Take the Money and Run1969
Take the Money and Run (1969)
Take the Money and Run Photos
Movie Info
Cast
as Virgil Starkwell
as Louise
as Fritz
as Miss Blaire
as Jake
as Al
as Chain Gang Warden
as Fred
as Vince
as Frank
as Psychiatrist
as Joe Agneta
as Judge
as Farmhouse Lady
as Mother Starkwell
as Father Starkwell
as Psychiatrist
as Michael Sullivan
as Kay Lewis
as The Narrator
News & Interviews for Take the Money and Run
Critic Reviews for Take the Money and Run
All Critics (20) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (18) | Rotten (2) | DVD (3)
Whatever its genesis, Allen's scraggly rhetoric evolved into the dominant comic style of the 70s.
A few good laughs in an 85-minute film do not a comedy make.
It has plenty of hilarious jokes and concepts, like the ventriloquists' dummies at prison visiting time, and the return home from a chaingang break with five shackled cons in tow.
Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy -- something very special and eccentric and funny.
Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run has some very funny moments, and you'll laugh a lot, but in the last analysis it isn't a very funny movie.
Rosenblum even suggested the use of New Orleans jazz on the soundtrack, which became a staple of future Allen projects.
Audience Reviews for Take the Money and Run
It doesn't matter how I look at it, the humor of this early Wood Allen semi-mockumentary doesn't work for me at all with those gags that may look great on paper but are a failure on screen, and it is just irritating to see one funny joke for every three or four terrible ones.
Super Reviewer
Take the Money and Run is a surrealist crime comedy that's little more than a loosely bound series of gags, and yet somehow the whole thing works. Woody Allen plays Virgil Starkwell, perhaps the world's worst criminal. He gets caught trying to rob a bank because the tellers can't read his hold-up note. He tries to pull another bank job with a gang, and a separate gang holds up the same bank at the very same time. Life is a series of hard knocks for Virgil, until one day when he's about to rob a beautiful girl, and decides to talk to her instead. The two soon become a couple and marry, and it's here the movie makes it's strongest point. The dialogue is at it's strongest and most realistic in the couple's exchanges, especially in the way she refuses to allow him to get away with lying. She knows him all too well, you see. The rest of the world are idiots, though. Unable to recognize even the lamest of schemes, everyone from cops and judges on down to the everyday people are all at the mercy of slightly-above-average-intelligence Virgil, and yet he always manages to do himself in due to his extreme ineptitude. In a movie that's just a series of gags, with the barest and loosest of plots, its fortunate that most of time it works.
Super Reviewer
I remember I was reading some Woody Allen Q&A session with Eric Lax and he was talking about how inexperienced he was while making this movie and how difficult it was to direct, so I was surprised to find that this was actually a very tightly structured narrative. All the physical comedy scenes are priceless but it's never like tiresome joke, joke, joke one after the other. The story works passably as well. It's actually one of the better comedies, believe it or not - miles ahead of Bananas and Love and Death. And the women Woody goes for are all so pretty and awesome too - sweet and willing to take a joke, but not in a wallflower sense at all.
Super Reviewer
Take the Money and Run Quotes
| The Narrator: | Although he does not make the 10 Most Wanted list, he does win Gangster of the Year Award and is asked to speak at many luncheons and universities. |
| Virgil Starkwell: | Nobody's going to be wearing beige to a bank robbery, it's in poor taste. |
| The Narrator: | On July 11, Virgil and Louise marry. It is a simple ceremony following what he later described as a deeply moving blood test. |
| Virgil Starkwell: | All I know is my heart was really pounding and I felt, I felt a funny tingling all over, you know, and I, I don't know, I was either in love or, ah, I had smallpox. |