Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) and Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) don’t always see eye-to-eye in classic romantic comedy
ANNIE HALL (Woody Allen, 1977)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, November 6, 9:00, and Tuesday, November 8, 1:45
Series continues through November 10
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
One of the funniest, most-quoted romantic comedies in film history, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is a pure delight from start to finish. It’s ostensibly a luuuuuurve story about a nebbishy Jew (Allen as Alvy Singer) and the ultimate WASPy goy (Diane Keaton as the title character), but it’s really about so much more: large vibrating eggs, right turns on red lights, television, Existential Motifs in Russian Literature, California, slippery crustaceans, driving through Plutonium, dead sharks, Freud, Hitler, Leopold and Loeb, religion, cocaine, Shakespeare in the Park, Buick-size spiders, planet Earth, and, well, la-di-da, la-di-da, la la. Nominated for five Oscars and taking home four — for Best Original Screenplay (Allen and Marshall Brickman), Best Director (Allen), Best Actress (Keaton), and Best Film — Annie Hall is screening November 6 and 8 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Hollywood’s ‘Jew Wave’” series, where such scenes as Annie’s grandmother seeing Alvy as an Orthodox rabbi at the dinner table should take on added significance. The eleven-day festival features eighteen (chai!) movies by and/or about Jews made between 1968 and 1977, a period that saw the influx of such actors as Elliott Gold, George Segal, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Richard Dreyfuss, Zero Mostel, and other members of the tribe. Allen fans should also be interested in checking out Martin Ritt’s The Front, in which Woody plays a bookie who becomes a front for blacklisted writers (one of whom, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, will be on hand for a Q&A on November 7), and The Touch, an English-language film made by one of the Woodman’s biggest influences, Ingmar Bergman.