Winning its Oscar for Best Picture over the co-nominated films The Goodbye Girl, Julia, Star Wars and The Turning Point, Annie Hall is that kind of award winning movie that defies most conventional standards of the last 20 years. It's geographically specific and highly literary in its character development and setting in a rarefied segment of society not concerned with earning money or averting the coming invasion of some alien race. It's also barely an hour and half long and includes virtually none of the show stopping special effects innovations of the 1970s to concentrate instead on observational humor and the kind of realities covered with its tagline of being, "A nervous romance."

Remarkably, 1977 was also the year of That Obscure Object of Desire, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Saturday Night Fever and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, each of which have distinguished themselves as commercial hits and/or critical beauties in the years since their release. That Annie Hall would be recognized above them in the eyes of the Academy, not to mention its inclusion the National Film Registry in 1992, means Woody Allen's style of small filmmaking has a place in the greater world of screened entertainment. Fortunately it also represents a terrific contribution to American movies that was rightfully lauded as movie of the year during a period of increased commercial pressure where this kind of film has normally been consigned to a small subset of the movie-going public.

Apart from being crackerjack comedy Annie Hall illustrates how art often represents human relationships as being the occasion for personal growth, heartache and happiness. Using these broad themes the film goes to the heart of certain '70s cultural impulses including bicoastal rivalries, a fascination with drugs and youth and the difficulty of achieving equality in romance and then renders them through the wholly original eyepiece of director/writer/leading actor Allen's unique sensibility.

In this interpretation "unique" is not meant as a pejorative synonym for limited, unpleasant or marginal. Instead its meant to signify the way Allen's role as director/writer/lead actor makes him the canvas for enjoying and interpreting the film that's ostensibly about Diane Keaton's lead part although its equally about the crisis of conscience in Allen's character Alvy Singer as he circles mid-life.

Not for nothing, such a mid life crisis is often the turning point of great artistic works and entire artistic movements. Somehow it seems to be a period that nails down the transition from a youthful focus to more deathly pursuits, or else it's the urgency of creation being a limited window of opportunity for those who pursue their muse, or maybe it's the time of maturation when artists first see the world in tones of faultiness, difficulty, joy and risk.

Annie Hall may not be directly concerned with these ideas but they are certainly involved with its characters and their worldview, if not as overt subjects of every scene. Throughout Annie and Alvy's on-going romance that serves as the movie's narrative source, people inhabit the spaces of New York City and Los Angeles and seem not altogether complete or particularly unable to cope with living in a world of confusing challenges and euphoric moments. They are simply people struggling for happiness as imagined by Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman.

The use of words in the film presents things in their symbolic position so they might revolve around Alvy's ideas and the material realities of his adult life. Only through the play of his words can he adequately compose himself as both a comedian and closet intellectual. Through discourse and conversation, often times to the point of distraction, he understands the world as much to ridicule it as to feel his own sorrow and joy.

Reaching towards philosophically significant ideas about discourse, language and representation, Annie Hall further abstracts its straightforward story and breaks up the narrative with flashbacks, animation, split screens, historical simultaneity and the imposition of dream states. Such cinematically specific devices are absent the written page, impossible on the two-dimensional canvas and far too weighted with temporal requirements and setting to be adequately produced in architecture, sculpture or any of the other plastic arts.

Movies, then, become part of the subtext of Annie Hall just as they are part of its overt content since Alvy, like Allen, is a tremendous movie aficionado. Movies likewise inform our reaction to what's happening in the film because we are, each of us, informed by a history of seeing stories on screen that move from story point A to B to C to end credits and a final title reading "The End."

Whenever Annie Hall departs from this set of linear conventions it challenges our assumptions about movie watching as a seamless activity. We are therefore encouraged to give our fullest attention and we are rewarded for enjoying the movie's connections between the hyperbole of comedy and the limitations of the movie frame itself.

For example, Alvy narrates a brief sketch of his childhood and states that he grew up in a tenement under the Coney Island roller coaster only to see his childhood apartment building rattled by the amusement park ride outside his living room window. It's a farce of exaggeration yet the Singer family is repeatedly depicted within these circumstances as if there was nothing remarkable about them.

Later on Alvy and Annie begin having relationship troubles that have them seeing one another along cartoonish lines in their own monologues and visits to therapists. Thus Alvy envisions Annie as a sort of wicked queen a la Snow White only to see the pair transformed into their animated selves with him as a dwarf wearing glasses and her as the black robed evil queen towering over him.

While these leaps of film form are, on the one hand, nothing more than interesting experiments on behalf of the movie's overall comic effect, they are also tests of the medium employed to a far larger purpose. Laughter abounds and yet Annie Hall is more than a brilliant screen comedy. It's an engrossing story of how stories are told and the methods used to tell them even while delivering the goods with now enjoyable cameos by Beverly D'Angelo, Jeff Goldblum, Carol Kane, Christopher Walken, Colleen Dewhurst, Shelley Duvall, Paul Simon and Sigourney Weaver.

Speaking to the screen story itself Annie Hall opens with standup comic Alvy Singer directly addressing us to explain how his worldview distills to a pair of jokes and how those jokes inform everything he does. Very quickly we learn he's been married and divorced twice, that he grew up in a neurotic Jewish household in Brooklyn and that he's smitten with a new woman, Annie, whose the opposite of the type he usually goes for. Significantly his sympathetic friend Rob (Tony Roberts) is a talent agent gigolo who is obsessed with dating new and younger women along with exploring the potential for success in Los Angeles.

As Alvy and Annie fall in love he gradually encourages her musical interests and the striving for her personal development only to discover she's not the absent-minded woman he originally thought she was. Unable to adapt his expectations and accept the person she's becoming, Alvy stifles their relationship just as she becomes a successful song-writer/performer. Played out in an effort to contrast their relationship with the West Coast's new wave sensibility versus the East Coast's more mature culture, Alvy screws up their romance in time for them to become lasting friends living separate lives.

Budgeted at around $4 million Annie Hall was not the same kind of box office bonanza as the year's big hits, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Saturday Night Fever. Earning some $19 million domestically, however, it was no slouch on its return to investors even though its thrills are very much more intimate than spectacular in every way.

Even so, Keaton's eponymous heroine caused a fashion rage with her costume choices taken from Keaton's closet just as the character's name was an amalgam of the actress's birth name, Diane Hall. Likewise the picture was easily recognizable as one of the best New York movies about New Yorkers yet it was also general enough with its larger themes about mid-life and relationships to be an export product to the rest of the country.

In subsequent years Allen's movies haven't always achieved this balance of his geographically specific setting with wider entertainment functions to be graciously received across the country, let alone the rest of the world. It's as if his normal palette of Jewish New Yorkerisms find their high water mark from time to time even as he keeps producing movies that fail with extremely brief releases and virtually no shelf life. Still, Allen has managed to produce at least one movie a year for the better part of 35 years and his gems are valuable enough to be included in any retrospective on American cinema, even if his duds drop heavily into the bucket of memory.

Standing among his many masterworks like Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets Over Broadway and Manhattan, Annie Hall is a movie that can be interpreted on its own although a more rewarding exercise is to examine it, perhaps inevitably, as the result of Allen's personality. In this way it's an autobiography using Keaton's character as the tool for introspection. To the extent she demands her own space on screen, though, and when remembering her Oscar for Best Actress of the year, it's a tribute to creative collaboration that we remember Annie Hall as a romantic comedy when its structure has been largely regurgitated many times over by both Allen and his countless imitators.

This level of repetition is a tribute to a great comedy that can be taken as simple genre work, as a rather direct demonstration of the director/writer/lead actor's mid-life crisis, as an experiment in film form or as the story of a troubled romance. With each of these strands built-in, and with each of them inviting repeat consideration, it's no wonder Annie Hall is a screen classic.

Jokes, strong writing and incisive observations about the mid-'70s put to one side, Annie Hall is a genuine movie pleasure not to be missed or ignored. See it at your convenience or miss it at your continued peril.