Love, Death and La - De - Dah

What's a nice girl like Annie Hall doingin a film like Mr. Goodbar?

  • Share
  • Read Later

(3 of 7)

Audiences begin cheering Annie Hall with the first scene, when Annie and Alvy meet after a tennis game (she wearing men's brown pants, an unpressed white shirt, a black vest, and a ridiculously long polka-dot tie, an outfit Diane might have found on the floor of her own closet). She starts to compliment him on his tennis, gets lost in one of her enchanted word-forests, then subsides into pretty embarrassment: "Oh, God, Annie ... Well, oh, well ..." And then the murmur of defeat: "La-de-dah, la-de-dah." Heartbreaking. Does anyone doubt that young women across the country are looking into their mirrors and trying to find just the right intonation with which to murmur "La-de-dah"?

The plot of Annie Hall has the two underweight egos twine together, rose and briar. For a while they twitch as one, forming a touching sort of pill pool and neurosis bank in Alvy's Manhattan apartment. Then it is over. Annie drifts off to Los Angeles; Alvy writes a play about the affair, wistfully giving it a happy ending in which the lovers unite. The film's details are not meant to match reality exactly. Keaton, then 22, and Allen, then 33, met when he was casting his Broadway comedy Play It Again, Sam, not after a tennis match; her career was farther advanced than Annie's; she did move out of Allen's apartment, but she stayed in New York, and lived for a while with another man. Through the five years since they split, she and Allen have maintained an unshakable friendship; they confer at dinner, catch a Knicks' game, work together, each one busily putting bubble-gum patches on the insecurities of the other.

Whether or not their actual affair now seems in some ways funny to them, Allen's humor has never fitted its subject better. Annie Hall addicts have been returning to theaters three and four times. Allen fans recite bits such as the one that shows Alvy and Annie, on a split screen, talking to their shrinks about the frequency with which they have sex. "Hardly ever," says Alvy, aggrieved; "maybe three times a week." "All the time," says Annie, fed up; "at least three times a week."

Woody Allen came from a Jewish family in Brooklyn; Diane Keaton's parents are Methodists who live in Southern California. She lacks the spooky older brother of Annie Hall (she has a younger brother, unspooky, and two younger sisters). But there is general agreement that the dinner scene, in which Alvy imagines that "Grammy Hall" sees him with yarmulke, full beard, earlocks and frock coat, bears some resemblance to truth.

There is a Grammy Hall, in her 80s, who is still trying to fix Diane up with nice young men from her neighborhood in Los Angeles. She thinks the film was very funny and says, "That Woody Allen, he's something! I can't make head or tail out of half of what he says." She, not Diane, appears to be the ranking family cutup; when Diane's sister Dorrie, 24, had to write a genealogical essay in the manner of Roots for college, Grammy Hall obligingly gave phony details about ancestors unto the fifth generation.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7