Manhattan

On the heels of Annie Hall , the Oscar-winning romantic comedy that rocketed Woody Allen to the front ranks of American filmmakers, Manhattan continued Allen's romantic obsessions in a darker, more pessimistic vein. Allen stars as Isaac Davis, a TV writer sick of the pap he is forced to churn out and harboring dreams of being the great American novelist. His love life is in barbed-wire territory: he is tormented by his ex-wife Jill ( Meryl Streep , (in one of her first screen roles), a lesbian who has written a tell-all book about their marriage, and he is dating teenager Tracy ( Mariel Hemingway ), who is disenchanted with his snobbish putdowns and refusal to commit himself. Woody's disillusioned best friend Yale ( Michael Murphy ) has begun an affair with Isaac's friend Mary ( Diane Keaton ). Like Isaac, who can never get past the first sentence of his novel, Yale is crippled by his lack of resolve, as indicated by his inability to leave his wife Emily ( Anne Byrne ). On the verge of leaving the country, Tracy tells Isaac the basic truth that none of his hung-up friends and past lovers fully realizes: "You have to have a little more faith in people." Manhattan is both a grim dissection of perpetually dissatisfied New Yorkers and an ode to the city itself, filmed in glorious black-and-white by Gordon Willis , who also shot The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), and set to a score of rhapsodic George Gershwin music. — Hal Erickson