Manhattan

Judged on structure, and most of the film is required. The overture states the wager, the city as Isaac would write it, and the rest tests it; each of the four couplings answers another; the coda is earned by everything before it, because the list Isaac speaks is the list of a man who has acted on none of it. The subtractive test finds slack in the middle. Jill’s book and her lover come and go as running jokes more than as necessity; the visit to Jill and the scene with Wallace Shawn’s Jeremiah make one point at length; the party in the museum garden and some of the gallery talk are there for texture. None is idle, but each could lose a third without the film knowing less.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a culture of taste can be a culture of evasion. Its articulate people rank things, as in the “Academy of the Overrated”, and cannot keep a promise. Yale speaks well of integrity and leaves his wife for Mary, then Mary for his wife, then goes back. Isaac is the film’s moral voice and is seeing a girl of seventeen whom he keeps telling to leave him. The film sees this: in the classroom beside the skeleton Yale turns Isaac’s self-righteousness back on him. Its truest disclosure is at the end, in a list of beloved things whose last item is the person he let go. The limit: the film is partial to its hero; Tracy’s wisdom is a gift to Isaac more than a disclosure of her, and much of the satire lands on soft targets.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation here is frequent, and visual. The overture is one of the great openings of its decade: skyline, streets, rain, fireworks over the park on the Rhapsody’s climax, a voice correcting itself beneath the images. The dawn shot of Isaac and Mary on a bench under the Queensboro Bridge, small against the span, holds the film’s whole romantic idea in one frame. The planetarium, silhouettes against projected moons and craters, is beauty made from darkness. The carriage ride with Tracy and the last close-up of Isaac’s face each rise. What holds the axis below the high eights is the source of the elevation: almost always the city or the light, rarely the people, so that the transport belongs to the photography and to Gershwin more than to the drama.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The film makes a myth of its city, and the myth is load-bearing. In the overture’s drafts Manhattan is by turns a figure for the decay of contemporary culture and a town that existed in black and white; the whole film tests that romantic idea against the people who hold it. The people are another matter. Tracy is cast in an old pattern, the innocent who sees truly and is lost by the experienced man, and the film evokes the pattern without building it: she remains a figure of youth and faith rather than one who gains depth as a figure. Yale, the faithless friend, and Isaac, the self-appointed conscience, are types well particularised and not deepened into archetype. The skeleton in the classroom is an emblem placed, not a myth constructed. A city myth built, and the rest evoked.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance is the American romantic comedy and Allen’s own comedies, and the turn is real. A comic star and director made a romantic comedy in black and white anamorphic, scored entirely to Gershwin, with long takes in which speakers leave the frame and conversations play in near darkness. Comedy was taken toward the chronicle of manners, toward Chekhov and Bergman by way of New York, with the jokes kept and the ending left open on a face. The limit is the stake. Allen came to it from his greatest success, with wide control over his films, and the subject, his own milieu and his own persona, was a proven path. The swerve is in the look and the tone more than in the kind: a strong turn placed on a secure base.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Substitute colour and a standard frame and the film loses its central knowledge: the gap between the city as remembered and idealised, which black and white and the wide frame give it, and the small, self-serving conduct of the people inside that image. The form is that irony. Gordon Willis’s compositions often let a conversation run on with its speakers out of frame or in silhouette, so that the city and the dark hold the screen while the people talk; the form says their words matter less than they think. The Gershwin score does the same work, setting the characters’ muddle against the confident romance of an earlier city. The redrafted first chapter makes the film’s own shape a draft. The limit: the middle runs on a conventional alternation of scenes whose form could be otherwise without much loss.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Forty-seven years of return, and the film rewards it. Second viewings show how early it marks Isaac’s self-regard, how Keaton plays Mary’s nervous pretension as fear, how often the frame argues against the dialogue, and how the list at the end reorganises the whole. Its reception has changed under it. The relationship between a man of forty-two and a girl of seventeen, which the film presents gently and lets end in her grace, is now read as the film’s problem, and is argued over in light of its maker’s life. That is yield of a kind, a work that keeps being reopened, though some of what is found is charge rather than depth. The limit: its formal depth outlasts its semantic depth, and the satire of talk exhausts sooner than the images do.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what an American romantic comedy could look like and how seriously it could take its own melancholy, and it fixed an image of New York as a romance in black and white. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its look and its talk pass into Allen’s own later work, into the New York relationship film, whose black and white and whose city descend from it, and into television’s habit of making the city a character; the opening montage became a standing image of the city on screen. The limit: it did not redirect the medium as the decade’s strongest films did, Chinatown (8.6) among them. It consolidated a mode more than it opened a field, a step taken on the ground Annie Hall (8.2) had broken.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-seven years. Form: the film survives whole, as released; it has been restored and kept in circulation in its widescreen frame, and no loss or altered version charges it. Presence: continuous, in revival screenings, on home video, in critics’ polls, and in the opening montage, in constant use as an image of the city. Two charges hold it at the lower mark for its age. The surface is fixed to its moment in one load-bearing respect, the relationship with Tracy, which its own era let pass and which now changes how the whole is received. And presence has been touched by its maker’s later history: the film is still shown and studied, but it has left some programmes and is no longer offered without comment. These are charges of presence and surface, not of form.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and here the making is load-bearing. Willis’s photography is among the finest black and white work of the colour era: exposures held at the edge of darkness, the anamorphic frame used for architecture and emptiness, interiors lit so that faces fall into shadow without loss of line. Susan E. Morse’s cutting of the overture to the Rhapsody is exact; elsewhere the editing trusts long takes. The dialogue is economical and funny, and the cast’s comic timing is precise; Keaton and Streep make small parts full. The limit: the dramatic carpentry of the middle is ordinary, and Michael Murphy and Mariel Hemingway are serviceable rather than commanding. The making stands below Chinatown (8.6) and The Third Man (8.5), whose craft carries the knowledge, and above Shadow of a Doubt (7.6).

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the overture’s rhapsody and the comic bickering at Elaine’s and in the scenes with Jill. They obey one law: the city is grander than the people, and the people make a comedy of their failure to live up to it. That law governs the opening, the bench at dawn, the planetarium, the skeleton and the run across town. The final scene holds it most completely: Isaac’s monologue of beloved things is grand and comic at once, and it ends on a face. The limit: the range is moderate, from satire to romance, not from farce to tragedy, and some comic set pieces, Isaac’s tirade as he quits his television job and the scenes with Jill and her book, play by the logic of the stand-up routine rather than the film’s own. Coherent, and wider than narrow.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 96 minutes can hold. Love, friendship, marriage and divorce; the work of art and the work of commerce, in Isaac’s television job, Yale’s unwritten book on O’Neill and Mary’s novelisations; the culture of a class; and a city. They are integrated: the city is the frame in which the private failures are set, and the culture is the medium in which they are committed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside that milieu. Labour appears only as profession; the state is absent; history enters only as nostalgia; the sacred is absent; the natural order is the weather and a planetarium’s moon. A comedy of manners in one milieu, well made at its size, and the size is modest; it clears its own floor by a good margin.

Score: 6.9 / 10