.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The inheritance is the romantic comedy, from the screwball to the sex comedies of the 1960s, and Allen’s own gag films, Bananas, Sleeper and Love and Death. The turn is double. Inside the genre: a romance told after its end, out of order, with no reunion and the couple apart at the close, and the devices of comic revue, direct address and the sight gag, made the grammar of memory rather than a means to laughs alone. Inside the career: the move from parody to a personal film about a recognisable man and woman, at the cost of the broad audience the slapstick had won. The devices were borrowed, from Godard’s address, Bergman’s memory scenes in Wild Strawberries (8.2) and Fellini’s self-portrait; their fusion in a mainstream romantic comedy, with the unhappy ending as its point, was new. The limit: a working director’s budget and studio cushioned the stake.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows: that a love affair, once over, exists as memory reworked. Alvy walks with Annie and Rob into the house under the Coney Island roller coaster and watches his family; the adult Alvy sits in his first-grade classroom and argues with the teacher; he and Annie stand in her past and comment on her earlier boyfriends. Memory is a room he can enter and cannot change. The subtitles under the balcony talk are the form at its sharpest, what is said and what is meant running at once. The play rehearsal near the end restages the breakup with a reconciliation, and the film’s own act becomes visible: art revises what life refused. Told in linear scenes, the story would be a slight romance. The limit: many sketches are container rather than instrument.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Forty-nine years of evidence, and the questions have stayed open. Is the film Alvy’s self-portrait or his self-indictment, and how far does it see what he is? Is Annie a person or the projection of the man who narrates her, and is her leaving the film’s verdict on him? Does the closing joke console or concede? It has been read as romance, as memoir, as a study of the New York Jewish intellectual and as a document of 1970s Manhattan; since the 1990s it has been read again through its director’s life, which has added questions rather than answered them. On return the structure keeps yielding, in the rhymes of the two lobster scenes, the two balconies and the two songs. The limit: much of the film’s thought lies on its surface, stated by its talkers, and its formal depths are fewer than the deepest films’.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised the romantic comedy around the failed relationship, the confessional narrator and the intellectual couple, and showed that a mainstream comedy could carry the devices of the art cinema and an unhappy ending and prevail with them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: four Academy Awards for 1977, Best Picture among them, ahead of Star Wars (7.9); Allen’s own next fifteen years of personal films, which follow from it; Annie’s clothes and her “la-di-da”, which passed into fashion and common speech; and a genre whose grammar it set, though how much of the later relationship comedy and the comedy of direct address descends from it is argued rather than settled. The limit: it did not reorganise cinema at large, as The Godfather (9.0) and Taxi Driver (8.6) did; its force is one genre’s grammar.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-nine years. Form: the film survives whole, as released, in its one version, and restorations for home video repair it. Presence: continuous and wide, in repertory, on television and every home format, in teaching, in lists and polls, and in the National Film Registry since 1992. Two charges hold it at the usual mark for its age and not above. The surface is more fixed to its moment than most: 1970s Manhattan intellectual life, its analysts, its films and its names, McLuhan, The Sorrow and the Pity, Commentary and Dissent, which ages its jokes. And its director’s public life since 1992 has narrowed some of its exhibition and changed how it is watched, without removing it from view. These are charges of presence and surface, not of form.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in several departments. The screenplay is exact in its dialogue and economical in its jokes, and holds its density without strain. Gordon Willis photographs New York in long takes, figures walking out of frame or held far off in the street while their voices continue, and Los Angeles in a flat, bleached light that is its own argument. Ralph Rosenblum’s cutting found the film in its material and gives the memory its leaps. Keaton’s performance, the stammer, the songs, is the film’s life, and Allen plays Alvy precisely within his range. The limit: the visual command is intermittent, strongest in New York and slack in several sketches; the supporting figures are often single jokes; and the craft serves the talk more than it carries the knowledge, as Chinatown’s (8.6) does.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Alvy drawn as a cartoon, arguing with a cartoon wicked queen, and the quiet last meeting on the Upper West Side, seen in long shot and held without a joke. One law governs both: everything is Alvy’s memory, and memory obeys his comic, anxious consciousness, which can summon McLuhan from behind a poster, walk into its own childhood or simply watch. The law is wide, from fantasy to plain realism, and it holds. The subtitles, the split screens, the figure stepping out of a body in bed and the passers-by questioned on the street are licensed by it, not added. The limit: the Los Angeles satire is broader than the rest, so that the city is mocked by the film more than by Alvy; and the law is one man’s subjectivity, which makes the coherence partly a narrowness, since Annie never has the film’s eye.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes can hold. Consciousness: Alvy’s fully, from inside; Annie’s partly, from outside. The couple, with its education, sex, jealousy and analysis. The family: Alvy’s Brooklyn parents, the Halls of Chippewa Falls, Grammy Hall, Duane. Class, ethnicity and religion, at the Easter dinner and in the Jewish comedian among gentiles. The city as two civilisations, New York and Los Angeles. The culture industry: stand-up, television, the Hollywood party, the cinema queue. Death as a preoccupation. All are routed through one relationship and integrated by it. What holds the axis lowest, with The Sublime: labour is entertainment only, the state and history appear only as the films Alvy watches, the sacred is a joke and the natural order is absent. One affair and one consciousness hold the whole, and nothing exceeds Alvy.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve, The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.6. A romance told after its end, out of order and without reunion, with the comic devices of revue made the grammar of memory; a form in which the past is a room the narrator can walk into and cannot change; a reorganisation of the romantic comedy around the failed affair; and a survival of forty-nine years in one whole version.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime and The Encompassed at 7.3: the film rises two or three times, by tenderness, and is otherwise wit; it holds the couple, the family, class, ethnicity, two cities and the culture industry through one affair, but labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent or a joke, and nothing exceeds Alvy. Above them, The Archetypal Deep at 7.7: an inverted Pygmalion shapes the affair, and the other patterns are allusion.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.6, Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.3, two tenths below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.2, from a sum of 97.8, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Annie Hall as released, the theatrical cut of about 93 minutes, in colour and in English, the one version in circulation, from the opening address to the closing joke: directed by Woody Allen, written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, produced by Charles H. Joffe, released by United Artists in April 1977, photographed by Gordon Willis and edited by Ralph Rosenblum. The long first assembly from which the released film was cut, a looser film under the working title Anhedonia by Rosenblum’s own account, was never released and is not judged. Restorations for home video repair the released film and are weighed only as part of its survival. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and otherwise described. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the date and place of the premiere, the associate editing credit, the exact location of the last meeting, the exact order of the middle scenes, and the scene and shot counts, are not given; the line of later films said to descend from it is stated as argued.