Woody Allen’s New York love song

Film Forum

Woody Allen and Diane Keaton before the 59th Street Bridge, one of the most iconic scenes from “Manhattan.”

By WILL McKINLEY

If you’re going to see Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” which begins a weeklong run on Friday at Film Forum, please don’t be late. Because you don’t want to miss the first four minutes.

“It’s one of the best openings in the history of movies,” said Foster Hirsch, author of “Love, Sex, Death and The Meaning of Life: The Films of Woody Allen.” “Every proud Manhattanite should show up to see the film for that opening alone.”

As the movie begins, Allen’s character Isaac Davis writes and re-writes (in voiceover) the opening lines of his novel, while cinematographer Gordon Willis’ masterfully composed, black and white picture postcards of New York City waltz across the wide screen to a Gershwin beat, courtesy of Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic.

If you’ve lived here all your life — or for much of it — you’ll smile each time you recognize a forgotten memory: a clothesline dangling between two tenement buildings; a phalanx of real New Yorkers at a bank of Times Square payphones; the marquee for the late ’70s Broadway hit “Mummenschanz.” But at the same time that “Manhattan” reminds us of the city’s past, it is also remarkably timeless.

“Gordon Willis’ work is crucial to the film,” said Kent Jones, Editor-at-Large of “Film Comment” magazine. “It removed the action instantly from 1979. He also created some of the most romantic images in American cinema — the POV shot from the moving carriage, the 59th Street Bridge. It’s stunning.”

Allen loves to work with the world’s great cinematographers, but “Manhattan,” more so than any of his other films, is truly a piece of collaborative visual art. And, in Film Forum’s beautiful new 35mm print, “Manhattan” shines again. The film resonates in hyper-realistic style, the artsy naturalism of Willis’ low-key lighting and unobtrusive camerawork only adding to the credibility of the story.

“It was amazingly sophisticated for an American comedy, visually speaking,” said Hirsch, who has been a film professor at Brooklyn College for more than three decades. “But the style of the film isn’t arbitrary. The mis en scene tells us something about the characters and their relationships.”

Like in many of Allen’s films, the twisted tango of modern love lies at the core of “Manhattan.” Allen plays a demoralized television writer whose married best friend (Michael Murphy) is having an affair with a pompous journalist named Mary (Diane Keaton). Allen ends up falling for the frizzy, frazzled Mary, a development made all the more complicated by his relationship with a younger woman named Tracy, played by the luminous — and Oscar nominated — Mariel Hemingway.

And therein lies the problem that many people have with “Manhattan.” Allen’s character is 42. Hemingway’s character is a 17-year-old high school student.

“Even at the time it was felt that there was something in ‘Manhattan’ that was a little too personal and fetishistic,” Hirsch noted. “In light of Allen’s own personal history, that relationship has become even more problematic.”

The filmmaker’s personal history is well known and, admittedly, you can’t help but cringe a bit as the middle-aged Woody of “Manhattan” loiters outside of the Dalton School, waiting for his jailbait girlfriend. But the mentor-student dynamic between Allen’s arrested development misanthrope and Hemingway’s wise-beyond-her-years optimist is what rescues their courtship — and the film — from creepy perversity. It’s hard not to be charmed as Allen and Hemingway sit in bed eating Chinese food and watching a W.C. Fields movie on “The Late Show,” or as Tracy councils Isaac to “have more faith in people” in the emotional homage to Chaplin’s “City Lights” that is the film’s final scene.

“The perception of the film has changed, but I’m not sure it’s because of the mishegas 14 years ago,” said Jones, who is also the Associate Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “I think it’s that times have changed and people have, in the intervening years, become more sensitive about the issue of young people in sexual relationships with older people. At the time it didn’t seem odd. Now it does, but not in a way that hurts the film.”

Some people might have differing opinions on that, specifically the voters of the American Film Institute’s recently announced list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. The filmmaker’s 1977 comedy “Annie Hall” was ranked at number 35 on the AFI survey, but “Manhattan” is nowhere to be found

.“I would disagree with that decision,” said Hirsch. “What’s so good about ‘Manhattan’ is that it has this mixture of comedy and something else. The result is a fusion of tones that works beautifully.”

After a decade of writing (or co-writing, with collaborator Marshall Brickman), directing and starring in slapstick screen comedies, “Annie Hall” was Allen’s first truly grown-up film, but in “Manhattan,” Woody Allen matured as a comic filmmaker. He isn’t desperate to make us laugh so we will like him.

“His earlier films are an outgrowth of his start as a stand-up comic,” Hirsch said. “They’re filled with one-liners. In this film he wanted to limit the number of them, and you can see that he’s consciously holding back so it doesn’t become a laugh a minute. That isn’t what he wanted. He wanted psychological realism.”

Here, Allen is not the shticky neurotic caricature that has become the stuff of parody. He is a real person — highly flawed, yet self-aware and unusually confident and assured, almost like the older, wiser brother of Alvy Singer, his character in “Annie Hall.” Allen frequently casts himself as the object of female attraction in his films, a situation that often demands a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer. But “Manhattan” is his only film where one can appreciate what the women see in him. This is not Woody Allen the comedian; this is Woody Allen the man. And, perhaps more so than ever before or since, this is Woody Allen the New Yorker.

“It’s the best film I know about a certain kind of Manhattan,” said Hirsch. “It’s Woody Allen’s East Side Manhattan. He writes about what he knows and he is without peer as a chronicler of a certain style of Manhattan chic, circa 1970s.”

A man with a unique perspective on New York agrees. “The scenes of the city in ‘Manhattan’ are wonderful to behold,” Edward I. Koch, mayor at the time of the film’s release, wrote in an email. “No other movie before or since has so magnificently captured the city’s neighborhoods.”

And, as the quintessential New York filmmaker embarks on yet another movie in Europe, it’s nice to remember a time where Woody still needed us and we still needed him.

“It’s a love letter to a particular mood and moment,” said Jones. “Allen said he was trying to show viewers 100 years in the future what Manhattanites were like in 1979. I think he pretty much succeeded.”