2 - ‘New York Was His Town, and It Always Would Be…’: Narrative Storytelling and the Vexing Role of Women in Manhattan

Summary

Abstract

This chapter considers the manner in which Woody Allen has employed storytelling devices in his work and what effect these strategies have on the representation of women in his cinema. Given the special commercial and critical significance that Manhattan (1979) has within his oeuvre, it is this film that will provide the central focus of the chapter. Issues relating to Allen's use of voiceover narration, gendered agency/passivity and character binarism will be considered in terms of how they impact upon the representation and function of Manhattan's primary female characters. The work will close by considering how Broadway Danny Rose (1984) might be seen as an unofficial sequel of sorts to the aforementioned 1979 film, via its sympathetic rewriting of the narrative conclusion.

Keywords: narrative, author, voiceover

In 2017, 38 years after its original theatrical run, Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) was re-released as a new 4K digital print in cinemas across the United Kingdom and in select cities in the United States. That this was the only film of Allen's to be accorded the honour of a reissue after 4K restoration suggested, even at the time, something of the special status that Manhattan holds within his extensive oeuvre.

Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris famously stated at its time of release that Allen's motion picture was ‘the only great film of the Seventies’ (quoted in McCann 1990: 9). Asked in the 1990s if his contentious view still remained, Sarris clarified that ‘[t]here are others I like from that period. But my test of a movie is whether or not I can look at it again and again. Can you stand to see The Bridge on the River Kwai another ten times? Or Lawrence of Arabia?’ (quoted in Meade 2000: 130). Manhattan is still Allen's most successful box office hit (adjusted for inflation) and arguably the project that is most emblematic of his desire to bridge the divide between comedy – his natural and longstanding metier – and straight drama. Indeed, Allen was to highlight this himself when discussing Manhattan in conjunction with its two immediate predecessors, Oscar-winning critical breakthrough Annie Hall (1977) and the unpopular familial drama Interiors (1978).