Reel SF: Take the Money and Run
How much do we love early Woody Allen? We went half-way across the world to the Balboa Theater Thursday night for their The Reel San Francisco! festival screening of the Woodman's Take the Money and Run. That's how much.
For those not up on their Woody oeuvre, Take the Money and Run, a mockumentary about notorious criminal master mind Virgil Starkwell (he, unfortunately, never made the FBI's Most Wanted List because, as his wife Louise (Janet Margolin- a cross between Neve Campbell and Julia Louise Dreyfuss- put's it "it's who you know") is his first movie he wrote (well, co-wrote with Mickey Rose), directed and starred in. It's so early it's missing the now trademark black background, white type title, and Dixieland jazz title sequence. It's so early it doesn't feature Mia Farrow or Diane Keaton. Yet it's as good as any of his early comedies which means it's about as funny a movie as a movie could possibly be. And then even funnier than that.
For whatever reason, this movie has become kind of under-appreciated and under-rated compared to Woody's other comedies. It doesn't quite have the ambition of his other comedies and while Margolin is amazingly beautiful, she falls short of being quite the foil Diane Keaton is, but it's far more economical and breezier than Sleeper, Bananas, or Love and Death. The movie just hums, the perfectly timed comic flick. It also showcases all of Woody's associated comic strengths-- the one liners ("Food on a chain gang is scarce and not very nourishing. The men get one hot meal a day: a bowl of steam"), non-sequitors (Woody being punished in prison by being thrown into solitary confinement with an insurance agent), physical comedy (like where he tries to play cello in a marching band, and just sheer inspired bits of comic genius. Like arguing with his wife about what shirt to wear before robbing a bank. Or any scene involving robbing a bank. The bank robbery foiled by bad handwriting contains more genius and wit than all the Scary Movie movies combined. It's like Woody thought up every component of the crime genre (the rough childhood, the heist sequences, prison escapes, being on a chain-gang) and took each to their ultimate comic conclusion.
And yes, the movie is filmed in San Francisco, something we had no idea of as we just automatically assumed it was filmed in New York. The scene where Woody first meets Louise (he tries to snatch her purse) is, upon closer inspection, totally Golden Gate Park and the apartment that he lives in, the one where he gets smoke blown on him from a cigarette ad, is totally North Beach. Which just goes to show that the current thinking brought on by the brilliance of Match Point, that Woody needs to leave New York more, is just that much more true.
Either way, we don't just love this movie, we lurve it.