Annie Hall, 2

Or maybe it was Play It Again, Sam I saw first. It's hard to remember. The Tony Roberts/Diane Keaton/Woody Allen team in both movies is important; Allen likes to cast competitors to his characters' love interests, usually as comic foils (Billy Crystal, most egregiously, as the devil in Deconstructing Harry; Michael Murphy, most cynically, in Manhattan), but in Sam, Tony's Dick Christie was a nice guy - maybe a little dull, but okay. His presence there takes the edge off Woody's.

In Annie Hall, Rob isn't interested in Annie romantically. Rob introduces Annie and Alvy after a game of doubles; he goes sightseeing with the couple in Alvy's old neighborhood (we learn that he and Alvy grew up together); he sits at the table with Alvy when Alvy goes to hear Annie sing. When the movie begins, Rob tries to convince Alvy to move to California; "we can play tennis outside there everyday," he says. Alvy has a smart response, but at least until the scene in LA when Rob wears a radiation suit and boasts about bedding sixteen year-old twins, Rob's casual, recurring encounters with Alvy anchor Alvy's neuroses to the sort of off-hand venting we all do in the company of friends. We believe that Alvy can be a normal guy, instead of some stand-in for a uniquely unequipped New Yorker.

Generally speaking, it's the normalcy in Annie Hall that separates it from Allen's most condescending tendencies. For example, that scene on the park bench, when Alvy and Annie comment on passersby, is sweet instead of smarmy; I like that Alvy sits casually, with his arm behind Annie's shoulders. We laugh at the jokes because they're about New Yorkers, not for them. And the jokes are told affectionately, as opposed to the later below-the-belt shots at Los Angeles that come closest to derailing the movie's essential theme.

What bothers me about the LA scenes isn't that Allen doesn't like the city, or try to; it's the director's association (not Alvy's) of what he sees as LA's cheapness and superficiality with Annie. When Annie follows Tony Lacey to the west coast, she isn't - for the first time - making her own decisions about who she is. Allen is. When Alvy gives her his books about death, Annie doesn't throw out her picture book about cats. And that, we're lead to understand, is what makes relationships so valuable: that the people you love adapt without changing who they really are. In Los Angeles, Annie becomes shallow and spiteful; she isn't exasperated with Alvy, she's dismissive of him. In that brief sequence, together at the cafe just off the boulevard, Allen betrays his heroine (only to exonerate her in his closing monologue).

Anyway, it's Annie Hall, not Alvy Singer. That makes it unique from Allen's other movies. We sympathize with her more than him.