Woody Allen's heart and Gordon Willis' camera conjure up a Platonic Ideal of Manhattan in Manhattan, a visual love poem to the city set to George Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue.” But in the shadow-world below, Allen's mortals have never been so utterly revealed as mice scurrying around an interior maze, struggling to be good and still lead the good life, and haunted by the pristine images the cityscape (and the cinema) offer up. For all its humor and humanity, Manhattan is a bitter chaser to the sweet and winning Annie Hall. Woody Allen's loving neb-
bish has become the consummate middle-aged manipulator, upping the ante on the shiksa obsession by finding, then rejecting a doe-eyed beauty (Mariel Hemingway) twenty-five years his junior. The colt-like edginess of Diane Keaton's Annie Hall has hardened into the brittleness of her throughly modern Mary Wilke. (“Keaton,” wrote columnist Herb Caen, “...gives the word ‘neurotic' a bad name.”)
Much has been written about Allen and Willis' contribution to the “city symphony” films, but critic Myron Meisel observes their less obvious use of widescreen: “The (final) confrontation (between Allen and Hemingway) inevitably recalls the climax of Chaplin's City Lights, even unto the camera setups and crosscutting. But where Charlie faced the blind girl he loved as she sees him for the first time (and he is recognized as only a tramp), here Allen seems to be seeing himself for the first time.... Chaplin plays most of the scene with the camera behind him, conjuring up an amazingly complex range of emotion with the back of his neck, while Allen, who can only offer the truth, stares embarrassed before the gaze of his anamorphic lens, lost in the wide wash of the frame.”