An Evening Without Woody

Woody Allen may well be the funniest man in America. But he is not the funniest writer in America, and between the two titles lies a profound gap. At the bottom of the gap is Don't Drink the Water, the film version of Woody's first stage play.

When he appears in his own Broadway comedy (Play It Again, Sam) or his own film (Take the Money and Run), Allen fleshes out the jittery image of Everymanic-depressive. Inanimate objects become his sworn enemies, paranoia reigns and everyone becomes a Woody worshiper. But Don't Drink the Water is minus the man--as adapter and actor--and the result is the lesser half of a situation comedy.

A Newark caterer named Walter Hollander (Jackie Gleason) and his family (Estelle Parsons and Joan Delaney) find themselves aboard a hijacked plane. Bound for Paris, it lands instead in Eastern Europe, where the Hollanders are charged with spying. "First no movie in the plane and now this!" moans the wife. "Nobody can be dragged out and shot," counters the suspicious junior American ambassador (Ted Bessell), "without written consent of the American Government." But from this intriguing negative nothing develops. Gleason merely settles in for an extended Honeymooners skit, swinging on the billingsgate with his wife and rolling fried-egg eyes skyward at every silence.

Until the substandard chase and rescue, the gagwriters resort to Edsel/Agnew jokes and mad bolsheviks. The junior ambassador tries to make clumsiness funny, bumping into chairs and stammering in search of laughs. The cause of his trouble, he claims, was having a famous ambassador for a father. Whenever Junior misbehaved, Mom hit him with an issue of TIME with Dad on the cover. Viewers are free to make similar use of this copy on the makers of the movie.

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