This Gub For Hire

When Woody Allen takes a brave, unhesitating step forward, it is only to tumble through one of life's trap doors. He is a clown who pummels himself with his own pig bladder, an incarnation of the schlemiel, a born super-stupe.

Allen's comic sense operates on the principle of disparity. His heroes are flies intent on building spiderwebs. In Take the Money and Run, he portrays Virgil Starkwell, a man who would get flustered crossing the street, and imbues him with the delusion that he can master the split-second timing, minute detail and cool bravado needed to become a successful bank robber. Result: a criminal so consistently inept that he fails even to make the Ten Most Wanted list.

Since the film consists of one damnable bungle after another, it tends to lose its comic momentum, but there are enough insanely funny moments to sustain the picture. One bank robbery goes excruciatingly awry when Allen and the bank teller get into a testy debate about whether the piece of paper Allen has shoved through the teller's window does or does not read: "I have a gub." Allen's gub is forthwith confiscated, and he begins one of several jail sentences.

Masterminding a personal jail break with inane aplomb, he whittles an imitation pistol out of soap and blackens it with shoe polish. The ruse works, and he escapes into a drenching rain with two guards as hostages. He prods them sullenly forward until they turn warily and discover that Allen's pistol hand is a gleaming blob of soap bubbles. And so it goes, with sight gags interspersed with word foolery. The offbeat one-liner is Allen's comic forte, as when he speaks of a girl he was once fond of: "I used to make obscene telephone calls to her, collect." That might not be great comic writing, but it is good enough to take the money and run.

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