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Take the Money and Run
Woody Allen hams it up brilliantly as a neurotic jailbird in this spoof crime-documentary. Part Truffaut, part Keystone Cops, it's essentially Allen's first original feature as writer and director
All artists profit from their neuroses, but few manage it so blatantly as Woody Allen. By the mid 60s, Allen was earning $6000 a week as a gag writer, stand-up and TV scriptwriter, so the move to the big screen was inevitable, if only to get into the really big bucks. Take The Money And Run, his directorial debut, is a low-budget crime documentary spoof. Part Truffaut, part Keystone Cops it neatly encapsulates early Allen: neurotic, slapstick, auteuristic. Allen is Virgil Starkwell, a loser of course, a petty criminal and fantasist; failed cellist and pool shark turned bank robber. The one redeeming feature in his miserable life is the beautiful Louise (Margolin), who he picks up by accident while trying to lift her handbag. Of course he ends up in stir, after the brilliantly doomed debacle of trying to rob a bank with a misspelt demand: "apt natural, I have a gub and I'm prepared to use it." And the story, such as it is, follows Virgil's attempt to escape prison and regain his place in the sun with the fragrant Louise - which he does, after a fashion. Although Annie Hall (1977) is more coherent and more poignant, Take The Money And Run equals it for gags every time. The jokes are inspired and superbly surreal - check out the ventriloquist dummy prison visitors. The storytelling is a little fragmented. But remember, this is Allen the wannabe New Wave auteur - as the final shot, a parodic homage to the famous freeze-frame at the end of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, testifies. |
