Woody Allen had directed six films before Annie Hall, and with each successive movie he moved closer to creating a coherent story that relied less and less upon his television training as a writer of sketches. Those first half-dozen film served as a strange type of self-apprenticeship during which Allen learned how to more assuredly connect disconnected and isolated events in a story so that they more seamlessly integrated.
The directorial influence of Woody Allen on Annie Hall is distinctly at odds with his authorial influence. A closer examination of the screenplay for the movie reveals that Annie Hall still exhibits Allen’s tendency to write “blackout scenes” that are only loosely tied to a coherent overall narrative strategy. That close analysis will reveal, however, that the disconnected quality of the scenes in Annie Hall is nevertheless significantly more coherent than an early entry like Bananas or even like this film’s predecessor, Love and Death.
If Woody Allen the writer was still struggling to overcome difficulties in tying scenes together, Annie Hall exhibited unqualified evidence that Woody Allen the director was exponentially improving with each project. Annie Hall only seems to be strategically more coherent as a narrative thanks to the confidence that Allen had developed by then in terms shooting for the purpose of editing. Taken apart scene by scene and the film reveals that it is far closer in tone to Take the Money and Run than to a later film like Hannah and Her Sisters. That tone still speaks back to the sketch comedy training from Woody’s television days. Only as a result of learning to direct through feature films rather than television does Annie Hall come across as a coherent narrative. Even so, it must be considered a definitive leap forward in the progression of writer/director duties which would soon reveal Allen had finally jettisoned that TV training and had fully developed into a coherent narrative strategist.
