Word: allene
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film should not come as a complete surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Allen's doings lately. This is the movie that Annie Hall hinted at and to which last year's Interiors, flawed as it was, seems to have served as a necessary prelude. It is even possible to perceive some of its themes in Allen's work ever since he began making movies on his own in 1969 (Take the Money and Run was the first pure Woody). It could be argued that the difference between Manhattan and its predecessors is chiefly one of degree...
Take simply the matter of visual style. His early films had a good workman's lack of clutter, and since Allen was almost as fond of visual parody as he was of the verbal kind, they showed an ability to ape the masters. Beginning with Sleeper (1973), a conscious coherence, a striving for a certain elegance came into his films, growing through Love and Death (1975), becoming lush and nicely jumbled in Annie Hall (1977), turning austere to the point of being mannered in Interiors...
...impression is of sheer confidence. The black and white carries an air of nostalgic romance, and it suits Allen's character in the film, who has, as Woody says, "the poignancy of age. He raps contemporary mores. He's clinging to Gershwin, the music of the past and to black and white." Beyond that, Allen lets long scenes play without break. The camera often just sits on its haunches and stares, without even a close-up or a reverse angle intruding. Variation comes from movement within the frame; sometimes, in fact, the actor moves right out of it, keeps talking...
...disappeared. Isaac Davis has his troubles with women, but he presents himself as a man who has "never had any trouble finding women." At the center of the film there is his relationship with a teen-age girl daringly presented in idealistic terms, an affair the old Allen would have made a guilty joke about and passed quickly over. Now he makes some guilty jokes but stays around to explore the affair and its meaning with tenderness and concern. Gone too are the jokes about his deprived childhood in Brooklyn. Isaac Davis has, it appears, absorbed his early life...
...that statement, all the strands he has so carefully laid out in this movie come together. Visually, and with glorious help from an often ironically used Gershwin score, he has turned Manhattan, which is one of Allen's passions, into a dream city, deliberately contrasting the awesome aspirations implicit in its construction with the distracted lives he sees taking place in it. He says: "There's no center to the culture. We have this opulent, relatively well-educated culture, and yet we see a great city like New York deterioriate. We see people lose themselves in drugs because they...