I’ve been on this Diane Keaton kick the last few days and I’m not quite ready to end it. I want to take a brief look at the 1979 Woody Allen film "Manhattan" next. This scene is the heart of the film, but it's also easily misunderstood. Here’s the clip, I’ll go over it after you watch.

It's a scene in two parts. The first is at a deli. Mary Wilke and Isaac Davis, who met previously and did not get along at all, run into each other at a Museum of Modern Art fundraiser for the Equal Rights Amendment. Davis gets to meet some of Mary's friends, they seem to be having a good time, and so the conversation continues with a long walk in Manhattan afterwards.

They end up at the deli after Mary tells Isaac she needs to walk her dog, hence the wienerdog she's carrying inside. Mary, by the way, is dating Isaac's best friend Yale, who is also married. So there's a bit of a dance going on at the deli – Mary is sharing a lot about her life (even about her therapy) and also expressing some disappointment in Yale. Isaac is doing what every Woody Allen character does best – charm her with comedy.

It's clearly working and we know this because Mary is Diane Keaton and she has one of the world's best laughs – but she also tells him directly: you know, you're really funny. But she's also telegraphing something extremely important in this scene through her therapy talk, that she deliberately puts herself into sticky situations. And she knows that she's putting herself into another one right now.

Isaac, because he's played by Woody Allen, has already lost it over Mary. And we don't need to interpret anything, it's entirely obvious any time Woody is allowed to interact with Diane Keaton in any circumstance where she's close to playing herself. In the earlier scene, Mary performed the role of a pseudointellectual and Isaac/Woody could resist her. But here, she's much closer to Diane, the woman who Woody recalled falling in love with the first time he met her.

So their amusing banter gets us out the door. And then, if we have any question about what Woody wants his audience to feel, we are immediately overwhelmed with timeless movie romance. The Queensboro Bridge scene is iconic. The shot, which will appear on the movie posters, is black and white poetry. George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" plays on the soundtrack. Woody/Isaac is rhapsodizing about the beauty of New York. The characters don't need to say a word – we are to assume that we're watching a love story and this is the central couple.

Except they are both with other people. They will eventually get together, but for Mary, it was always tentative ... someone because Yale isn't available ... someone in case Yale doesn't change his mind ... someone who won't make me feel the guilt of breaking up a marriage. But in the end, the compromises don't hold, Mary wants Yale, you can see it every time they are together, she can't help herself.

But what about that chemistry with Isaac? That is something Al Pacino ... and Woody Allen ... and Warren Beatty ... and who knows how many other men never understood ... that everyone in the movies falls in love with Diane Keaton. And it always felt like something special to them – watch that AFI tribute and see one famous actor after another declare her the love of his life. I don't doubt them, but none of them ever got it.

Diane was lovable and shared so generously ... but no one in any Diane Keaton film I've ever watched ever bothers to ask what she really wants. She has to show us through gestures and looks ... and perhaps most of all the way she melted into Warren Beatty's arms at the train station in "Reds."

All of which brings me back to that one Diane Keaton directed movie "Unstrung Heroes," which wasn't by any means a perfect movie, and not a classic like so many that she's acted in. But Diane Keaton earned so much capital with Hollywood royalty over so many years that I think she deserved to have all of them come together and praise that movie, prop it up, make sure the critics paid attention.

I say this not for that movie as much as all the other movies Diane Keaton might have made if the industry had gotten behind her ... all the stories Diane could have told where she isn't everyone's object of affection, but she gets the chance to tell it all her way. We never got that and her fans deserved it.