Manhattan
Directed by: Woody Allen - 1 hour, 36 minutes - USA - 1979 – B&W – Blu-ray - 2.35:1
Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Mariel Hemingway, Michael Murphy, Meryl Streep
“Chapter One: He adored New York. He idolized it all out of proportion. (no no, make that…) He romanticized it all out of all proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. (ugh, no - let me start this over)”
Isaac (Woody Allen) is a frustrated, divorced middle-aged writer in New York, stuck at a job he hates, writing for television. He is dating 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), who is in love with him but who he can’t commit to. His best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is having an extramarital affair with Mary (Diane Keaton), a high-strung intellectual whose default attitude seems to be snidely dismissive, and who Isaac immediately dislikes. Yale is afraid to leave his wife and commit to Mary, and encourages Isaac to spend time with her. Mary and Isaac find in each other the same jaded and immature personalities, who both use their cynical wit to cover their insecurities.
Manhattan was the film, along with Annie Hall, that marked a major shift in Woody Allen’s career from his earlier slapstick-and-one-liner films to his later works which examined relationships, the dynamics of lovers and families, and existential dread, among other favorite Allen topics (and still plenty of one-liners). Manhattan is the film that best balances all of his ideas and inspirations, and visually it is almost without equal in Allen’s filmography. Shot by Gordon Willis, the cinematographer best known for the Godfather series, it changed the rules for what films ‘deserved’ the grandeur of CinemaScope. Allen chose to take a widescreen format associated with religious epics and action spectaculars and to turn it toward the petty arguments and insecurities of his band of Manhattan intellectuals – small conversations writ large in light. Willis took the lead to create some truly amazing shots, most famously the planetarium sequence, which abstracts the actors’ profiles until they are only thin silhouettes of light set against the darkness. Allen and Willis were so proud of the result that they wouldn’t allow the film to be altered for home video, and Manhattan became the first film to introduce “letterboxing” to the home-viewing world. It marked the start of Woody Allen’s outstanding run of films throughout the 1980s, and still holds its place as possibly his very best.