Manhattan review – Woody Allen's masterpiece still shimmers with honesty

Woody Allen’s middle-period masterpiece from 1979, co-written with Marshall Brickman and shot in lustrous black and white by cinematographer Gordon Willis, now gets a cinema rerelease.

It’s the film that, apart from everything else, invented the romcom cliche of the last-minute rush to the airport. Dismayed by a lack of cabs in the dense traffic – casually superb location shooting – Allen’s unemployed TV producer Isaac runs desperately to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment to tell her how he feels, finding her in the lobby with her bags packed, ready to head out to JFK for a trip to London. This is Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), who wryly tells him she just turned 18 and that she is now “legal” – though she was “legal” at 17. However we feel about this scene now, and to me it feels bleak and autumnal rather than romantic or funny, Hemingway’s performance has a dignity and maturity, especially in her hurt feelings when Isaac breaks up with her. She has an honesty and authenticity that the rest of the cast, for all their comic brilliance, do not.

Allen is superb as the menopausal guy who quits his job to work on a memoir about living in New York, introduced with the legendary Gershwin montage of the city. And what emerges from the film is how inspired the use of Gershwin is; it’s almost impossible to believe the music wasn’t composed for the film, and it can’t now be heard without thinking of this movie: their destinies are fused.

Diane Keaton is reliably great as the conceited writer who Isaac falls in love with, even as she is having an adulterous affair with his best friend Yale (Michael Murphy). Meryl Streep has a glorious cameo as Isaac’s ex-wife, whose tell-all book about their calamitous marriage is the unacknowledged spur to his own efforts. A smart scene that I always forget is Yale’s wife Emily (Anne Byrne) taking Isaac out to lunch, after her marriage has ended, and unintentionally revealing that she still doesn’t understand how complicit Isaac has been in Yale’s adultery. And Isaac, for all his prickly integrity, can’t bear to confess. Nothing has changed in how compelling and addictively watchable this film is.