Annie Hall (1977)
Directed by Woody Allen
New York comedian Alvy Singer falls in love with the ditsy Annie Hall.
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8 films that influenced Annie Hall
What critics say influenced Annie Hall
Believe it or not, such comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem, for Allen has been strongly influenced by Bergman - beyond just borrowing a specific visual trick from Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” (in flashback scenes showing him as a carrot-topped, girl-crazy grade schooler, Allen is also present as a grown man, offering comments on his behavior) or including a scene where he and his co-star, Diane Keaton, meet at a theater playing Bergman’s “Face to Face.”
Other movies have incorporated The Wizard of Oz into their fabric, notably Woody Allen's Annie Hall , Martin Scorsese's After Hours and David Lynch's Wild at Heart , not to mention the popular book/Broadway play Wicked, which tells the story from the Wicked Witch's perspective.
Inspired by Federico Fellini’s “8½”, “Annie Hall” contains the seeds of the deconstructionist template Woody Allen has avidly pursued throughout much of his career.
The montage of his school days contains great wit, and will influence a similar scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, and scenes involving the fascists combine seriousness with comedy.
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For all of Mr. Allen's growth as a writer, director and actor, "Annie Hall" is not terribly far removed from "Take the Money and Run," his first work as a triple-threat man, which is not to put down the new movie but to upgrade the earlier one.
Brickman was the one who, along with editor Ralph Rosenblum (who had worked with Woody since his first film Take the Money and Run in 1969) spoke up about the original cut of Annie Hall being incomprehensible and in desperate need of reworking.
Its tale of the eagerly criminal career of Virgil Starkwell is as unpredictably structured as Annie Hall, if not yet anything like as sustained in tone and mood.
Annie Hall is refreshing because it showed an astonishing leap in creativity, exploration, and cinematic curiosity from Allen's previous film, the very funny but flat Love and Death.
Previous movies such as the mock Russian literature epic "Love and Death" are funnier but are only really a sequence of gags.
After skewing Russian literature (Love and Death), political leaders (Bananas), and future nostalgia (Sleeper) in broad comedies, it was as if Woody said, “Okay, you’ve seen that I can be funny, now it’s time to get to know me a little bit.”
The comic level of Annie Hall is not as high or frantic as in Allen's Sleeper or Love and Death.
A culmination and a transition, refining the spray-gun approach of Sleeper en route to Annie Hall, and, like Twain's The Innocents Abroad or Jones' What's Opera, Doc?, an act of artistic debunking that reassures the importance of art.
Sleeper belongs to Allen's pre-Annie Hall movie output when he relied heavier on pure slapstick and one-liners to elicit laughs from his audiences.
The film is early Allen, which is to say that the director is in a far more loose and playful mood than the movies that would come after his Academy Award-winning "Annie Hall."
Woody Allen ("Annie Hall"/"Take the Money and Run"/"Zelig") loads up his futuristic sci-fi comedy with slapstick, sight gags, Mack Sennett-inspired chases and one-liners.
Around the time Annie Hall was made, Allen was transitioning from broad, slapstick-heavy spoofs such as Sleeper and Bananas toward more personal, introspective comedies and dramas.
The comic level of Annie Hall is not as high or frantic as in Allen's Sleeper or Love and Death.
After skewing Russian literature (Love and Death), political leaders (Bananas), and future nostalgia (Sleeper) in broad comedies, it was as if Woody said, “Okay, you’ve seen that I can be funny, now it’s time to get to know me a little bit.”
Around the time Annie Hall was made, Allen was transitioning from broad, slapstick-heavy spoofs such as Sleeper and Bananas toward more personal, introspective comedies and dramas.
After skewing Russian literature (Love and Death), political leaders (Bananas), and future nostalgia (Sleeper) in broad comedies, it was as if Woody said, “Okay, you’ve seen that I can be funny, now it’s time to get to know me a little bit.”