New York was his town and it always would be.
One decade after he took the money and ran, a much more seasoned Woody Allen made Manhattan, which I consider to be his masterpiece, even if the master himself doesn't think too highly of it. (It's said that he offered to direct another film for United Artists for free if they would shelve it.) Filming for the first time in both anamorphic widescreen and black and white, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis conspired to capture the most romantic vision of New York City possible and it's safe to say their efforts will never be topped. Throw in the lushly arranged music of George Gershwin and Allen's most perceptive script (written with Marshall Brickman, co-writer of Sleeper and Annie Hall) and you've got the recipe for one of the all-time classics.
Unlike Annie Hall, which jumped around in time and used various distancing devices like direct address and other forms of fourth-wall breaking, Manhattan tells a much more linear and straightforward story of love and other entanglements in the Big Apple. In it, Allen plays a television comedy writer dating a high school student (a wise-beyond-her-years Mariel Hemingway) whose life gets thrown into upheaval when he quits his job to write a book and becomes enamored of his best friend's lover (an insecure, intellectual Diane Keaton). Allen hangs back, though, despite the fact that his friend (Michael Murphy) is a married man and thus in no position to make Keaton happy. Meanwhile, his acrimonious relationship with his ex-wife (Meryl Streep) is exacerbated by the fact that she's writing a tell-all book about their marriage, which ended in divorce when he caught her sleeping with another woman. That's the sort of thing that would put some people off love permanently, but Allen is nothing if not tenacious. And the ending, while bittersweet, shows that he's still a romantic at heart.