“LA DI DA, la di da.” It’s always Annie Hall, isn’t it? Say the name Diane Keaton and the image that comes to mind is Keaton in mannish waistcoat and tie in the Oscar-winning comedy. The 1977 film is 40 years old this year but the image it created of Keaton is the one that has stuck to her down the years: “the golden shiksa from the provinces who looks cool and together,” the great critic Molly Haskell once wrote, “but has only to open her mouth or gulp or dart spastically sideways to reveal herself as the insecure bungler she is, as complete a social disaster in her own way as Allen's horny West Side intellectual is in his.”
So many Hollywood comedies have been fuelled by that full-on Keaton kook. Think Something’s Gotta Give. Think The First Wives Club. Think nearly everything she has made in the last 20 years. Annie Hall, the original, is still the best.
It’s a reflection of how well the persona fitted her of course. But it’s still only that. A persona. Back in the 1970s she gave a number of performances that demonstrated how much more she could do. In Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather she plays Kay, a woman adrift in a world of feral masculinity who is still strong enough to stand up for herself and challenge her Mafia husband Al Pacino. In Looking for Mr Goodbar, a film that is both juiced and appalled by the prospect of a sexually confident woman, she is carnal and confident in her carnality (the film punishes her as a result).
There were other roles too. As feminist Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty’s Reds, most notably. But it’s Annie Hall – and that vision of Diane Keaton it gave us – that persists. It’s not a bad legacy. But you wonder now what else she could have done too. La-di-da, la-di-da.
Teddy Jamieson
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