When Woody woke the morning after the 1978 Academy Award ceremonies, he learned from The New York Times that his film Annie Hall had swept the Oscars, picking up trophies for Best Actress (Diane Keaton), Best Original Screenplay (Allen and Marshall Brickman), Direction (Allen) and Best Picture of the Year. Woody himself had not bothered to fly to California to attend, but instead spent the evening playing clarinet at Michael's Pub, then later read himself to sleep with Conversations with Carl Jung. When asked his reaction to the awards, Woody said simply: "I was very surprised. I felt good for Diane because she wanted to win. My friend Marshall and my producers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe (who accepted the award for Woody) had a very nice time. But I'm anhedonic."

In fact, "Anhedonia" had been the original title for the film that would eventually become Annie Hall, though he was in the end persuaded by United Artists to change it only weeks before the film's release. Anhedonia, of course, refers to the psychological situation that might be described as acute melancholia: the inability to enjoy oneself, no matter how pleasant one's circumstances. And while the thrust of the film was changed, during the writing, filming, and editing, to the relationship between Jewish night club comic Alvy Singer and his shiksa goddess Annie Hall, the theme of anhedonia still runs through the picture, sewing as the key that unlocks Alvy's characterization. Woody's collaborator, Marshall Brickman, told interviewer Susan Braudy that he and Woody wrote Annie Hall by "walking up and down Lexington Avenue and across to Madison and talking and talking and talking." Sometimes, they would stop long enough for ice cream. The process of working with Woody became a sort of "highly stylized conversation," and in the end it was impossible to pick out who had contributed what. "When you collaborate," Brickman said, "you arc both responsible for everything. You never knew when one person will make the other person think of something. The early parts are hard. You try not to make any big mistakes, to paint yourself' into a comer."

For instance, in their first draft, Woody and Marshall made Diane Keaton a neurotic New York girl, but soon realized that left no room for dramatic transition. This led to their assigning her a family in Wisconsin. "You keep asking each others who is this guy, what are his values? Face it, the movie only hints at profound issues, but we asked ourselves, 'Is it neurosis or honesty that makes the character Woody plays so pessimistic? Is it merely maladjustment, immaturity, or is it a relentless philosophical integrity?'" For his part, Woody had wanted, al least since December 1973, to write a murder mystery. While Sleeper was still in its Christmas release, Woody worked on just such a story with plans of beginning production that spring. However, the script did not successfully gel, and instead Woody started work on the film that would eventually become Love and Death. But the murder mystery would eventually be written and shot, though never seen by the public.

Woody himself described Annie Hall as being "subjective and random" in its style, while Diane Keaton noted that a key distinction between this movie and some of Allen's earliest, whackier efforts, was that here "The jokes come out of behavior rather than absurd circumstances." The critics, who had long since decided Woody Allen was our great comic auteur and were hungry to happen upon a film which would establish him as the American Ingmar Bergman as well as the contemporary Chaplin, gushed over Annie Hall, paving the way for the Oscar sweep.

Ray Loynd of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner hailed it as "his wittiest, best film to date, both more socially and personally observant in its departure into the foibles and traumas of a human relationship." In Saturday Review, Judith Crist called it "Allen's most satisfying creation and our most gratifying comedic experience in recent years." In Time, Richard Schickel wrote: "a ruefully romantic comedy that is at least as poignant as it is funny and may be the most autobiographical film ever made by a major comic." In Newsweek, Janet Maslin heralded the film as "bracingly adventuresome and unexpectedly successful, with laughs as satisfying as those in any of Allen's other movies and a whole new staying power." Even the near-constant Allen critic Stanley Kauffmann tolerantly wrote in The New Republic that "the cheery news [is] he has written his best film script and he is now a competent director." Only a small handful of critics found anything negative to say, though Pauline Kael did call it "the neurotic's version of Abie's Irish Rose," while M. J. Sobran, Jr., wrote in the National Review that "What it finally comes to is ninety minutes of coitus interruptus, fun but fruitless. Annie Hall may look like a comedy or a romance, but it's really a tsuris trap."

Critics who hailed Annie Hall as Woody's "breakthrough film" (and that was most everybody) failed to notice how many serious undercurrents there were in the earlier films, or the growing sense of darkness in theme. They also fail to take into account that Annie contains much recycled material. When Alvy performs a stand-up routine for a college audience, his line about cheating on a metaphysics test CI looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me! ") is only one of a large number of gags taken directly from Woody's own earlier night club routines, and an awareness of this makes it impossible not to take Alvy Singer as an autobiographical figure for Allen himself. Beyond that, it helps us understand the function of this film for Woody at that point in his career: by including so much old material, he makes this a compendium of his work up to that point. Though A.H. was hailed as the beginning of Woody's new direction, it may be more correctly perceived as an apotheosis of his earlier work, solidifying all his material from that previous period and freeing him to start fresh in the next one. After all, Interiors (love it or hate it) is certainly a "new" venture in a way A.H. was not.

Thus, people who look back at the film today, and wonder why this relatively slight if often charming romantic-comedy could have won the Oscar for Best Picture, need to put the film in its proper context. Timing can play a devastating factor in the question of whether a film does well or poorly, both at the

box-office and in the critical response it elicits. A.H. could not possibly have been better timed. As Diane Jacobs argues, "Social as well as artistic factors contributed to [its] immediate success." That may be an understatement! A.H. looks, to anyone casually catching it for the first time, like one of the most artistically overrated films in cinema history, but one must study it as a celluloid document that arrived midway through the 1970's to understand the impression it made.

Certainly, the question of feminlsm and its impact on the traditional male-female relationships was a significant one for people surviving the era when the sexual and social revolutionary changes of the 1960's lost their flower-power idealism and came crashing up against the brick wall of reality. The difficulty of making an old-fashioned, romantic, committed, traditional relationship work in the new no-rules aura of adapting to constant upheavals in lifestyle weighed heavily on the minds of people who had been young in the swinging sixties and were now approaching early middle age. That "nervous romance" between Alvy and Annie may have been a combination of autobiography and imaginative invention, but a certain sector of the public saw in it a screen romance that captured the way they lived, boiling down man-woman relationships in the Me Decade to a symbol of what everyone (or, at least, everyone who counted) was going through. It spoke to them on a level Woody himself may not have even been trying to communicate; they saw in A.H. what they wanted to see, and that was a love story for their time, and of their time.

Which, of course, opened the film up to charges that it glorified the culture of narcissism. Some of Diane Keaton's comments (to Time out) indeed do make the film sound like just such a document: "Some people have come up to me and said, there's so much of what we feel in it. It's about relationships now, and what it's like for us. I mean, obviously, there's been a change (in society at large). There's many more people who are single and not actually ready to get married .... Women who are 30 and not ready and not knowing if they want to get married and who are still finding out about themselves." What's important, though, is that the film is about something more than all this: ultimately, it's about the emptiness of the culture of narcissism. Keaton describes Annie's attitudes as though they were one and the same with the attitudes of the movie itself. But the film, its title notwithstanding, actually shares Alvy's attitude, his point of view of Annie and what happens to her.

Allen's symbol for the culture of narcissism is Southern California, with its perennial sunlight, hot tubs, health food restaurants, and synthetic TV sit-corns. In contrast to all this is the island of Manhattan. "I do have an over-idealized view of New York," Woody told me at the time of the film's release. "In A.H. I was careful to shoot on gray, overcast days so it would look moody and romantic. In Los Angeles, we shot in hot light because that is what strikes me about L.A., that bright sunlight." As Annie becomes more and more a part of the L.A. scene, Alvy senses he is losing her but, beyond that, fears even more that she is losing the wonderful quality she once had--when she was in New York. That Annie will eventually return to New York on her own, after their break-up is final, and that Alvy will run into her at a threatre where The Sorrow and the Pity (his favorite film, a four-hour documentary about Nazism) is playing, suggests that like Alvy, Annie is one of those radical innocents who may be temporarily tempted by hedonist pleasures but will always instinctually return to what is truly important in life. If a reconciliation between them is too much to hope for, at least there is the part of her that has not changed, that comes back if not to him then at least to his city, where rude cab drivers and dirt on the streets stand for something more basic and valuable than the antiseptic accoutrements found in Los Angeles.

The character who here stands for the culture of narcissism is Alvy's one-time best friend in New ~,~ York, Rob (Tony Roberts), who surrenders to the world of sunscreens, available blonde bimbos, and phony laugh tracks to cover up bad TV material. Rob never comes back to New York ("I played Shakespeare in the park--somebody stole my leotard!"), ; ii; opting instead for the pleasure of the moment and ~ an eternity of mediocrity. For Annie, Tony Lacy (Paul Simon) is the silver-tongued devil who seduces her with promises of a lovely lotus-eating present, but despite her seeming acceptance of this world (she looks amazingly like Luna in the early scenes of Sleeper when Alvy visits her), Annie eventually breaks with it (for reasons never shared with us). Alvy returns to writing his serious work, trying out new relationships, even though the one he wants with Annie can no longer be. Despite the large number of laughs along the way, the ending is bittersweet.

This was, after all, the age of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (the movie version of which starred, intriguingly enough, Diane Keaton), the era of singles bars and swift encounters, These are the very qualities Alvy (and Allen) turns his back on; he wants a lasting relationship. Like the earlier films, A.H. is about marriage, only this time the theme has to be re-interpreted somewhat for the seventies. In flashbacks, we see Alvy's earlier, unsuccessful relationships with women, including his failed marriages to both Allison Porshnik (Carol Kane), a political activist who (like Louise Lasser in Bananas) takes the man who professes little interest in politics (though he does meet her at an Adlai Stevenson fund raiser) and makes him so political that he can't sleep with her for trying to sort out the Kennedy conspiracy possibilities, and Robin (Janet Margolin), a pretty but pretentious member of the New York literary set. We also see, in terms of the depiction of relations with woman, his least satisfying affair: with Pare (Shelley Duvall), a rock critic for Rolling Stone who, in her total pseudo-hipness, is a fitting symbol for the Culture of Narcissism and is quickly rejected by Alvy, following a brief and unsatisfying (for him) tryst.

Then, of course, there is Annie. In the earlier Woody Allen films, the idea of people co-habitating in an unwedded state seemed naughty and fun; it was only after they formalized their relationships that problems set in. In A.H., the problems set in the moment Annie moves in with Alvy, even though marriage is not yet an issue. It's important, though, to keep in mind that unlike the earlier Allen films, A.H. belongs to the mid-seventies. Indeed, as compared to "swinging" (the casual pick-ups of the bar scene), a couple living together, and working at maintaining a relationship, seemed in this new decade's context to be almost old-fashioned. Although Woody and Annie never do get around to formalizing their relationship with a wedding vow, the point is that from the moment when they begin living together (and the relationship begins to fall apart!), they are spiritually if not technically married. That explains why all those terrors Woody depicted in the married states of characters in earlier films haunt Annie and Alvy in their (technically speaking) non-married state.

Once more, there are nightmare visions of frightening marriages offered by both sets of parents: Annie's cold, formal, foreboding WASP parents; Alvy's vulgar, warmhearted, sloppy Jewish parents. Alvy looks at each pair and is seized with foreboding: he doesn't want to turn out like either, and resists a commitment--at least early on, when Annie is pushing for one. But Alvy/Allen's anhedonia also figures in. When Annie wants to work toward a lasting commitment, he is miserable because he fears it; when Annie begins to wander off in her own directions--emotionally, intellectually and sexually--he is horrified and wants her to move back in, even proposing marriage. He is, in the end, alone (though not without companionship, since we see him on a date with no less a beauty than Sigourney Weaver) because he did not act in time; it was the failure to commit himself at that moment when it must be done that consigns him to later being a friend, rather than a lover-husband, to Annie. Alvy begrudgingly accepts his fate: he clearly wants to maintain that freedom which Annie threatened, but at the same time realizes there is an emptiness without commitment to the right person. For Alvy, that person could only be Annie Hall, and all relationships afterwards are likely to be letdowns.

That Allen the artist understands far more than Alvy the character does is made clear by his constant comparisons of life to art, and his insistence the reason we need to create art is not to achieve immortality (a notion Woody rejects) but to make things work out perfectly. Early in the film, as Alvy and Annie wait in line to see a movie, he is angered by a loudmouth pseudo-intellectual's babbling about Marshall McLuhan; Alvy then yanks McLuhan out from behind an advertising display, and the great media prophet tells the astounded professor that he knows nothing of McLuhan's work. "Boy," AIW says, turning to the audience, "if life were only like this." Woody once more makes us self-conscious about the fact that we are watching a film; he also makes clear that such a wonderful little victory is possible only because Allen the artist is in control of what happens to Alvy.

Toward the film's end, we see Alvy turning his unpleasant California experience with Annie (she refused to resume their relationship) into art; many of the words are the same ("So this is how it ends--at a health food store on Sunset Boulevard") but with one key difference: in the play, just as the young actor performing Alvy's role is about to leave, the young actress playing Annie decides to go back with him. "What do you want?" Alvy asks us. "It was my first play." Then he adds: "You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's so difficult in life."

The result is a kind of patchwork quilt of a film, and it contrasts remarkably with the perfectly seamless Manhattan, which in fact would be the perfect realization of the kind of movie Allen was attempting in A.H. Here, Allen tries to alternate comedy with drama, and fails to quite pull off the delicate balance he's after; in Manhattan, he more wisely, more artistically blends rather than balances the two elements. A.H. is actually an imperfect though necessary dry-run for Manhattan.

In the meantime, he had produced an uncertain brew: an uneasy mixture of pleasant gags and problem melodrama, the most blatant expression thus far of Woody's key themes. The paradox principle has never been more aptly illustrated than in the use of split screen to show us Alvy and Annie visiting their shrinks at the same time, simultaneously interpreting the same facts in totally different ways. When asked if they have sex often, Annie replies, "Constantly...three times a week," while he says "Hardly ever... three times a week." This, of course, also establishes the theme of analysis, introduced earlier in the film when young Alvy is analyzed by a doctor who wants to understand why the child has stopped doing his homework. His reason is simple: he has fallen into an anhedonic state after learning that in several million years the universe will be no more. All logical attempts to make him understand that iJ doesn't matter, since we will all be long dead anyway, do not help; the problem is, he has had a glimmer of the perishability and impermanence of everything, not just of individual men or man himself but the cosmos that contains us all. Why work to leave something for the future when eventually there will be no more future?

But Alvy does continue to work, so the serious art vs. hedonism theme also comes into play. Alvy may not be able to achieve any lasting sense of being through art, but he continues to try and create art for art's sake, because it is what he was meant to do. The opposite of that, of course, is commerce, and nowhere has he more heatedly attacked television and the people who create it than here. We see Alvy growing sick at the thought of giving away an award on a live TV show, becoming nauseous when he sees the pathetic non-art his friend Rob creates. As compared to the anathema of television, there is the appeal of movies: that Alvy constantly goes to see a documentary film attests to Allen's strong affinity for that form (we think of Take the Money... and Zelig); his attending Bergman's Face to Face allows us to realize that such heavyweight projects have assumed the role once played in his life by Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.

Woody's death obsession is in ample evidence here: he gives Annie only books with the word "death" in the title, though he seems downright healthy in rejecting the death obsessions of the apparently normal brother of Annie, Duane (Christopher Walken), who feels a compulsion to drive directly into someone else's car. Duane and his family represent those genteel gentiles who at one moment seem so superior to the sloppier Jewish characters, then a second later look cold and unin-viting compared to the loving (if less than sophisti-cared) Jews. In this context, it's worth mentioning that Woody here effectively revives a joke he muffed in an earlier film. In Take the Money, we heard the narrator claim a serum experimented with in prison temporarily turned Virgil into a rabbi. When we then see him looking like a Hasidic Jew, the visual gag does nothing but duplicate the verbal gag. However, in the scene in which Alvy has Easter dinner with the Hall family, Woody recycles that gag, now making it work beautifully: Grammy Hall (Helen Ludlam), already described by Alvy as "a classic Jew-hater," observes him trying pathetically to eat the ham; then we see him from her point of view, looking like that same Hasidic Jew. Here, though, the gag works because it doesn't follow a line of dialogue, but is strictly visual.

The Easter dinner sequence furthers the "enormous restaurant" theme, as Alvy's discomfort with his lover's family is expressed through food. "We'll kiss now... then go eat," Alvy tells Annie ~n their very first date. His initial repulsion at what she orders in the dell (pastfatal on white bread with mayo and lettuce) suggests the problems that lay' ahead for them, though the scene in which they prepare lobsters together paves the way for their more pleasurable moments. Woody's scorn for intellectuals is in evidence in the New York literary party sequence, where he prefers to slip into the bedroom and watch a Knicks game on TV; the body always takes precedence over the brain, though we sense he would give anything to be back at that New York literary party when he later finds himself at an insipid California party. Allen doesn't sentimentalize Alvy: his hero is downright nasty when, on their first meeting, he reduces Allison to a cultural clichd, and she effectively, if gently, puts him down for it; when Annie and Alvy sit on a bench, sarcastically commenting on the people walking by ("Here comes the winner of the Truman Capore lookalike contest," he says, and the man is played by Truman Capote), there is an air of superiority and cruelty to their banter. His attitude toward authority is clear when a policeman attempts to give him a ticket and instead of handing over his driver's license, Alvy rips it up; and his incompetence with machines is seen when he bangs his car into two others. When Alvy tries to "assimilate" into WASP culture, the results are suitably hysterical, and when he tries to associate with modern, ostensibly "hip" people, he fares no better.

In the end, he must learn to live with the notion that nothing is permanent ("Love fades!" proclaims a little old lady on the street), and in A.H., the Woody persona appears to be begrudgingly accepting what the Diane Keaton character told him in Sleeper: that there are chemicals in our systems which eventually make us get on each others' nerves. Part of the problem stems from the inability to communicate through language: in the scene in which subtitles tell us what the characters are really thinking as compared to what they say (mundane cocktail-hour patter as compared to inner angst), Woody's theme of the inadequacy of language is perfectly expressed. He even touches on an issue that will grow in importance in several films such as Stardust Memory and Zelig: the concept of celebrity being both an attractive and difficult status, as when Alvy--waiting in front of a movie for Annie to join him--is surrounded by ferocious looking autograph hunters.

Most of all, though, Woody had the chance to further delineate his attitudes about women and the inability of men ever to completely comprehend them. He fluctuates, thinking of Annie at one moment as a cartoon of an evil queen (a vision of her which, significantly, he finds sexually stimulating), a gentle and rewarding friend the next. Pam may find sex with him to be "a Katka-esque experience," but he rejects the one-night stand with the hedonist to pursue the woman whom he helped, Svengali-like, to enlighten, only to find her needing to liberate herself from the man who liberated her. He is, of course, on a search for his own identity, underlined by the fact that his friend Rob makes up a name for him ("Max") which he uses in reference to Alvy throughout the film; this only underscores Woody's own search for a new identity through the making of this daring and more demanding picture.