Manhattan (1979)

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General		Extras
Category	Romantic Comedy	Main Menu Animation Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1979
Running Time	92:15 (Case: 96)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Woody Allen
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Woody Allen Diane Keaton Michael Murphy Mariel Hemingway Meryl Streep Anne Byrne
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$34.95	Music	George Gershwin

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Auto Pan & Scan Encoded	English Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (256Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (256Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (256Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (256Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired German German for the Hearing Impaired French Italian Spanish Dutch Swedish Finnish Norwegian Danish Portuguese Polish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The broad story here is based around Isaac Davis (Woody Allen), who happens to be smack in the midst of a mid-life crisis: he is forty two, hates his job and is dating a seventeen year old schoolgirl in Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). To make matters worse, his ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) is writing a book about their marriage and its break up, which is just a little annoying to Isaac since Jill happened to run off with another woman, taking his son with them. Isaac is not exactly happy that all sorts of personal details are going to be revealed. Naturally, he would like to do disgusting things to Jill, all of which involve some illegal activity and usually with the intent of terminating Jill's life.

    Isaac's best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) happens to be having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton), supposedly unbeknownst to Yale's wife, Emily (Anne Byrne). When Mary tires of the illicit relationship with Yale, she decides to break off the affair, which is great news for Isaac who has obviously previously met Mary and been smitten by her. So, Tracy gets the flick and Mary moves into his life (sans a job which by now he has quit), apartment and bed. The trouble is that Yale still is in love with Mary, and Mary slowly comes to realize that she is still in love with Yale, and their relationship is eventually rekindled much to the consternation of Isaac and Emily - most especially when Emily invites Isaac and Mary over for a meal one evening. This unholy mess of a menage a quatre gets a tad too much to handle, and we end up with Yale and Mary getting back together, Emily being devastated (and blaming Isaac for introducing Mary to Yale) and Isaac realizing that he really does love Tracy and setting off to rekindle that relationship - only to discover that she is about to head off to Europe to go to school (which Isaac originally encouraged her to do as a way of breaking off their relationship). So all in all, we end up down the usual route of Woody/Isaac ending up being the schmuck without the girl - again - in what is almost a epitaph to the sexual enlightenment of the seventies.

    Confused? Welcome to the world according to Woody Allen. On the whole, critical acclaim for Manhattan seems to be somewhat less than for Annie Hall, so in some sort of perverted way that would probably account for why I find Manhattan a more palatable film. The story is riddled with the usual clichés that seem to be a recurring theme in Woody Allen's films, and the characters are if anything even more trite than usual, and yet it seems to work a little better than usual. Woody Allen is still not a favourite of mine but I find his performance here to be far less unappetizing than usual. Diane Keaton basically gets to play the same role she always plays in Woody's films, namely the somewhat unlikeable, possibly egocentric object of Woody's infatuations. Accordingly, this is very much acting by numbers as far as she is concerned. Of the rest, Mariel Hemingway is the only one to stand out and that is for all the wrong reasons. I simply find it difficult to believe that she copped an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for this role: frankly, the one thing that is not on display here is any real acting ability. It does have to be said, though, that the best parts of this film are actually when she and Woody Allen are in scene together: there is something naive and immature in her performance that in some ways conveys the uncertainty inherent in this sort of relationship (at least I guess there would be some sort of uncertainty in such a relationship, not having any personal experience of such a relationship to draw upon!). The rest is pretty much your typical Woody Allen film by the numbers.

    Billed as a comedy, this actually raised a couple of (minor) laughs out of me, so that immediately makes it a rip-roaring success as far as Woody Allen films and I are concerned. It is of course much more a romance than a comedy and at that level it also works pretty well, and whilst I would not be rushing out to indulge in this effort again too soon, it is actually the first Woody Allen film that I have come across that I would actually contemplate watching again in the future.

Video

    The transfer is presented in its correct aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and is 16x9 enhanced - unusual I would suggest for a black and white DVD (although no doubt several dozens will now be brought to my attention). The transfer is Auto Pan & Scan encoded.

    The disappointment in the DVD transfer is apparent almost from the opening scene, and so pervasive that I am almost tempted to suggest that it is the way the film is supposed to look, despite the fact that it was filmed anamorphically which usually means a sharp, detailed image. However, I found this to be at times a very diffuse image that reminded me of such earlier black and white films of the forties and fifties as Angel And The Badman, but without the annoying film artefacts. I was really expecting something a lot sharper in nature with a greater degree of detail than what we have here, that is for sure. The detail at times is not much better than average and again is far more reminiscent of black and white films of the fifties rather than something from the seventies. Shadow detail is at times decidedly average. This is not an especially clear transfer, but thankfully does not seem to suffer from any significant grain problems to speak of. Just to balance the whole inconsistency of the transfer, there were times that this was as sharp and as clear as I was expecting. There did not appear to be any low level noise problems in the transfer.

    The big let down after the inconsistency in the transfer is the general lack of depth to the black and white tones. Again, this is in sharp contrast to the reviews of the Region 1 release which seem to be high on the solid blacks and bright whites. They are sadly lacking here in my view, and this is really a good example of how black and white should not look. Blacks in general were of a distinctly greyish tone and lacked any sort of depth throughout much of the film. At no time could I honestly say that the whites were really clean and bright (and I will now stop sounding like a detergent advert, I promise).

    There are no apparent MPEG artefacts in the transfer. There are no real problems with film-to-video artefacts in the transfer. Naturally, since this is over twenty one years old, there is something of a problem with film artefacts in the transfer, but again nothing that I would consider unduly distracting in a film of this age.

    This is an RSDL-formatted disc, but I was unable to note where the layer change occurred. That being the case, it is obviously not disruptive to the flow of the film.

Audio

    Dialogue was generally clear and easy to understand.

    There did not appear to be any problems with audio sync in the transfer.

    The original music score comes from George Gershwin: obviously it was not composed for the film, but rather the film uses some of his great music to complement the film. I am not certain that the choices were totally appropriate to the mood of the film at times, but there is no denying the quality of the music. Some of the very best orchestral music of the twentieth century originates from the United States and George Gershwin is one of the very best of those American composers.

    The final disappointment with the DVD comes from the soundtrack itself, which is an exceedingly unnatural sounding effort. Perhaps this is best illustrated by the scene in Bloomingdales, where Mary and Isaac are talking. As they leave "centre stage" and blend into the passing traffic walking away from the camera, their voices actually become louder and more prominent in the mix. This is not an isolated example, and throughout the film I was always being confronted by what I would consider unnatural and often extremely frontal soundscapes. Whilst appreciating that this is often the case in Woody Allen films, where dialogue clarity seems to rule above all else and mono will do as well for this as anything else, it is nonetheless quite disappointing that this is so marked an example of his quirks as far as audio are concerned. Accordingly, this demonstrates in the extreme that this is not a film that requires much from the soundtrack apart from presenting clear, undistorted dialogue and that is what we actually get here - and nothing else. However, with the setting being New York, you do at times really miss the surround channel and bass channel detail that would really bring in the vibrancy of the city.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer (3:14)

    An average video transfer at best.

    A below average audio transfer.

    A minimal extras package.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall