Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975)

Cast: Carol Kane, Steven Keats, Mel Howard, Dorrie Kavanaugh, Doris Roberts, Stephen Strimpel, Lauren Friedman, Paul Freedman, Martin Garner, Leib Lensky, Zane Lasky, Zvee Scooler, Eda Reiss Merin. Screenplay: Joan Micklin Silver, based on a novel by Abraham Cahan. Cinematography: Kenneth Van Sickle. Production design: Stuart Wurtzel. Film editing: Katherine Wenning. Music: William Bolcom, Herbert L. Clarke. 

Gitl (Carol Kane) joins her immigrant husband Yankel (Steven Keats) in turn-of-the-century New York City, and discovers that he is no longer the modest, religiously observant man she knew in the old country. He has picked up American slang, while she speaks only Yiddish, and calls himself Jake while insisting that their son, Yossele (Paul Freedman) be called Joey. He has also taken up with a flashy Americanized woman named Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh). With the help of their neighbor, Mrs. Kavarsky (Doris Roberts), Gitl learns how to adapt to the new world, shed herself of Jake, and find a new, more suitable husband. Kane received an Oscar nomination for best actress in writer-director Joan Micklin Silver's first feature. Low-key, warm-hearted, and amusing, Hester Street evokes silent movies in its well-crafted depiction of the era in which it's set. 

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, Rita Moreno, Cynthia O'Neal, Carol Kane. Screenplay: Jules Feiffer. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Richard Sylbert. Film editing: Sam O'Steen.

Carnal Knowledge begins as a light comedy of manners set in the late 1940s, when college students were supposedly less casual and more poorly informed about sex. Jonathan (Jack Nicholson), who claims to be more sexually experienced than his Amherst roommate, Sandy (Art Garfunkel), gives Sandy some advice on how to approach Smith College student Susan (Candice Bergen) at a mixer. The scene has some of the keen ear for awkward attempts at communication found in screenwriter Jules Feiffer's cartoons and in director Mike Nichols's comedy routines with Elaine May. Eventually, Sandy and Susan get together, with Jonathan still coaching Sandy on sex, until Jonathan himself makes his own moves -- unknown to Sandy -- on Susan. He succeeds, in an excruciating scene in which Susan's confusion about the loss of her virginity plays across her face, partly obscured by the grunting Jonathan on top of her. And from then the film becomes increasingly sour, as the years pass and the misogynistic Jonathan continues to meddle in Sandy's life but also makes a mess of his own relationships with women. He takes up with Bobbie, a model played by Ann-Margret, for what begins as a passionate fling and ends in misery. By the end of the film he is being serviced by Louise (Rita Moreno), a prostitute whom he hires to perform a routine -- and abuses when she deviates from it -- designed to give him an erection. It's a sad, rather hopeless film that despite fine performances from all the actors never quite convinces us that its characters are anything but puppets of the writer and director. Jonathan and Sandy seem incapable of change and growth. Something makes me think that Carnal Knowledge would have been a better film if it had been told from the women's point of view, that it would have made a more telling point about the male ego and about the great gulf between the sexes if we had seen Jonathan and Sandy through Susan and Bobbie's eyes. We get glimpses of that, but Susan disappears from the film after she marries Sandy and he, egged on by Jonathan, drifts into mid-life affairs. Bobbie's entrapment into Jonathan's world leads to a failed suicide attempt, after which she, too, vanishes from the story. Feiffer and Nichols never make it clear whether their film is a satire on sex in modern society or just a particularly bleak story about unhappy people.

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)

Cast: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, Sully Boyar, Carol Kane, James Broderick, Lance Henriksen, Susan Peretz, Judith Malina. Screenplay: Frank Pierson. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Production design: Charles Bailey. Film editing: Dede Allen.

Dog Day Afternoon is a tragicomic docudrama about an ill-advised, ill-planned bank robbery that went wrong in almost all ways imaginable. It gave Al Pacino one of his most entertainingly flamboyant roles as Sonny Wortzik, who wants the money to pay for his lover's sex reassignment surgery. In its day, this motive might have been played more for laughs than it would be today, but Chris Sarandon's performance as Leon, who wants to transition to female, brought a measure of sympathy to the character that it might otherwise have lacked. The film is, like so many of director Sidney Lumet's, notable not only for standout performances like Pacino's and Sarandon's, but also for its exceptional ensemble work among the hostages in the bank and the cops outside, a result of Lumet's going beyond the screenplay (which won an Oscar for Frank Pierson) to workshop dialogue and business among the groups, playing up the emerging Stockholm Syndrome of the hostages and the itchiness of the impatient cops. 

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Annie Hall

Alvy Singer: Woody Allen
Annie Hall: Diane Keaton
Rob: Tony Roberts
Allison: Carol Kane
Tony Lacey: Paul Simon
Pam: Shelley Duvall
Robin: Janet Margolin
Mom Hall: Colleen Dewhurst
Duane Hall: Christopher Walken

Director: Woody Allen
Screenplay: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Costume design: Ruth Morley

Annie Hall is generally recognized as the movie that took Woody Allen from being a mere maker of comedy films like Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973) that were extensions of his persona as a stand-up comedian and into his current status as a full-fledged auteur, with a record-setting 16 Oscar nominations as screenwriter, along with seven nominations as director (the same number as Steven Spielberg, and only one less than Martin Scorsese). It is one of the few outright funny movies to have won the best picture, and also won for Diane Keaton's performance and Allen's direction and screenplay. Watching it today, in the light of his later work, I still find it fresh and original and frankly more satisfying than most of his later films. Marshall Brickman shared the screenwriting Oscar for Annie Hall and was also nominated along with Allen for the screenplay of Manhattan (1979), as was Douglas McGrath for Bullets Over Broadway (1995), one of his most entertaining later movies. Is it possible that Allen should have worked with a collaborator more often? Would that have curbed his tendency to overload his movies with existentialist conundrums and his increasingly creepy fascination with much younger women -- viz., Emma Stone in Irrational Man (2015) and Magic in the Moonlight (2014), Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works (2009), and Scarlett Johansson in Scoop (2006) and Match Point (2005)? But it does Allen's achievement in Annie Hall a disservice to view the film in light of his later career (and his private life). He made a step, not a leap, forward from the goofy early comedies by playing on his stand-up persona -- the film opens and ends with Alvy Singer (Allen) cracking jokes and includes scenes in which Alvy does stand-up at a rally for Adlai Stevenson and at the University of Wisconsin. What makes the movie different from the "early, funny ones" -- as a rueful running gag line goes in Stardust Memories (1980) -- is his willingness and ability to turn Alvy into a real person who just happens to be very funny. Keaton's glorious performance also succeeds in giving dimension to what could have been just a caricature. Annie Hall may not have deserved the best picture Oscar in a year that also saw the debut of Star Wars, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, but it's easy to make a case for it.