Palomar. Director Woody Allen; Producer Charles H. Joffe; Screenplay Woody Allen, Mickey Rose; Camera Lester Shorr; Editor Ralph Rosenblum, James T. Heckert; Music Marvin Hamlisch; Art Director Fred Harpman
Woody Allen
Janet Margolin
Marcel Hillaire
Jacquelyn Hyde
Lonny Chapman
A few good laughs in an 85-minute film do not a comedy make. Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, basically a running gag about hero Allen's ineptitude as a professional crook, scatters its fire in so many directions it has to hit at least several targets. But satire on documentary coverage of criminal flop is over-extended and eventually tiresome.
Bright spots are interviews with parents-in-disguise Ethel Sokolow and Henry Leff; Janet Margolin, as wife, and prison psychiatrist Don Frazier also deliver yocks.
Margolin turns in a neat performance as Allen's wife. Allen, both as director and actor, sustains his own characterization. In such scenes as robbery when he can't convince bank personnel they are being robbed, or in chain gang's visit to farmhouse, he creates genuinely funny moments.
(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1969. Running time: 85 MIN.
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