Whatever the ads say, you can’t compare Woody Allen with Charlie Chaplin or W.C. Fields. It’s not that Woody’s a different animal – he’s of a different order of being. Take the Money and Run (Fine Arts Theater) is a human cartoon, a series of spoofs getting laughs from such things as dynamic candles and a car driving around a living room.
The film parodies our fascination with the criminal, taking off on Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, and the more standard Hollywood stereotypes. Allen plays a notorious noodnick in crime, a burglar who can’t seem to steal anything right. The movie proposes to be a kind of documentary showing “scenes from the life” and “interviews with those who remembered”, but it is mostly just a catalogue of jokes – sight gags and funny lines.
Usually, the scenes are either completely absurd or pat and predictable. Allen will serve you set-ups like these – taking an anti-virus injection to get parole ad turning into a rabbi from the side effects, or breaking into a vault and finding it occupied by gypsies – and stop, without supplying anything more. On the other hand, he can make your cup runneth over until the effect goes flat: the bank teller can’t read his hold-up note, so he asks someone for advice; eventually everyone who works there is crowded around giving his interpretation, Allen left fumbling with his gun in the middle of it all, trying to explain himself.
The film also sustains itself on stand-up comedian lines recorded over inconsequential visuals. For example, while watching Allen walk hand in hand with his girlfriend we hear the quip, “I told her the only other girl I knew was so ugly I made obscene telephone calls to her collect.” All right, it’s funny, but it has nothing much to do with what we’re seeing on screen. Similarly, there are some scenes, like his battle with a shirt-folding machine in the prison laundry, which seems unrelated to the movie – just another set piece from a comedy writer’s repertoire.
Some gags, though, are handled just right, like the sequence of Allen’s escape from prison in the rain, in which his “gun”, laboriously carved out of soap, turns to suds in his hand.
But the humor of Woody Allen is cartoonish at best – all kinds of things happen to him, all kinds of things go wrong, but the comedy is mechanical and the comedian is two-dimensional. He has no integrity. Of course there’s always the glasses, the bald spot, and the silly-looking body, but never the sense of personality: only a nondescript little guy in the center of some crazy situation. We laugh at Chaplin when he eats his boot and Fields when he insults a little girl just because it’s funny, but also because it’s so consistent with the comedian. Woody Allen throws anything at you he thinks will make you laugh. He’s an ideas man, not a genius.