TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1969) **1/2 (out of four)
It's the Woody and Clyde story in Woody Allen's first outing as writer, director and star. In this mock documentary satirizing the crime films of the 30's (and of course 1967's BONNIE AND CLYDE), Woody plays the most inept criminal on the planet, the kind of guy who robs a bank by giving the teller a letter reading, "I am pointing a gun at you." But the teller thinks it says "gub" and calls over another teller to get a second opinion. Finally Woody is sent to the manager's office because the teller can't hand out money without written authorization. By the time Woody realizes what's going on, the cops are there.
That's the kind of movie TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN is, so wacky it's surreal. A lot of the other early Allen films had that kind of feel to them, movies like BANANAS and SLEEPER. Those were both twice as funny as TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, which has at least one failed gag for every successful one. The movie begins with an early biography of Allen's character, explaining that he took up a life of crime to pay for cello lessons.
There's a shot of Woody playing the cello in a marching band -- sitting in a chair and playing for a few seconds, then running to catch up with the rest of the band and sitting back in his chair (one of the gags that works) -- followed by a comment from his embarrassed parents, so embarrassed that they are wearing Groucho moustaches to disguise themselves (one that doesn't) that Woody didn't know how to play the cello at all. He blew into it (works). The movie alternates between the ones that are funny and that aren't while always being watchable.
So he's carted off to jail, something he narrowly avoided a few years back. (You've heard of the women-in-prison movie genre -- here's the Woody-in-prison movie.) As always, there are opportunities aplenty for jokes, both verbal and visual, mixed together expertly like only he can. One minute Woody's telling the prison psychiatrist an ink blot looks like "two elephants making love... to a men's glee club" and the next he's escaping prison using a bar of soap carved into a gun, until it starts raining and his gun turns into soap suds.
It wouldn't be a Woody Allen movie if he didn't work romance in somehow. Woody meets a girl (Janet Margolin) on a park bench and narrates, "After fifteen minutes I was completely in love with her. And after thirty I had completely given up the idea of stealing her purse." If only we could all experience such bliss, but even Woody has problems when he ends up in jail again, on a chain gang this time. The man is a genius for manufacturing premises that lead to a variety of joke-producing situations, although this movie has its share of classic moments, that genius isn't as fully developed in TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN as his comedies of the early 70's.
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