Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. Better. 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. Uh, no, let me start this over.
The forgoing of his traditional white-Windsor-set opening credits on a black screen, Woody Allen’s Manhattan opens with a voiceover read by Allen’s character Isaac Davis, while black and white images of city slowly cycle through sets the film up as not just a love story, but as Allen’s love letter to New York. I watched PBS’s excellent new three-hour documentary, Woody Allen: A Documentary Film, during my Thanksgiving vacation and I found myself itching to rewatch one of my favorite Allen films. Manhattan was one of the first Woody Allen films I had ever seen, helping to start a journey through all of his movies and turning him into my favorite director and a creative hero. It had been a few years since I’ve watched it and in that time, I have since moved to Manhattan myself, giving me a slightly different perspective this time around.
If Annie Hall showed the kind of auteur Allen could be, I’d argue Manhattan solidified that title as every part of the film is wonderfully designed, creating an impression of New York that has shaped my own view of this city. A lot of that style comes from Allen’s collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis. Willis, known for his work on The Godfather, first worked with Allen on Annie Hall and went on to work on seven of his films, but it was Manhattan that their two visions came together. In Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax, Allen describes the genesis of the film:
Manhattan was something that Gordon and I talked about in the Hamptons during the filming of Interiors at dinner a number of times; we used to eat dinner all the time. And I talked about doing a wide-screen picture and the thought was not to do a war picture or a typical large-screen picture but to do an intimate romantic picture with a wide screen. We wanted to work in black and white because that had a Manhattan feel to it.
I moved to New York with the same romantic view that Allen and Willis instill in Manhattan. This is, perhaps, most evident in the famous scene of Allen and Diane Keaton in front of the Queensboro Bridge. It’s here that Allen’s idea for an “intimate romantic picture with a wide screen” is most evident and really shines.
I’m especially drawn to the scenes where Willis’s nickname “the prince of darkness” becomes evident. One of my absolute favorite scenes in the film, both in story/dialogue and cinematography is when Allen and Keaton stumble into the Hayden Planetarium. For this entire scene the viewer is only shown their silhouettes making for a strangely intimate moment.
And just a few of my other favorite scenes:
