Film Overview
With Take the Money and Run, Woody Allen made his first fully original feature as director and introduced Virgil Starkwell, one of cinema’s least successful professional criminals.
Presented as a documentary about Virgil’s life, the film follows him from an awkward childhood through a spectacularly unsuccessful career in crime. Bank robberies, prison sentences, chain gangs and escape attempts are treated with the solemnity of a serious biographical study while almost everything Virgil attempts ends in disaster.
Allen co-wrote the screenplay with Mickey Rose and uses the mock-documentary format to move rapidly between interviews, reconstructions, narration and visual jokes. The structure allows the film to abandon conventional realism whenever there is a better joke available.
Janet Margolin plays Louise, whose relationship with Virgil provides an unexpectedly gentle centre to the film. Around them is a mixture of professional performers and supporting players who help preserve the appearance of a genuine documentary.
After the unusual experiment of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, this was the film in which Allen firmly established himself as a writer, director and leading actor working on his own material.
Watch Take the Money and Run
My Review
The birth of the comic persona
Take the Money and Run has always felt to me like the moment Woody Allen properly arrives on screen as a filmmaker rather than simply a brilliant comic voice appearing within other people’s work.
There had already been the strange detour of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, but this is the first time you can really feel a complete Woody Allen film taking shape: the rhythms, the comic anxieties, the formal inventiveness and the fascination with people who are hopelessly unequipped for the lives they have chosen.
Virgil Starkwell is not a master criminal, nor even a competent one. That is the starting point, and Allen understands immediately how much comedy can be extracted from treating a figure like this with the grave seriousness usually reserved for important public men.
The mock-documentary structure is the film’s great idea. Instead of simply giving us a run of comic set-pieces, Allen and Mickey Rose build an entire fake biography, complete with interviews, narration, reconstructions and solemn testimony from people who knew Virgil at different stages of his life.
The film’s big comic revelation is that total incompetence becomes even funnier when it is described with absolute seriousness.
What makes the film so funny is not simply that Virgil fails, but that everybody around him seems to regard those failures as material worthy of careful historical record. The documentary voice treats his embarrassments with complete composure.
His parents discuss him as though he were a figure of tragic significance. Prison life, escape attempts and robberies are framed not as bursts of slapstick but as milestones in a wayward life.
The famous robbery note sequence remains a perfect example. It is not simply a joke about illegible handwriting. It becomes an escalating comic study in procedure, misunderstanding and institutional calm. Everybody reacts as though deciphering a badly written holdup note were a perfectly ordinary inconvenience.
Woody Allen’s performance is central to all of this, and what strikes me most is how recognisable the screen persona already is. Virgil is not exactly the later Allen character in full, but so much is already there: the nervous self-consciousness, the inability to project force and the sense of a man whose ambitions are forever being undermined by his own nature.
The difference is that here the persona is still rooted much more openly in gag comedy and silent-era clowning.
It is one of the reasons the film feels so energetic. You can sense Allen discovering what happens when his verbal wit is matched with editing, framing and rhythm. A joke can come from an interview cutaway, a static composition, a line of narration or the dead expression on the face of someone listening to nonsense.
Virgil Starkwell is one of those characters who fails so consistently that failure becomes a kind of vocation.
Janet Margolin is also very important to the film. Louise gives Virgil something close to emotional reality, and Margolin never overplays the role.
She does not behave as though she has wandered in from a different, more serious film, but she provides a calm, believable presence that stops the comedy becoming too mechanical. Without Louise, Virgil might easily feel like nothing more than a collection of comic humiliations. With her, he occasionally seems like a man who has somehow inspired genuine affection despite being spectacularly ill-equipped for adult life.
That balance matters because the film’s comedy depends on Virgil never becoming cruel or threatening. He is a criminal in name, but not really in temperament. Even at his most absurd, he remains oddly innocent.
He is not fascinating because he is dangerous. He is fascinating because his chosen identity and his actual character are so completely mismatched.
The film also benefits from the supporting players and from Allen’s willingness to let apparently minor ideas run just long enough to become memorable.
The interviews with Virgil’s parents are inspired. Their disguises remain one of the great throwaway ideas in the film because the documentary treats them as practical necessities rather than obvious insanity.
You can already feel Allen discovering that the camera can deliver a joke just as effectively as a line of dialogue.
Scenes in prison, on the chain gang and during escape attempts have a similarly sustained absurdity. Allen understands that a joke often becomes funnier once it has gone a little too far.
Another pleasure is seeing how much the film belongs to a broader comic tradition. There are traces of television parody, silent slapstick, radio timing and gangster pastiche running through it. Yet it never feels like an imitation of any one of them.
What emerges instead is a distinct early Allen sensibility: a love of incongruity, an affection for losers and a refusal to let seriousness remain intact for very long.
It is true that the film is rougher than the work that followed. That roughness is part of its appeal for me. It does not have the emotional sophistication of Annie Hall, the tonal confidence of Hannah and Her Sisters or the visual elegance of Manhattan.
But it has something those later films could never quite have again: the excitement of a filmmaker discovering his own freedom in real time.
You can feel how much Allen enjoys the licence to move anywhere a joke requires. The film can be a spoof documentary one moment, a bank-robbery farce the next, then a prison comedy, then a romantic interlude, without ever seeming particularly worried about consistency.
I also think it is one of the most important films in understanding the shape of Allen’s early career. It is not simply an entertaining first original feature. It is the point at which his comic world becomes fully legible.
The anxious outsider, the collision between aspiration and inadequacy, the fondness for parody and the delight in self-invention are all already here.
What I enjoy most, though, is the film’s generosity. It laughs at Virgil constantly, but it never seems to despise him. There is a kind of affectionate absurdity in the way the film watches him fail.
For that reason, Take the Money and Run remains much more than an interesting early effort. It is the first fully formed statement of a comic voice that would develop in many different directions afterwards.
It may not be the most polished film in the filmography, but it is one of the most revealing — and one of the funniest.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
An aspiring master criminal whose lack of competence turns almost every robbery, escape and criminal scheme into a disaster.
Janet Margolin
Virgil’s partner and eventual wife, whose affection for him provides the film with its warmest and most grounded relationship.
Marcel Hillaire
One of the distinctive supporting characters encountered during the documentary account of Virgil’s life.
Jacquelyn Hyde
Part of the film’s large supporting ensemble, presented within its straight-faced documentary world.
Lonny Chapman
A fellow convict who appears during Virgil’s continuing and generally unsuccessful encounters with prison life.
Jan Merlin
A bank robber whose criminal career intersects with Virgil’s increasingly chaotic attempts to make crime pay.
Marvin Hamlisch gives Virgil’s failures a surprisingly polished score
Marvin Hamlisch’s music gives Take the Money and Run much of its momentum. The score can move between crime parody, romance and slapstick while giving Virgil Starkwell’s disastrous life a musical confidence that the character himself almost completely lacks.
Marvin Hamlisch
Hamlisch’s score gives the film a polished musical identity that works beautifully against Virgil’s incompetence. Instead of constantly underlining the jokes, the music often treats his adventures as though they deserve the scale and momentum of a much more accomplished criminal career.
Music that moves as quickly as the comedy
Hamlisch’s score is flexible enough to follow the film wherever it goes. Documentary parody gives way to robbery, prison comedy and romance without the soundtrack ever slowing the pace.
This was one of Hamlisch’s early film scores, several years before the extraordinary run of successes that would make him one of the most celebrated American composers of the 1970s.
He would work with Allen again on Bananas, making Hamlisch an important part of the musical identity of Allen’s earliest original features.
Marvin Hamlisch
The composer gives Virgil’s criminal adventures energy, pace and a deliberately disproportionate sense of importance.
Crime Meets Comedy
The score frequently borrows the confidence of crime-film music while the images reveal just how badly Virgil is coping.
Comic Momentum
Music helps carry the film rapidly between its documentary interviews, robberies, prison sequences and romantic scenes.
Allen and Hamlisch
Hamlisch returned for Bananas, continuing one of the defining musical collaborations of Allen’s earliest filmmaking period.
Locations
Although Virgil’s story supposedly carries him across America, Take the Money and Run is very much a San Francisco film.
Allen shot extensively around the city and also took the production inside San Quentin State Prison. The real locations give the mock-documentary a visual authenticity that makes Virgil’s increasingly ridiculous adventures even funnier.
San Francisco
San Francisco provided the principal locations for the film, often doubling for places elsewhere in the United States.
San Quentin State Prison
Prison sequences were filmed inside the real institution, giving Virgil’s mock biography an added layer of visual authenticity.
Mission Street
The Mission District appears in the film’s San Francisco location work, including the memorable marching-band sequence.
Clement Street
The Richmond District provided additional city locations for Virgil’s increasingly unsuccessful criminal career.
Spreckels Lake
The lake and surrounding parkland were among the San Francisco locations used during production.
A City Playing America
San Francisco frequently stands in for other parts of the country, perfectly suiting the deliberately artificial documentary biography.
Awards and Recognition
Comedy Screenplay Recognition
Woody Allen and Mickey Rose received Writers Guild recognition for their original comedy screenplay.
Allen’s First Original Feature
The film marks Allen’s first fully original narrative feature as director and the clearest beginning of his distinctive screen world.
An Early Mockumentary
Its interviews, narration and supposedly factual reconstructions made documentary parody central to the comedy long before the form became commonplace.
A Defining Early Comedy
Virgil Starkwell established many of the comic traits Allen would continue to develop throughout the 1970s.