Take the Money and Run (1969)

Take the Money and Run arrives in 1969, before the cultural apparatus that now governs our viewing habits had been fully assembled. Woody Allen's second outing as director is a mockumentary concerning Virgil Starkwell, a bank robber of surpassing incompetence, and it devotes itself entirely to the pursuit of laughter. There is no thesis to be located here, no argument about the arrangement of society, only a man whose gun turns out to be a cigarette lighter and whose demand note is legible to no one.

The supporting material is instructive chiefly for how little it signifies. Two Black prisoners appear on the chain gang, and the film declines to comment on their presence. Women arrive as girlfriends, wives, and one blackmailer with designs on the protagonist, and the picture shows no interest in their interiority. Virgil's clumsiness and social awkwardness are comic machinery, not a portrait of a mind that works differently. Bank robbery occasions slapstick instead of an indictment of finance. Allen has said he wanted every inch of the film to be a laugh, and he got what he wanted. The result is a picture that operates as a sustained gag with no social instruction attached to it.

Viewers who arrive expecting a sermon will find none. The film asks nothing of its audience beyond attention to a running joke about a man carving soap. In the ledger of contemporary cultural markers it registers a flat nothing across every column, and there is something restful in that. It is a comedy from a period when comedies were permitted to be merely funny, and it offers no apology for the fact.