Ethan Mordden

"[Sally] Kellerman is the most seventies of actresses, but who took the fame for the time? Diane Keaton. Here is a talent less adaptable, though Keaton's switchover from Woody Allen comedy (Sleeper, 1973), into epic melodrama (The Godfather, 1972, 1974), into Woody Allen seriocomedy (Annie Hall, 1977) on to artist (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, 1977) is impressive, and was ultimately vindicated by strong work at the top of the 1980s.

"Keaton's range within the Allen films alone is wide. At first, in Play It Again, Sam (1972), she is little more than a foil. By the time of Love and Death (1975) ... she is one of the company farceurs, blithely airheaded, most forceful when the issues are most vague, like an emigrant midwesterner in New York who had adapted its forms but not its content. She is Allen's odd man in, not daffy exactly but the sort of person to whom daffy things happen....

"For many, Annie Hall was the height of Keaton, as much her vehicle as Allen's.... [T]he result is a gem so bright it made Keaton the diva of the age, a trend setter in fashion, an industry heavywieght complete with Oscar, and a critic's darling.

“She is to love. Allen opens the film alone ... speaking into the camera of his love for Annie. We then see them in his element, a Thalia showing of The Sorrow and the Pity. Later, in bed, Keaton wonders how she'd stand up under torture, and Allen tells her, 'The Gestapo would take away your Bloomindale's charge card, you'd tell them everything.' In her dress shirt and tie, vest baggy pants, and floppy hat, Keaton is a ne plus ultra of the WASP style/ She comes from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, has a "Grammy" who gave her the famous tie ..., and orders pastrami on white with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. [Wasn't that also Mary Wilkes in Manhattan?].Fitzgerald's Daisy's voice was "full of money." Keaton's voice, when Allen meets her for the last time in Los Angeles, is full of tofu. She tells him, 'You're like New York City.' He broods on art and politics and cannot hold her.

"Indeed, she moved on, out of burlesque. But by then so had Allen.If Annie Hall marked the synthesistic perfection of the jokes he had been telling for a decade, Keaton's role in it was characterological rather than generical.... Keaton successfully emerged from her Annie Hall persona in Reds (1981)....

"Reds is not the great opportunity for Keaton, though she and Beatty both won wide acclaim. Keaton's Annie Hall was most funny when her love relationships were most fragile, most troubled, and this quirk in her persona undercuts her fragile, troubled romance in Reds. There is always a trap in being perfectly cast in a unique part, as with Betty Bronson as Peter Pan or Bette Davis as Margo Channing; one keeps thinking that Keaton will say, 'La-di-da.'...."



Ethan Mordden, Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood (1983), p. 273-74