If Annie Hall was Woody Allen’s ode to falling in love, 15 years later Husbands and Wives is an examination of falling out of love. Where the look and style of Annie Hall was clean and precise, Husbands and Wives is franticly shot handheld with herky-jerky editing and an almost improvised vibe to the performances. If Annie Hall marked the beginning of Allen’s great run of introspective masterpieces and near masterpieces, Husbands and Wives is the end of the streak. It’s his last really important Woody Allen film and definitely his last strong acting performance before he fell into a cliché of himself or brought in other actors to substitute, aping his own famous mannerisms. Husbands and Wives doesn’t have as many laughs as some of his earlier work but the insights into relationships can be utterly nerve striking. Made during his dramatic break up with his then wife Mia Farrow, it may be the last time Allen really had something he wanted to say or was worth hearing.

“It’s hell gettin’ older, especially when you feel 21 inside.” 

— A sobering reflection made by the aging Diane, brashly played by the vibrant, and still very alive at 86, Elaine Stritch, in Woody Allen’s 1987 drama, September.

The film centers on Lane, a fragile and confused woman in her early fifties, played by Mia Farrow.  After having moved into her summer home in Vermont for some much needed mental rest, Lane’s familial, platonic, and romantic relationships unravel at the arrival of autumn.

The plot of September, taking place over the few remaining days of the summer, floats through the home from room to room, mostly centering on a love triangle, or really, love train, secretly developing amongst the characters.  Howard loves Lane, but she in fact loves Peter who in turn loves Lane’s friend Stephanie who is already unhappily married with children.  This potential fodder for comedy, Woody Allen’s challah and butter, is instead treated and explored as the stuff of a serious stage piece, filled with the morose blend of emotionally heavy dialogue and restrained expression normally found off-off-off Broadway. 

I’ve been on a Woody Allen kick of late and I’m not sure what prompted it. In the twilight of his career he remains a polarizing figure mostly reviled for personal indiscretions or ignored for his supposed cultural irrelevancy. He doesn’t always make it easy to defend his work. The things people used to find amusing about his movies now just elicit a kind of widespread yawning contempt—the gross age difference between him and his latest ingénue, the aloof quality of the writing, and the way his characters don’t seem to bear even the slightest relation to actual people in New York City or anywhere else. His last few international productions have been, by all accounts, hit-or-miss and the early fans who adopted Annie Hall and Manhattan as the films of their generation have deserted him. I don’t necessarily disagree that his films aren’t what they used to be, but I think his good films are still some of the best American films ever made. The period of his work I generally romanticize is the mid-1980s period and the film of his that I like best is, in some ways, the least representative of his work, Radio Days. It’s light, unabashedly sentimental, and probably the least cynical movie he ever made.

Along with the original versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night Of The Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby was one of the most frightening film-watching experiences of my life. And what really makes Rosemary’s Baby an even more special film is that if you took the "horror" elements out of it and you just had a film about a young couple in New York City in the late '60s it would still be completely entertaining. It’s a great lesson in storytelling: interesting characters first will make the "horror" more powerful.

The perfectly taut screenplay credited to director Roman Polanski follows Ira Levin’s novel almost scene for scene, line for line. There is not a loose shred in the script, which may sound simple enough on paper - newlyweds Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) move into an old Manhattan building where they become friends with the elderly couple next door (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer). Slowly the pregnant Rosemary begins to suspect that they and their creaky posse are part of a witch’s covenant of devil worshippers who are hungry for her unborn baby.