Partners in Crime

Eons ago (aka May), I set myself the ambitious task of watching and reviewing all 41 of Woody Allen’s feature directing credits.  I made it through exactly one movie (his first, 1966’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?) before I predictably got bored with blogging altogether and found other ways to waste my time.  But now that I’m back and trying to take this more seriously (and in defiance of the kind of movies I’m supposed to be watching a couple days before Halloween) I took a look at Allen’s second film – and his first conventional writing/directing job – 1969’s Take the Money and Run.  It was second time watching the movie, but the first time in probably fifteen years.

The first thing I noticed – within the first couple minutes, in fact – is how sublimely silly it is.  Given the urbanity (and, let’s face it, increasing humorlessness) of Allen’s later films, it’s easy to forget just how funny his earliest movies are.  The jokes are often broad and come in rapid fire succession – in fact, you can draw a straight line from Take the Money and Run (as well as several other films from Allen’s early filmography) to Airplane! and the Naked Gun films, as well as Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.  For those who only know Allen from his late 70’s masterpieces Annie Hall and Manhattan or recent films like Match Point and Midnight in Paris, it will be something of a revelation to watch the extremely funny running gag where various figures throughout Allen’s character’s life (a neighborhood bully, a truck driver, a courtroom judge, Allen himself) take off his glasses and step on them.

The movie is shot mockumentary-style, and the plot – such as it is – focuses on petty thief Virgil Starkwell (Allen) and his many run-ins with the law.  We get a little backstory, meet Starkwell’s parents (who wear Groucho glasses, nose, and moustache throughout the movie to protect their identity – one of the jokes that hasn’t aged especially well), and then spend the rest of the movie watching as Starkwell commits crimes, falls in love with the beautiful Louise (Janet Margolin), and bounces in and out of jail.

It doesn’t sound particularly funny in print, but the gags are clearly the engine that drives this vehicle, so the plot is secondary to watching Allen throw a bunch of jokes at the wall and seeing what sticks.  And, to be honest, not everything works, which is only to be expected of a 40-year-old comedy. (I’m reminded of the David Berman poem where the narrator argues that anyone who laughs at Shakespeare’s comedies is clearly trying too hard.)  There’s the previously-mentioned disguise for Starkwell’s parents, and there’s a too-long sequence early in the movie where we see Starkwell try (and fail) to play the cello in a marching band.

The broadness of the jokes is the problem (although I love the line from the cello teacher about Virgil blowing into the instrument), but I don’t see this as Allen’s fault as much as it’s simply an unfortunate characteristic of many comedies of the same time period.  I remember joking with my college roommates about how so many comedies of the late 60’s and early 70’s got resolved by having a pie fight or a go-kart race (or, better yet, a pie fight during a go-kart race), and a few of the jokes in Take the Money and Run follow that formula: broad and wacky because that’s just what you did.

Allen would go on to fine-tune this tendency in his next few movies (especially Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death), and we see signs of this maturity even here, along with his love of language and wordplay.  One of the very best scenes in the movie hinges on Allen’s poor handwriting as he attempts to hold up a bank:

The crux of the joke is a small one (the difference between gub and gun and apt and act), but the earnestness of the characters – apparently unaware that they’re in a broad comedy – is what pulls it off.  Virgil is dead-set on convincing the bank employees that his handwriting is perfectly legible, and the employees are so by-the-book that they won’t consent to being robbed until this little technicality is resolved.  And of course this is played against the inherent ridiculousness of the scene – that the employees would take Allen’s note completely seriously and argue its legibility.

The movie is full of small, delightful moments like this one, where the reality of the situation is placed in counterpoint to the obliviousness of a key character.  There’s a scene late in the movie where Virgil and the other members of his chain gang have escaped custody but failed to remove their shackles.  They take shelter at an elderly woman’s house, and when the local law comes calling, they manage to trick the policeman by claiming they’re the old woman’s family, standing in a clump, and shuffling as a group whenever they have to move.  The cop doesn’t see their chains, and it’s the sheer unreality of the scene that gives it its kick.  It’s funny precisely because it’s so stupid, which, as is typical of Allen, is a highly intelligent move to make.

Take the Money and Run isn’t Woody Allen at his best.  But it is Allen learning how to play his instrument, and it’s surprising to see just how quickly he would become a virtuoso.  In the next decade he would direct seven more movies, including three revolutionary comedies in the same vein as Take the Money, a Best Picture Oscar winner (Annie Hall), and my all-time favorite movie (Manhattan), which manages to be both hysterically funny and emotionally devastating.  Take the Money and Run isn’t perfect, but as calling cards go, it’s a hell of a thing.

My other Woody Allen reviews:

5/2/11: What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

*****

Current listening:

Mercury Rev – Deserter’s Songs (1998)

Current reading:

Alan Warner – Morvern Callar (1995)

This Is Only a Test

Even though he’s not especially popular anymore (except with elderly Jews and youngish movie nerds), Woody Allen remains one of those public figures about whom people invariably have an opinion.  To the casual movie-goer, Allen is “the old dude who married his daughter,” which is how one of my students described him last semester.  He’s referring, of course, to Soon-Yi Previn (the adopted daughter of Allen’s then-girlfriend Mia Farrow), whom Allen married in 1997. This tends to be, I think, the sum total of the information most people have about Allen, even though, as I mentioned in my previous post, he’s released a movie a year since 1969 with only a very few exceptions.

The problem with this revisionist history is that it completely loses sight of the fact that Allen was one of the great comic voices of the 20th Century.  His recent output (inconsistent at best, and this comes from a huge apologist for even Allen’s slightest films) has perhaps contributed to the tendency to overlook his inarguably impressive track record, which began in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.  During that time he wrote for Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and Candid Camera, and honed his act as a regular on the the Greenwich Village standup circuit.

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I mention all this because, if there’s one thing that should be pointed out at the start of this little experiment (watching and reporting on all of Allen’s films in chronological order, in case you missed it in the previous post), it’s how much of a transformation Allen’s movies underwent during his career.  His early films reflect his sensibility as a comedy writer – they’re much broader, much sillier, with a greater emphasis on slapstick and wordplay.  His later films (beginning with Annie Hall in 1977) are still comedies, but the humor is subtler, more rooted in character than in shtick.  In the 60’s and early 70’s, though, Allen was responsible for a lot of capital-C Comedies that reveled in the absurd.

And that’s as good a place as any to introduce Allen’s first official directing credit, 1966’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?  It’s an odd movie for me to have to start with because it’s not a directorial effort in the conventional sense.  Allen took two Japanese movies – International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder and International Secret Police: Key of Keys – and redubbed them in English, turning them from James Bondian cloak and dagger adventures into a spy spoof about a quest to find the world’s best egg salad recipe.  So while Allen’s films would eventually shift from broad comedies starring himself as a neurotic nebbish to urbane, slyly funny meditations on modern life starring himself as a neurotic nebbish, his first “real” movie is one that doesn’t seem like a Woody Allen Movie™ at all.

That said, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is still very funny, and plays like a precursor to Mystery Science Theater 3000.  As with the movies in that series, the plot is incidental to the jokes, which come at a furious clip.  There’s a dashing hero, femmes fatale, and villains sporting various permutations of ridiculous facial hair – all uttering deadpan dialogue that wouldn’t sound out of place in one of Allen’s standup routines (in the latter example, one character tells another, “Don’t tell me what I can do, or I’ll have my mustache eat your beard”).  Not all the jokes stick, but a surprising number of them still work, and one of the pleasures of a movie like this is the cumulative air of the absurd that encompasses the entire endeavor.  It revels in its own ridiculousness, and for its short running time, the mood is infectious.  While it’s true that parts of the movie haven’t aged particularly well – especially the hysterically incongruous clips of the Lovin’ Spoonful playing to a distractingly caucasian dance party – What’s Up, Tiger Lily? holds up well, and I think it plays even better now, in a culture that has a newfound appreciation for satire, sarcasm, and irony.  (Side note: The clips of the Lovin’ Spoonful were apparently inserted into the movie by the studio against Allen’s wishes, which is one of the reasons why he became so adamant about taking sole creative control of his future films.  It’s a good point.  Those segments play like a parody of a bad 60’s movie, which is a problem when they’re embedded in a good 60’s movie.)

As it turns out, it’s difficult to have much to say about Tiger Lily.  Finding myself without characters or story on which to report, all that’s left for me to do is describe the jokes – a dubious enterprise at best.  Suffice it to say, Allen and co-writer Mickey Rose wring a lot of laughs out of the standard spy movie tropes, as well as the inevitable culture clash involved in grafting English dialogue onto the Japanese movie.  For instance, the very Japanese hero’s name is now Phil Moscowitz, and when his gun clicks empty late in the movie he speaks directly to the screen: “No bullets? Ah, but if all of you in the audience who believe in fairies will clap your hands, then my gun will be magically filled with bullets.” There’s also a play on James Bond’s lady-killer vibe, as two scantily-clad women frolic in their hotel room (as scantily-clad women around the world are wont to do) and have this exchange:

Teri: I wish Phil would get here. It’s getting awfully late.
Suki: [Running to answer a knock at the door] It’s Phil, bringing the promise of joy and fulfillment in its most primitive form!
Teri: I hope he brought the vibrator.

It’s all profoundly silly in the best way.  As a calling card, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? didn’t turn the world of cinema on its ear, and it doesn’t even really give much of an indicator of what Allen would eventually accomplish.  But it fits in well with the rest of his early work, leaning, as it does, more toward the silly than the sophisticated.  And, knowing the riches that would come later, it’s a lot of fun watching Allen tentatively dip his toe into the cinematic waters.

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Up next: 1969’s Take the Money and Run

*****

Current listening:

Public Enemy – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)

The Straw That Stirs the Drink

For the last 15 years or so, Woody Allen has been my favorite director.  I don’t know if it’s counterintuitive, but this wasn’t an immediate realization.  It wasn’t like when I first saw Pulp Fiction or Trainspotting and knew that whatever Quentin Tarantino and Danny Boyle did for the rest of their careers, I’d be along for the ride.

I don’t even remember what my first Woody Allen movie was.  I think I’d been exposed to some of the sketches from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, and I’m pretty sure I saw Sleeper on TV when I was in elementary school.  I’m guessing my first proper Woody Allen experience was either Annie Hall or Love and Death when I was in college, but I wouldn’t necessarily put my money on either of them.  I of course knew about the whole Soon-Yi Previn scandal (which made headlines in 1992, during my sophomore year), but didn’t really have an opinion on it, other than it seemed vaguely icky.  The point is, I was aware of Allen and his movies but only in a sort of tangential way.

I do remember that 1995’s Mighty Aphrodite (which I loved) was the first of his films that I saw in an actual cinema.  It was my positive reaction to that movie – I loved, among other things, the Greek tragedy conceit at the heart of it – that prompted me to pick up another of his movies: 1979’s Manhattan (at Roger Ebert’s recommendation, if memory serves).  Watching that movie is really where the epiphany happened.  To this day, Manhattan remains my all-time favorite movie.  The clever and lacerating dialogue, the gorgeous black and white photography, the Gershwin score, the moral ambiguity at the heart of pretty much every character, and that beautifully simple last line – “You have to have a little faith in people” – the movie resonated with me immediately.

From there, I started working my way through the rest of his filmography in a scattershot fashion, becoming more and more impressed with everything I saw.  Well, not everything.  With only a few exceptions, Allen has released a movie a year since 1969, so there’s bound to be a few clunkers in there.  But his number of hits far outweighs his number of misses, and I came to appreciate (in moments of weakness, I might change that verb to revere) the different facets of his filmmaking.

All this setup is my way of announcing a project that might drive a lesser man to madness: viewing chronologically and reporting on (reviewing is probably too professional a word for my writing) all of Allen’s movies as I watch them.  The Internet Movie Database lists 47 directing credits.  One of those is in preproduction and five of them are short films (and/or TV movies), which leaves me with 41 movies.  Although I’ve seen most of them, I haven’t watched them all – especially his unofficial trilogy of “serious” movies (1978’s Interiors, 1987’s September, and 1988’s Another Woman), which I’ve always been afraid would tarnish what I think of his work.  But I’m game to give it a shot.  I tried this a year or so ago with the various adaptations of Stephen King’s books and only made it through seven of them (Firestarter – and George C. Scott with a ponytail – did me in), but I have higher hopes for this little adventure.  I know myself well enough not to establish a timeline, so I could very well be plugging along at this a year from now.  But I’ll try to do at least one a week, schedule permitting.

I’ll begin later tonight or tomorrow with Allen’s first official directing credit – 1966’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?

*****

Current listening:

Fugazi – Repeater (1990)