Diane Keaton, Woody Allen, and Tony Roberts form quite a team in ANNIE HALL
ANNIE HALL (Woody Allen, 1977)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Monday, March 13, $14, 7:00
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
“You’re an actor, Max. You should be doing Shakespeare in the Park,” Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) says to his best friend, Rob (Tony Roberts), in Annie Hall. “Oh, I did Shakespeare in the Park, Max. I got mugged. I was playing Richard the Second and two guys with leather jackets stole my leotard,” Rob responds. Tony Roberts is indeed an actor, with a fifty-five-year stage and screen career that includes six Allen films (Play It Again, Sam, Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Radio Days) and two Woodman plays (Don’t Drink the Water, Play It Again, Sam). Now seventy-seven, Roberts will be at Film Forum on March 13 for a special tribute; the evening begins with a screening of Annie Hall, which won four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress for Diane Keaton), followed by a conversation between Roberts and actor/producer John Martello, the former longtime executive director of the Players Club who was fired over a financial dispute in April 2013.
Best friends Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Rob (Tony Roberts) play tennis in ANNIE HALL
In Annie Hall, the steadfast, skirt-chasing Roberts stars as an actor on a hit TV series who is loving life in California, which disappoints Singer. During the film, Rob dons a sharp white suit, a space outfit, and tennis gear; however, unlike in the Broadway show Doubles, Roberts keeps his clothes on. The New York City native and two-time Tony nominee has also appeared in such films as Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Amityville 3-D, and Switch and such Broadway productions as Barefoot in the Park, They’re Playing Our Song, The Sisters Rosensweig, and Promises, Promises. He also starred in an all-star two-part Love Boat episode as cruise director Julie McCoy’s (Lauren Tewes) long-lost love; the cast also included Lorne Green, Mark Harmon, Eleanor Parker, Ray Milland, Julia Duffy, Donny Most, and Lisa Hartman. It should be a splendid event honoring this character actor extraordinaire, who gets to play a leading role for a night.
Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is a devastating portrait of addiction, featuring one of the most brutal endings in cinema history. Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn), who cowrote the screenplay with Aronofsky, the Coney Island-set film focuses on four central figures: Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), a lonely widow living in Brighton Beach who learns that she might appear on a television program so is desperate to lose weight to fit into her red dress, ultimately getting lost in a haze of prescription drugs; her son, Harry (Jared Leto), a junkie looking to make a big score; Harry’s girlfriend, Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly), who dreams of becoming a fashion designer but has to decide how far she will go for her next taste; and Harry’s partner in crime, Tyrone Love (Marlon Wayans), who shoots up while remembering the warm comfort of his mother’s arms. Using repetitive fast-paced editing, enhanced sound effects, and a harrowing score by Clint Mansell, Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Wrestler, PI) creates a nightmare world where delusional dreams come crashing down with horrific consequences. The acting throughout is a veritable tour de force, led by Burstyn’s Oscar-nominated descent into hell. Requiem for a Dream is screening November 15-16 at 12:05 am as part of the Nitehawk Cinema series “November Brunch & Midnite: Thx Bklyn,” a month-long collection of films either set in Brooklyn or written and/or directed by Brooklynites, being shown on weekend mornings and midnights, continuing with J. Michael Muro’s Street Trash, Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive, Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale.
When rich kid Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders (Beau Bridges) finally decides to do something with his spoiled life of privilege, he takes a rather curious turn, buying a dilapidated tenement in a pregentrified Park Slope that resembles the South Bronx in Hal Ashby’s poignant directorial debut, The Landlord. At first, the less-than-worldly Elgar doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into, believing it will be easy to kick out the current residents and then replace the decrepit building with luxury apartments. He pulls up to the place in his VW bug convertible, thinking he can just waltz in and do whatever he wants, but just as his car is vandalized, so is his previously charmed existence, as he gets to know wise house mother Marge (Pearl Bailey), the sexy Francine (Diana Sands), her activist husband, Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.), and Black Power professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart), none of whom is up-to-date with the rent. Meanwhile, Elgar starts dating Lanie (Marki Bey), a light-skinned half-black club dancer he assumed was white, infuriating his father, William (Walter Brooke), and mother, Joyce (a delightful, Oscar-nominated Lee Grant), who are in the process of setting up their daughter, Susan (Susan Anspach), with the white-bread Peter Coots (Robert Klein).
Anthology Film Archives’ “From the Pen of . . .” series, honoring some of the great cinema scribes and source writers, continues with a pair of tense, powerful fact-based dramas directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Bronx native Al Pacino that helped define the 1970s, both onscreen and off. In Dog Day Afternoon, one of the most bizarre bank robberies gone wrong you’ll ever see, Pacino stars as Sonny, a confused young man desperate to get money to pay for his boyfriend’s (Chris Sarandon) sex-change operation. But things don’t go quite as planned, and soon Sonny is leading the gathered crowd in chants of “Attica! Attica!” while his partner, Sal (John Cazale), wants a plane to take them to Wyoming and Det. Moretti (Charles Durning) is trying to get them to surrender without hurting anyone, primarily themselves. Written by Frank Pierson — who won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay — Dog Day Afternoon is a blistering, funny, biting commentary on mid-’70s New York as well as a fascinating character study of a deeply conflicted man. In Serpico, another gritty, realistic drama, Pacino gives an unforgettable performance as an undercover cop single-handedly trying to end the rampant corruption that has spread like a disease throughout the NYPD. When his fellow officers and supposed friends turn their back on him, he is left on his own, vulnerable but still committed, risking both his career and his life to do what he thinks is right. Based on Peter Maas’s book, Serpico earned a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler. Pacino is explosive in both films, playing two very different protagonists on different sides of the law yet similar in so many ways. The series runs through December 10 with such other films as Midnight Cowboy, Cat Ballou, French Connection II, and The Seven-Ups.
