Sunday, December 2, 2007

WOODY'S MIXED BAG

Happened to revisit Take the Money and Run last night on TCM and it was a mixed bag. Loads of laughs, but I came away feeling "Is that all?" First the good stuff. The faces, of course. Allen has a great eye for casting. The actors he chooses to tell the tale of the incompetent Virgil Starkwell from youthful nerd to would-be Napoleon of crime look the part, starting with himself--the little nebbish with glasses that everybody wants to stomp on. And then there's the angelic innocence of Janet Margolin's Louise who shares some of the lovely glow of Chaplin's Goddard (though little of her feistiness). The faces and haircuts of the cops, the prison warden, the bank tellers, and the hoods, are perfect and seem to come straight out of the Eisenhower/Nixon years. Not to mention the stentorian voice of the narrator Jackson Beck (who sounds like an old March of Time Newsreel but was actually for many years from radioland's Superman) which provides the glue that, more or less, holds the glittery pieces and one-liners together. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a story.

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