"Take the Money and Run" was the first film to be directed by Woody Allen. (I don't count "What's Up, Tiger Lily", which was made by recutting and redubbing a film directed by someone else, although Allen awarded himself a director's credit). It is an early example of a comical pseudo-documentary, a genre which later became known as a "mockumentary". Some have claimed it as the first feature film made in the genre; Allen said that he made the film in this style because the documentary format had hitherto been seen as inherently serious, "so you were immediately operating in an area where any little thing you did upset the seriousness and was thereby funny".
The film tells the life story of a fictitious criminal named Virgil Starkwell. The joke is that Starkwell is notoriously inept and that his planned robberies always go hopelessly wrong, generally because of incompetence on his part, leading to him ending up in jail. Despite this, his story is narrated in the sort of portentous, ultra-serious tones that would be more appropriate to a biography of major-league villains like Al Capone or Bonnie and Clyde. As in a real documentary, narrative scenes are intercut with talking-head interviews with Starkwell himself and other people who have featured in his life, such as his wife Louise and his parents. (In a running joke his parents always wear a Groucho Marx disguise when being interviewed because they do not want to be identified as the parents of a criminal). Louise is played by the lovely Janet Margolin, often regarded around this time as one of Hollywood's "brightest new starlets", but who never quite seemed to achieve full-blown stardom.
Woody was to return to the mockumentary form in "Zelig" and "Sweet and Lowdown". I must admit that I have never see "Zelig", but "Sweet and Lowdown" is one of Woody's best films of the nineties. It is not a pure comedy, but also a psychological study of considerable depth, with its hero (or anti-hero), the jazz musician Emmet Ray, emerging as a much more complex character than Starkwell, and showing that the mockumentary can also be used for serious purposes.
Starkwell may not be a complex character, but he is nevertheless one with whom we can identify. He may be a career criminal, but he is also a loveable schmuck, the eternal "little man", who shows his softer side in his relationship with his wife and child. We cannot help sympathising with a man who tries to break out of jail with the aid of a surprisingly convincing imitation gun, painstakingly carved out of a block of soap, only for his exploit to be foiled when it rains, reducing his weapon to a mass of soapsuds. We can somehow identify with the hapless optimism with a man who, sentenced to eight hundred years in jail, hopes that with good behaviour he can get his sentence cut in half. "Take the Money and Run" is never going to be rated as Woody's greatest film, not when compared with "Sweet and Lowdown", let alone masterpieces like "Annie Hall" or "Manhattan", but it was nevertheless an auspicious start to his directing career. 7/10.
