Black-and-white CinemaScope. Gershwin. A 42-year-old writer dating a 17-year-old. The film whose central plot point is, in 2026, the thing the film is most-discussed for.
Manhattan, late 1970s. Isaac Davis, a 42-year-old television comedy writer, is in a romantic relationship with Tracy, a 17-year-old high-school senior. He is also entangled with Mary Wilkie, a magazine writer in her thirties who is herself having an affair with his best friend Yale. Isaac's ex-wife Jill is writing a tell-all memoir about their marriage.
The film tracks Isaac across roughly six months. He breaks up with Tracy to be with Mary. Mary returns to Yale. Isaac, recognising too late what Tracy meant to him, runs across Manhattan to her apartment to ask her to stay before she leaves for a six-month London acting programme. The film closes on Tracy's response: that he should have faith in her.
Manhattan is, on visual grounds, one of the most-beautifully-shot American films of the 1970s. Gordon Willis (the cinematographer of the Godfather films, who would also shoot Allen's Annie Hall and several later films) shot the film in black-and-white 2.35:1 CinemaScope, with extensive use of available light and silhouette compositions of the Manhattan skyline. The opening sequence — a montage of New York landmarks set to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue — is one of the most-influential opening sequences in modern American cinema.
Allen has talked about Manhattan as his attempt to make a love letter to the city. The film's New York is unmistakably an idealised version — there is no graffiti, no street crime, almost no people of colour. It is the Manhattan of the city's white literary class, photographed with the visual idiom of European art cinema. The film's romanticism is, in retrospect, part of the film's content as well as its style.
The film's plot is structurally built around a romantic relationship between a 42-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl. The film, in 1979, presented this relationship as a complication rather than a crime. Tracy is depicted as wise, mature, the moral compass of the film. The film closes on her response to Isaac as if the response settled the matter on Isaac's terms.
Almost no subsequent critical writing about Manhattan ignores this. The film is, on the page, openly courting the question of whether a 42-year-old man dating a 17-year-old is morally acceptable, and the film's resolution does not take a clear position. In 2026, with the broader cultural reckoning around age-of-consent issues and Allen's own subsequent personal history, the film's central premise is harder to read past than it was in 1979.
What we'd say: the cinematography is genuinely beautiful; the Gershwin opening is genuinely a piece of cinema history; the film's central plot point is genuinely a problem the film does not resolve. All three statements are true at once.
Mariel Hemingway was 17 during production, playing a 17-year-old. She has spoken in subsequent interviews — particularly in her 2015 memoir Out Came the Sun — about her experience on set and about Allen's continued personal interest in her after production. Her Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress made her the youngest Best Supporting Actress nominee of the year.
The performance, on its own terms, is excellent. Tracy's quiet seriousness is the film's emotional centre. Whether the role should have been written and produced at all is a separate question.