A rather more sublime presentation of Diane Keaton seriously at work is in Woody Allen's Manhattan, in which the director should take credit for giving her a much more complex and interesting role than in Annie Hall. Indeed, as a film, it's a lot more grown up than the previous one, which still had half its feet in the gag-Allen films of old like Take the Money and Run which became pruned down from Anhedonia into the film we know and love now, But this, from its stark black-and-white chiroscuro design on, is a more adult affair. Keaton is initially quite mouthy and unlikeably pushy, but we soon learn she's as much a neurotic mess as anyone else, in Woody's study of adults at play. Leaving in fact Mariel Hemingway's seventeen year old student as the single voice of reason.
That ending - on her - ''You've got to have a little faith' always blows my socks off, but it's then the close up on Woody that is the film's final image - how he facially responds to that piece of advice, which seals the film. It's (as I've written before) his greatest performance, particularly in that last scene, in which he unsuccessfully tries to unsay all the good advice he's told her earlier.
It was one of Meryl Streep's earliest roles (after Julia and The Deer Hunter) - a bundle of nervy energy.
In conversation with Stig Bjorkman:
W: I was so disappointed that I didn't want to open it. I wanted to ask United Artists not to release it. I wanted to offer them to make one free movie, if they would just throw it away.
SB: Why were you so unhappy with the film? [Yes - the question everyone always asks. And the answer?]
WA: I don't know. ['I don't know'??] I had worked on it for a long time and I was just not happy with it.
Maybe it's partly because as an actor he is so naked.
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