Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have
Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
* “Beatles-in-Hamburg” as a
modifier means early in the given artist’s career, when many of the elements of
his/her work/art were already present, if in rudimentary form. See End note for more.
Subsections below:
Among staples, Jewish
jokes and the pretty girlfriend/partner/wifeMore Allenesque staples: Psychological/family background, and sex jokes
Appearances by longtime associates; production partners
Miscellaneous details or observations
Take the Money and Run
(1969) may be among the very few Woody Allen films that are most familiar to those only casually interested in or
knowledgeable of him, along with the likes of Sleeper (1973) and Annie Hall
(1977). It was the first film—and under what would become the long tradition of
the Rollins/Joffe producing banner—that he both starred in and wrote-and-directed.
It also presents the gag-a-minute type of humor with which
he became so tightly associated by the mid-1970s that, by Stardust Memories (1980), when this latter film was interpreted as
being simply about him, its line about the fictional director’s “older,
funnier” movies became among the received critical (and public) wisdom about
Allen in the decades of his subsequent career. This implied he had been “at his
best” or “at his most crowd-pleasing” when doing quickly-ratcheted-out comedy,
as if he were the tasty novelty of a comedian doing a standup routine in
writing movies, rather than the writer of probing themes that he gravitated
toward and preferred to work as, starting in the 1980s.
Take the Money, actually,
makes us appreciate, in his later films, how much a screenwriter of depth and
subtlety Allen is at his best. Yet this film’s humor often still hits home
today, and it’s surprising to note how much of the Allen that most generally
expresses himself throughout his many films still comes through this early and
admittedly homely, sometimes clunky work.
##
The film is a mock documentary about the life of a
small-time crook named Virgil Starkwell who rises from being an enormous
bumbler (in trying to be streetwise and to pull off petty crimes in his youth),
to eventually being successful enough as a bank robber that, near the film’s
end, he gets 800 years in prison (which, the narrator [Jackson Beck; 1912-2004] intones, Virgil feels he can cut in
half with good behavior).
Among staples, Jewish
jokes and the pretty girlfriend/partner/wife
There are various Jewish jokes, a feature that at the time
was on the edgy side, and in Allen’s case probably was seen as an inevitable
consequence of Allen’s being a New York–tuned Jewish standup comic. Here, we
find, for example,
* the squabbling, digression-making, Ashkezani-inflected
parents (and, not a necessarily Jewish trait, in silly disguises), who are
interviewed sporadically (though Virgil’s full name doesn’t really sound
Jewish);
* the prison episode where, after volunteering to be a
guinea pig on which an experimental vaccine is tried out, Virgil develops the
side effect of turning temporarily into a rabbi (complete with black brimmed
hat, bushy beard, and aptness to pedantically discourse on the meaning of
eating matzoh during Passover); and
* a funny scene with Virgil in a prison chapel, obviously
Christian (Catholic), with him being sneaked homemade weapons by an
intended-breakout accomplice while they are in the pews, and (as intended
cover, yet by an obvious fictional clod about observing religious proprieties)
Virgil engaging incongruously in the type of rhythmic rocking that religious
celebrants do in Jewish temples.
##
There is also the Allenesque touch of having a
girlfriend/wife for Allen’s character who, at least in the looks department,
seems out of his league, which side character probably at this early stage of
his career reflected merely the producer demand to have an attractive leading
lady to add some romance and sex appeal to the story for marketing purposes (as
any big-audience director’s debut would have been expected to do).
Here, the leading female is Janet Margolin (1943-93) as Louise, a young laundress Virgil
stumbles on accidentally and almost immediately becomes smitten by. Virgil is
about to snatch her purse in a town park when she alertly eyes him, and he catches
himself, and then he moves discreetly/awkwardly to a friendly conversation about
amateur artwork she is doing. They are an item from then on.
Margolin had her acting debut in the respectful
mental-inpatient drama David and Lisa
(1962), and worked for Allen again in Annie
Hall, as the city-intelligentsia-conscious wife who apparently has trouble making
love without Valium.
An interesting touch in Take
the Money—whose setting is (largely) San Francisco—has Virgil and Louise
going on a date to Ernie’s, the famous restaurant with the red walls that is
reproduced in Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958). One amusing detail: notice how, when Allen’s Virgil drops a handful of
change into the waiter’s hand as a tip, a woman to the left on the screen (an
extra) is looking steadily (and a little scandalized?) at what has fallen on
the floor, as if she didn’t expect this move.
More Allenesque
staples: Psychological/family background, and sex jokes
In the film’s fastidious mock-biographical manner, family
history is presented comically (Louise, it turns out, was adopted by a
career-military father, who after 30 years “catapulted” to the rank of
corporal, and a religious mother who had conversations with God about, among
other things, interior decorating). Allen, of course, would prove for many
years to be conscious of this robust way of looking at aspects of character; it
would appear in many forms through many of his later films, not just in the
similar Zelig (1983), but in ones
where family background, whether or not including mental illness, is invoked
importantly.
Even an early form of Allen’s patented sex jokes turns up.
In a sort of monologue comprising his brief turn at voiceover narrating of his
story (temporarily taking over from Beck—an artist’s-license move), shortly after
meeting Louise, Virgil remarks about having talked with a prison psychiatrist
about sex. The p-doc, following up on his question about whether Virgil had a
girlfriend, had asked him if he thought sex is dirty, and Virgil recounts that
he answered, “Well, it is if you’re
doing it right.”
Appearances by
longtime associates; production partners
At this early stage in his career—not that I know it all really
well—Allen had help from people he’d already been working with, in lesser-film
fare. Mickey Rose (1935-2013), a
student-days friend, is his co-writing partner here, as he would be for Bananas (1971). Rose had helped him with
the drive-in-style comic riot What’s Up,
Tiger Lily? (1966).
Interestingly, Allen’s start here as writer/director/star almost
didn’t happen; in Eric Lax, Conversations
with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007; p. 335; speaking within November
2005-November 2006), Allen notes, “When I wrote Take the Money and Run with Mickey Rose, Jack Rollins [Allen’s
longtime manager] didn’t want me to appear in and direct a film because he felt
like there might be some kind of backlash, like, ‘Who is this wunderkind? Who
does he think he is?’ And I didn’t care about directing it. I just didn’t want
someone to ruin it. So it was hard to get anybody [a studio] interested in Take the Money and Run.” Palomar
Pictures International ended up being the producing studio, and accepted the
multi-role situation that Allen presented, presumably because, as Allen says, it
“was a new company and they couldn’t deal from strength.”
##
For Take the Money,
Allen would have the services of several film editors, but Ralph Rosenblum (1925-95) is listed in the credits as a consultant:
actually, he was brought in to perform crucial reworking of some of the film’s editing,
giving it such tweaks as the interspersing of comments by Virgil’s parents;
this is recounted in Lax, p. 270. Rosenblum would be ranked as the full editor
for the next film. Rosenblum would work as sole/main editor for Allen up
through Interiors, on every film Allen
directed except Everything You Always Wanted
to Know About Sex… (1972).
Also, Jack Grossberg is an associate producer here; he would
be full producer on the next film, and would be associated with Allen’s work at
least as late as, I think, Sleeper.
Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012)
scored music for virtually the entire film, as he would do for Bananas; this was not Allen’s usual
method for his films from about Sleeper
on.
##
Louise Lasser, who was
married to Allen for a few years until 1970, appears toward the end as a
“person on the street” commenting about Virgil. (She would costar with Allen in
Bananas and would also be in Everything You Always Wanted….) Lasser
here is giving some streetwise comments, basically riffing on the notion that
Virgil had seemed like (for one measure) such a schlemiel, and yet was a master
criminal. She ends with an expression I think
I have right: “Go know, right?”—which may have been hip in those days, but I’m
not sure what it means unless it is “Go figure.”
The voices in the film are largely what sounds now like flat
and rather expressionless blats; similar can be found in 1970s films. I guess
we Americans got more inflection-wielding and with a certain general lilt in
our talk while (perhaps as a semi-cause) society has gotten more
technologically advanced, or whatever other societal correlate of the voice
phenomenon may be relevant. Allen, however, is familiar to us with the Brooklyn
touches to his voice. He even has thinning hair here, as he would familiarly
have later: going bald on the back-top of his head, and receding front
hairline, leading to his characteristic uneven front hairline, with its
comb-over, or whatever that is.
Miscellaneous details
or observations
* Allen originally had an ending far different from what the
film has; it would have entailed a shootout, with Virgil killed messily,
reminiscent of the end of Bonnie and
Clyde (1967). But there would have been a comic twist, with Louise (and her
son by Virgil) visiting his grave, and (as the two leave) Virgil from
underground (?) giving them a “Psst!”
as if he was still alive. The scene was filmed, and included even special
effects for gunshot wounds, courtesy of A.D. Flowers,
the famed special-effects man who later worked for Francis Ford Coppola, among
others. But this ending was scrapped (see Lax, p. 134).
* Various story details seem to echo (by artifice, of
course) Allen’s real life, such as the birth date of Virgil being Allen’s.
There are also touches of Virgil being characterized as an “atheist” (including
by his own father) and a “pinko”—similar is done regarding Allen’s character of
Fielding Mellish in Bananas—which
both reflects the cultural/populist bugbears of the time and perhaps echoes
some features of Allen’s late-’60s/early-’70s intellectual orientation
(arguable; or what may have been compatible with it) that maybe he was playing
for laughs as well as being a bit daring about presenting.
There are also jokes in the later film about Mellish’s being
a college dropout, which perhaps Allen was a bit embarrassed about his being then, and certainly wasn’t
later. (The underscoring of anti-communist paranoia is also shown in the
fictional FBI agent, Daniel Miller, toward the end of the film, who is noted as
having authored a book, Mother Was a Red.)
But the classical instrument Virgil takes up as a youth, a
cello, is an incongruously nerdy instrument for a street “gamin” like him; but
it is not the clarinet that, in real life, Allen ended up mastering.
* The instrumental song (by Quincy Jones) “Soul Bossa Nova,” which is familiar to younger audiences through
the Austin Powers series (1997-2002),
underscores one sequence in this film, but it is played somewhat differently
here.
End note.
The Beatles, as you know, did their most act-solidifying
early work as a managed house band of sorts in a few clubs in Hamburg, Germany,
from 1960 to 1962 (starting with the Indra Club and then the
Kaiserkeller). Bob Spitz’s comprehensive if flawed and occasionally biased
biography on the group from 2005 (Little, Brown) is arguably at its most
interesting when it recounts, in surprising detail, the band’s early
professional history that is similar to that of many a local American garage or
bar band: young slobs pounding away at their act in obscure venues with dreams
of the big time.
Also, the recent book Beatles
vs. Stones by John McMillian (Simon
& Schuster, 2013), comparing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, shows its
obvious bias toward the latter group, but I think the question of which group
was greater (in the 1960s) is both silly and easily answered: The Beatles were
greater, if no other reason than because, by 1962, they had long paid their
dues in grungy work for about two years as an apprentice band usually covering
other writers’ songs, with occasional original numbers, which period of
extended, rugged apprenticeship the Stones never went through. And of course,
the Stones rode the tidal wave of British-band “mania” that the Beatles helmed
that allowed the Stones to come to prominence.
In terms of the literal image that “Beatles-in-Hamburg”
connotes, think of the band in stinky leather jackets in later 1960 (and
consider the picture, from whenever, of John Lennon with a toilet seat around
his neck). Think of them playing like maniacs in a seedy club patronized by
boorish German sailors, the band fueled by the stimulant Preludin and beer, and
heeding the exhortations of Bruno Koschmider, the German club owner/manager who
told them to “Mach Schau!” (“Make
show!”; this more literally can be read as something like "Power up a show!," but you get the drift; anyway, on this latter, see The Beatles’ autobiography from 2000 [Chronicle
Books], p. 47, and Spitz, p. 209).
