Hannah And Her Sisters | 1986
Another tour of Manhattan from Woody Allen, revolving around the various relationships of sisters Hannah, Lee and Holly (Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest), between three Thanksgiving dinners.
Hannah’s apartment is at the Langham, 135 Central Park West – which was Mia Farrow’s home in real life.
Architect David (Sam Waterston) takes Holly and April for a tour of his (and so, we presume, Allen’s) favourite New York buildings, which includes the Dakota Apartments, 72nd Street at Central Park West (the setting for Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby); the old bulging windows on West 44th Street; the glistening, deco Chrysler Building, 405 Lexington Avenue at East 42nd Street (the lair of Q – The Winged Serpent); Abigail Adams’ old stone house, now the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum, 421 East 61st Street at York and First Avenues on the East Side, and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 301 Park Avenue between East 49th and East 50th Streets.
He also takes them through the charming little mock-Tudor village of Pomander Walk, 260-266 West 95th Street to 94th Street. You’ll be lucky to take such a romantic stroll through it, though – the street is generally locked to the public.
When Elliot (Michael Caine) ‘accidentally’ bumps into Lee in the East Village, she takes him to the Pageant Print and Book Store – now reborn as Irish drinkery the Central Bar, 109 East Ninth Street.
They conduct their affair at the St Regis New York, 2 East 55th Street on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue (the hotel also seen in The Godfather).
Mickey Sachs (Woody Allen himself) takes a deeply unimpressed Holly, who prefers coke’n’punk, to hear the late Bobby Short, who was a regular jazz entertainer in the classy Cafe Carlyle in the Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street at Madison Avenue on the East Side.
After her terrible singing audition, Holly meets April (Carrie Fisher) outside the Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue.
The production briefly leaves New York when David takes Holly to the opera. The performance of Manon Lescaut was filmed at the Regio Theatre, Turin, Italy.
When hypochondriac Mickey is found not to have a brain tumour, he dances out of the Mount Sinai Hospital, East 98th to East 101st Streets between Fifth and Madison Avenues on the Upper East Side.
His brush with death takes him on a search for religion to the Church of the Transfiguration, 1 East 29th Street near Madison Square, but eventually he finds solace watching the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup at the – need I say, closed – Metro Cinema, 2626 Broadway at 99th Street on the Upper West Side. After standing empty for several years, the art deco building is due to reopen as Planet Fitness, a gym.
