Take the Money and Run

Discounting the abortive What's Up, Tiger Lily?, this was Woody Allen's debut as his own director, and it marked the beginnings of his idiosyncratic 'one shot - one gag' technique. Its tale of the eagerly criminal career of Virgil Starkwell is as unpredictably structured as Annie Hall, if not yet anything like as sustained in tone and mood. But it has plenty of hilarious jokes and concepts, like the ventriloquists' dummies at prison visiting time, and the return home from a chaingang break with five shackled cons in tow.