"Annie, there's a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can't get it out… Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side."
Lobsters bring out a strange range of emotions. Here, in one of the many memorable moments in Annie Hall (1977), we get a dizzying, scuttling display. The scene is a scant 1 min., 15 secs long, but it's so full of frenetic movement, and so much genuine chemistry exists between the two actors, it was hard to capture a frame for this post without a lot of blur.
It all happens in a kitchen in a house in the Hamptons. There's a torn paper bag on the tiled floor, and lobsters are crawling out every which way. Dishes are stacked up on the drain board, and a big black pot is heating on the stove. Annie (Diane Keaton) just doesn't have the heart ("I can't!…I can't put a live thing in hot water.") Alvy (Woody Allen) has no qualms ("Gimme! Gimme! Let me do it! What-what's he think we're gonna do, take him to the movies?"), though squeamishness ("Oh God, it's disgusting!") keeps stopping him in his tracks. By the end of it, between the two of them, Annie and Alvy manage to get just one of the unruly critters in the pot.
Could you do it? As much as I like lobster, I don't ever think I could.
- Nora
ah, my favorite exchange from that scene:
alvy to annie: "talk to him! you speak shellfish."
i know it is barbaric, but i cook lobster with the best of them.
Salvador Dali used lobster imagery all the time as a reference to women, their sexualtiy, and fertility. Ever see the plastic lobster he glued onto a phone? I tried to glue one onto my cell phone as an homage, but have not perfected it just yet.
By the way, I like shellfish, but hate sitting at a table to work on picking meat out of a lobster or crab, or picking meat off of a rabbit in Rome or the bones out of a plate of curried goat... My point is, I might have a lobster roll, since I can relax at the table and just eat, but would normally never opt to dine on lobster... For me, the payoff is just not worth the expense of energy.
Absolutely no double entendres intended.
My favorite line from that scene is Alvy saying, "I'm not myself since I stopped smoking." "When did you stop smoking?" "Sixteen years ago." Later in the film, there's another scene with another woman, a date, I think they're also in the kitchen making lobsters, who, unlike Annie Hall, doesn't understand this line at all.
"Annie Hall" changed the way women dressed. It was the creme de la creme of Woody Allen movies.
I still remember it well.
this scene helped name one of my fave foodblogs, Ximenia's awesome Lobstersquad from way over in spain
http://lobstersquad.blogspot.com/