Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Take The Money And Run (1969)

Then Throughout the 1990s I was an addicted carbooter, waking up at stupid hours on a Sunday morning to travel out to the massive sale at the multi-story car park in St Helens. This was pre-dvd and the perfect way to build up a film collection, which I did, slowly but surely, little knowing that within a couple of years the whole lot would be essentially worthless. But I was happy and my room looked, if not like Blockbuster video, RST video from Kevin Smith’s Clerks. It’s during one of these visits I bought my first copy of Take The Money And Run (1969), the first copy I watched, as released in the ugly red box design of Video Gems. It will have cost a couple of pounds and looked for all the world like they’d transferred the image by training a video camera on cinema screen.

Now A mockumentary about a failed and yet somehow successful bank robber features many of my favourite Woody Allen scenes, especially this exchange from half way through the film. Woody’s character, Virgil, is on the run and is trying to trick his way into an office job. We greet him and his potential employer in a crusty wooden-panelled office:

Interviewer: Name please.
Virgil: John Q. Public. P-U-B-L-I-C.
Interviewer: Mr. Public, have you any experience working in an office before?
Virgil: Yes, I have.
Interviewer: What kind of office was it?
Virgil: Rectangular.
Interviewer: Have you any experience in running a high-speed digital electronic computer?
Virgil: Yes, I have.
Interviewer: Where?
Virgil: My aunt has one.
Interviewer: And what does your aunt do?
Virgil: I can't recall.
Interviewer: You said before you worked in an office. Did you deal in products or services?
Virgil: Products.
Interviewer: Is this something found in the home?
Virgil: No, it's not. One down and nine to go.
Interviewer: Is this product edible?
Virgil: No, it wasn't. I think our time is running out and I'm sorry you haven't guessed my occupation. So I'm going to flip all the cards and tell you what I have used to do. I used to manufacture escalator shoes, for people who were nauseous. I'm sorry, you didn't actually get my occupation, but you did win $10 and I want to thank you very much. Better luck next time. You are good sport.

What I love about this scene is that it’s managed to date quite successfully but the essential idea is still sound. These days, if someone says that an aunt has a high-speed digital electronic computer it doesn't sound too incongruous (other than to wonder why they’re using such arcane language). She probably has three. Then you remember that computers those days were the size of a small car ... I love it for those retro details but also because it’s still sound, it still works, it’s still funny. Change the details and it would work just as well on The Mitchell and Webb Look.

But plenty of comedy series and films which followed in Take's wake owe it a debt of some description, most specifically The Simpsons and Family Guy. The rabbi gag is exactly the kind of cutaway perpetrated by Matt Groening, Seth McFarlane and their writers. Monty Python began in the year of this film’s release and again there are absurdist elements that reach forward to the prime of their work, especially the chain gang. You’ll have to watch to see what I mean.

The nebbish figure that Woody would go on to play for much of the rest of his career strolls in largely fully formed here (only to have his glasses broken). Allen has said, that all of his characters are pretty much the same because he lacks the range to do better, the comedian’s crutch, citing Chaplin and WC Fields. That might be true, but there are few actors which have managed to play that figure quite so consistently across forty years. Once Chaplin lost the moustache and cane, his comic timing left him too. His 50s comeback films are torturous.

And Woody as ever is hyper critical of his abilities. It would have been very easy to play Take The Money And Run at a singular level (especially considering the tiny shooting schedule) but amid the slapstick there are some surprisingly effective elements of melancholy which reach back to the pre-Code 1930s crime/drama social awareness films, especially I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, that are generally down to Allen’s ability to convincingly portray a man who is pathologically incapable of not stealing.

Despite being filmed in San Francisco some of Woody’s auteur details are already being employed, most prominently the moments when his voiceover poetically muses over shots of Virgil’s tender romance with Louise, sweetly played by Janet Margolin (who reminds me of Ali McGraw in the same way that Monica Potter should have had Sandra Bullock’s career). Substitute Margolin for Mariel Hemmingway, Diane Keaton or Mia Farrow and these sequences could appear in any number of his other films, albeit in a more professional style.