Movie Reviews
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Take the Money and Run (1969) Rating:  (1 out of 5)Starring: Woody Allen, Janet Margolin, Marcel
Hillaire, Jacquelyn Hyde, Lonny Chapman, Jan Merlin, James Anderson,
Jackson Beck and Howard Storm.
Directed by: Woody Allen
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| Great American director? Or borscht belt retread? |
I admit it, I don’t like Woody Allen. I find him personally
loathsome – arrogant, immoral, condescending, immature, misogynist,
self-indulgent, and completely boring. Almost as annoying as Allen are
his fans – a group of knee-jerk acolytes almost completely incapable of
discussing their hero in any other than laudatory terms. In recent years
Allen has become horribly tedious and repetitive. Until recently, I used
to think that Allen at least used to be funny in the old days, like in
Take the Money and Run (1969).... I used to think that until I had the
displeasure of watching Take recently. What a dog! Boring and tiresome,
with only a vanishingly small number of amusing moments and nothing
actually funny. Its short running time is the only thing that
persuaded me to watch it to its miserable, pointless end.
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| Virgil's first tour in prison features a gun made of soap and
a transformation into a rabbi. |
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The concept is actually promising. Take is mock documentary – or
mockumentary if you prefer – about "comically" inept
would-be criminal Virgil Starkwell. You’re probably smiling at this
point, either at the your dim memories of this movie or perhaps if you
haven’t seen it at the admittedly clever concept. I smiled too when
the movie began... and then again when it was finally over. Allen plays
his usual schlub character, but in the final analysis Allen’s stock
character is not at all sympathetic simply because Woody is a stark
raving egomaniac. Not matter how incompetently and idiotically his
character behaves, Allen insists on portraying Virgil as somehow
more clever and attractive than is at all plausible. He plays the fool,
but Allen is too arrogant for that. There is nothing
quite as frustrating as an actor who insists on staying above the
material, and when the actor is also the writer and director it is
doubly annoying. The tone throughout is one of Allen shouting at the
audience – "Yeah, I’m playing an inept crook, but he’s still
smarter than anyone around him, and I much smarter than any of
you." You know what Woody? I don’t think you’re that smart. For
all the pseudo-intellectual dialogue in a typical Allen movie, there are
few true insights. I think this is part of reason why Allen’s stock as
a filmmaker is definitely on the downswing. As Ken Begg of Jabootu’s
Bad Movie Dimension mentioned to me, "remember when he was
widely bandied about with Scorsese as being the Great American
Filmmaker? I think those speculations have increasingly run their
course." (Ken, I hope you don’t mind me quoting you.)
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| See, his parents are so embarrassed they wear Groucho masks.
This becomes progressively less clever as the movie lumbers
on. |
Anyway, we see Virgil growing up in a tough neighborhood. We see his
painfully caricatured Jewish parents – if a non-Jewish filmmaker
portrayed Jews the way Allen does, he’d be branded a raving
anti-Semite. Allen subjects us to Virgil’s parents over and over, and
each time it is exactly the same shtick. They argue, interrupt each
other, and make lots of hand gestures. Mom is a "typical"
over-protective Jewish mother, always defending her boy, Dad is the
"typical" abrasive Jewish father calling his son a loser. Oy!
Virgil ends up in prison. He carves a gun out of a bar of soap and
colors it black with shoe polish. Unfortunately, it is raining when he
executes his escape and the fake gun is quickly reduced to a handful of
soap. Yuck yuck yuck. In a truly painful scene Virgil then agree to
serve as a guinea pig in a drug test in return for a reduced sentence.
The gag? The only side effect of the medication is to temporarily turn
Virgil into a rabbi. Ugh. Was that scene ever funny?
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| Does this man really belong with this woman? Not unless he's
paying for it. |
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Anyway, Virgil receives his parole and returns to a life of crime. On
the outside, he meets Louise (Janet Margolin) in the park. He says,
"After fifteen minutes I wanted to marry her, and after half an
hour I completely gave up the idea of stealing her purse" – a
line that is funnier in print than as delivered by Allen. Margolin is
merely the first in a long-line of improbably attractive women cast as
Allen’s love interest in movies. Not only does Allen always portray
himself as smarter than anyone else around him, he also portrays himself
as absolutely irresistible to women. You have to marvel at the
self-delusion of this nebbish of a man. His supporters will claim
that he is satirizing the concept of a sex symbol... an interpretation
that would be more plausible if the trope weren't replayed in every
Allen movie. As usual, Allen’s love
interest is an absolute throw away character, a tissue-thin creation.
Frankly, even in his more woman-centered movies, the female characters
are memorable solely for cosmetic reasons – Annie Hall and her vests,
Tracy in Manhattan (1979) for her youth. I’d argue that only Cecelia from
The
Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) breaks out of that mold at all., and notably
Woody doesn’t have a screen role in that one. In Take, Margolin is
completely wasted; her character is so lacking in defining
characteristics that she doesn’t even rise to the level of caricature.
Anyway, back to review. Virgil is desperate for money so he decides to rob a bank. He’s such a loser though and
his handwriting is so awful that the teller can’t read the hold-up
note. Admittedly amusing. But any possible enjoyment you might derive
from it is drained away as the gag is repeated over and over for the
next several minutes as the teller first calls over a co-worker and then
his supervisor to try to decipher the note. Frankly, the most
surprising thing about Take upon review is Allen's awful, awful
sense of pacing. Despite being only 85 minutes long, the movie
plods along painfully.
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| See, the teller can't read Virgil's handwriting... a bit
drained of comic potential by tiresome repetition. |
Virgil ends back up in prison. He plans an escape, but in the end his
co-conspirators abandon him, leaving him in the prison yard by himself asking
the others to let him back in. Ho ho ho. We do get an amusing bit where
Virgil struggles to work a mechanical shirt folder with a mind of its
own – it would be more amusing if it didn’t feel like a Chaplin
rip-off, however. In the end, Virgil "comically" flees from
the guards and manages to take a cab to freedom. Back on the outside,
Virgil tries to stay on the straight and narrow with Louise whom he
marries. He overlooks her lack of cooking skills – she fries up the
bacon still in its plastic wrapping – and he tries to make money by
becoming a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. They even have a child,
who instantly turns into a toddler. Virgil finally lands a job in a mail
room, but even that turns to disaster as a female co-worker blackmails
him into turning over his paycheck and becoming her lover. Ah yes
Woody, you’re irresistible to women. Virgil tries to kill his
tormentor... unsuccessfully, of course. Desperate Virgil and Louise go
on the lam.
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| Yet another woman who can't get enough of Woody's charms. |
Virgil decides to try to rob another bank. Unwittingly, he almost
betrays his plans to a cop, but manages to convince him it was a joke.
Virgil puts together a team of robbers, who are each introduced in
faux-Dragnet style. One example: "Frankie Wolfe, wanted by federal
authorities for dancing with a mailman." The rest aren’t any
funnier. The plan involves disguising the robbery as a movie shoot.
Problems start early as the mock director takes his role too seriously,
and the plan completely falls apart when Virgil’s gang runs into
another gang trying to rob the bank at the same time. Hilarity ensues...
or at least a pale imitation of hilarity ensues.
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| Do I really have to comment on this one? |
Anyway, back to prison, on a chain-gang no less which provides
opportunities for a tepid parody of Cool Hand
Luke (1967). When the opportunity
presents itself, Virgil joins a jailbreak with all eight of the escapees
shuffling along at a painfully slow pace... followed by some
choreographed hijinx as the men each try to run in a different
direction. They finally make it to small house inhabited by an old woman
with the police close behind. But when the cops arrive, the men try to
convince the cops that this multi-ethnic gaggle that moves in unison is
just a close family. It might be funny if you’re five or stoned, but
otherwise I suspect most viewers will regard this scene with a stony
demeanor.
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| A minor moment of genuine humor: Virgil busts open a gumball
machine to pay for dinner with Louise. |
Virgil, et. al., manage to elude capture. He goes back to Louise and
the two go back on the road. Virgil returns to his life of crime,
unfortunately he tries to rob the wrong man, a old classmate turned cop.
Virgil ends up in prison yet again, and the movie concludes with a
series of interviews with people Virgil knew in his final days of
freedom, each interviewee performing the equivalent of Borscht-belt
shtick. One example, "One day he told me he was a gynecologist. Now
he couldn’t speak no foreign languages. Who’s he kidding?" If
that made you laugh, then you might like this movie. Otherwise, if you’ve
never seen it, give it a pass. And if you have seen it and remember it
fondly, well, then definitely don’t see it unless you’re looking to
be disappointed. I don't know if comic sensibilities have changed
over the year or what, but this movie feels painfully dated.
Unlike some comedies that age badly because the humor is too topical, or
in some cases becomes painful politically incorrect, Take the Money
and Run suffer from neither of those problems. It is just, for
lack of a better word, lame.
Available at
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