Annie Hall

"There's an old joke: two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The the other joke important joke for me is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. And it goes like this, I'm paraphrasing: Um, I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member. That's the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women. You know, lately, the strangest things have been going through my mind, 'cause I turned 40, and I guess I'm going through a life crisis or something, I dunno, and I'm not worried about aging, I'm not one of those characters, you know I, well I'm balding slightly on top, that's about the worst you can say about me. I um I think I'm gonna get better as I get older. You know, I think I'm gonna be the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say, the um distinguished gray, for instance, you know, unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism. Annie and I broke up, and I still can't get my mind around that, you know, I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind and and examining my life and trying to figure out where did the screw up come, you know, and mm a year ago, we were in love, you know, and and and I just, and it's funny, I'm not a I'm not a morose type. I'm not a depressive character, you know, I was a reasonably happy kid, I guess, I was brought up in Brooklyn during World War II."

"[voiceover] My analyst says I exaggerate my childhood memories, but I swear, I was brought up underneath the roller coaster in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Maybe that accounts for my personality, which is a little nervous, I think. You know, I have a hyperactive imagination. My mind tends to jump around a little, and uh I I I have some trouble between fantasy and reality. My father ran the bumper car concession. Th-there he is, and there I am. Right. I I used to get my aggression out through those cars all the time. I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh but, "Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym." And uh, of course, those who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school. I must say, I always thought my schoolmates were idiots. Melvyn Greenglass, you know, his fat little face and Henrietta Farrell, just Miss Perfect all the time and uh Ivan Ackerman, always the wrong answer. Always."

"I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable."

"I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself; but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss."

"You know, even as a kid, I always went for the wrong women. I think that's my problem. When my mother took me to see Snow White, everyone fell in love with Snow White. I immediately fell for the Wicked Queen."

"A relationship, I think, is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark."

"After that it got pretty late, and, we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her, and I thought of that old joke. You know, this guy goes to his psychiatrist and says, "Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken." And the doctor says, "Well why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships– you know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs."

"[repeated line] La-dee-da, la-dee-da."

"Woody Allen - Alvy Singer"

"Diane Keaton - Annie Hall"

"Carol Kane - Allison"

"Tony Roberts - Rob"

"Paul Simon - Tony Lacey"

"Shelley Duvall - Pam"

"Janet Margolin - Robin"

"Colleen Dewhurst - Mrs. Hall"

"Christopher Walken - Duane Hall"

"Joan Neuman - Mrs. Singer"

"Dick Cavett - Himself"

"Jeff Goldblum - Lacey Party Guest"

"Beverly D'Angelo - Actress in Rob's TV Show"

"Sigourney Weaver - Alvy's Date Outside Theatre"

"Mark Lenard - Navy Officer"