Some of you will have already noticed that the original Wall of Paul slogan, "Paul Tatara on Movies (and so forth)," now reads "Paul Tatara on Pop Culture (and so forth)." In the winter of 2007, when we launched this site, I knew I'd initially draw readers who were familiar with my CNN and Goodauthority movie coverage, so I mostly wrote about movies. But I live in the same world everyone else inhabits, and I contemplate a lot of things besides motion pictures. It was my goal, then, to eventually examine music, sports, politics, religion, firecrackers, action figures, babies, fast food, heroes, hypocrites, air conditioning, parades, cream puffs, and a slew of other topics that have come to shape my consciousness. Thus the altered, and far more accurate, slogan.

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Every Time I See a Round Loaf of Sourdough Bread...

August 25, 2010

Every time I see a round loaf of sourdough bread, I think of this brilliant, yet completely idiotic sight gag from Woody Allen’s 1969 picture, “Take the Money and Run,” a fake documentary-genre film pastiche in which Allen plays an inept bank robber named Virgil Starkwell. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

That’s so courageously stupid, Allen must have fallen out of his chair when he first thought of it, and it’s certainly not the only gag of that ilk in “Take the Money and Run.” The movie is pretty much comprised of them, from beginning to end.

The first picture that then-comedian Woody directed - technically speaking, he gets a co-director credit on “What’s Up Tiger Lilly?,” but that shouldn’t count - “Take the Money and Run” is really just a filmed version of an Allen standup routine. There’s virtually no “plot” to get in the way of the often Freudian one-liners, the framing of the images is abysmal, there’s little concern for continuity, many of the actors appear to be amateurs, and the score, by Marvin Hamlisch, sometimes works just fine, but more often sounds like it’s incidental music left over from a first attempt at “A Chorus Line.”

“Take the Money and Run” is a mess, but it’s also funny as hell. Outside of “Match Point,” I’d watch it in a second over any one of Allen’s last 10 0r 12 pictures…and, even then, “Match Point”’s trump card is Scarlett Johansson repeatedly getting hot-and-bothered, which has very little to do with making motion pictures and everything to do with Scarlett Johansson’s DNA.

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Take the Money and Run (lobby cards)

Actually, I’m more familiar with the internal rhythms of “Take the Money and Run” than I am with much better films that I watch far more often, because, when I was about 14 years-old, my brother, Jim, and I listened to “Take the Money and Run” repeatedly without looking at it. If you’re too young to remember a world without video tape, this will sound insane. But if you’re the right age, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

We don’t watch movies nowadays with the sense of urgency that we used to, and I really think our connections to them have dimmed in the process. Jim and I first saw “Take the Money and Run” on a Friday night, when it was broadcast on one of the three national TV networks. That’s three channels, folks, with the only other options being PBS and reading a book.

There weren’t any cable networks cranking out shifting streams of Hollywood garbage and gold back then, and there certainly wasn’t any Tivo. If you wanted to see a movie on TV, you had to be sitting in front of the television at the exact moment it was being broadcast. And if you couldn’t be there, tough luck. You’d have to wait to see if the network repeated the picture the next year.

You had about as much chance of making your television show you exactly what you wanted to watch as you did of making your oven cook your favorite dinner without your input. That just wasn’t how it worked, and there was nothing you could do about it.

Unless, of course, like me, you flipped on an audio cassette recorder and just taped the soundtrack. That’s right, the second time I ever watched “Take the Money and Run,” because it was so hilarious the previous year, I decided to get the words down on tape so I could listen to them in the morning when I was getting ready for school, or when Jim drove us to the Piggly Wiggly in his orange Opel Kadet station wagon.

We played the cassette over and over again, until we could practically recite it, and a lot of the jokes have remained with me into middle age, especially this nugget from Allen's oh-so-serious narrator: “Food on a chain gang is scarce and not very nourishing. The men get one hot meal a day— a bowl of steam.”

During the sight gags, you could hear us sniffling and snorting in the background, trying to stifle our laughter so we wouldn’t ruin the recording. But I had to sit there and try to reconstruct the visuals from memory while I listened to the tape. We used to do the same thing with early episodes of “Saturday Night Live”— Steve Martin as “Theodoric of York” and all that.

It didn’t seem pathetic at the time, but a lot of things we do don’t seem pathetic until we look back on them 35 years later. Again, if you’re not old enough to have experienced this yet, get ready. Your turn is coming, and, given the endless torrents of digitized stupidity that you have to choose from at this point, you’ll be rolling your eyes a hell of a lot more than I do when you finally start reflecting.

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Anyway, as long as I have it in my head now, here’s another killer moment from “Take Money and Run.” (Note that Janet Margolin, the actress who plays Virgil's girlfriend, is about 50 times hotter than any woman in her right mind who would touch Woody Allen, a theme that ran throughout Allen's pictures until relatively recently.)