Woody Allen: Rabbit Running

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Perfect Sense. It is the mark of the eccentric that he considers himself normal; it is only the world that views him as odd. To Allen, the East 79th Street duplex in Manhattan that he now shared with Louise made perfect sense. It had a striking Aubusson rug, a Tiffany lamp, a newly decorated interior. His old apartment had contained a bed in the middle of the floor—and little else. The new main room held a billiard table —and nothing else. The ceilings concealed tiny spotlights to illuminate pictures on the walls. But there were no pictures on the walls. The Nolde watercolor, the Kokoschka drawing and the Gloria Vanderbilt paintings were stacked up somewhere, awaiting the decision that their owner could not make. The Wurlitzer jukebox was loaded with records but remained unplugged.

Woody scarcely had time to enjoy his oddly luxurious surroundings. He worked, in fact, with a demonic, almost humorless passion—writing parodies and vignettes for The New Yorker, confecting new nightclub and television routines, searching vainly for the ultimate one-liner. Sporadically, he took time out to spice up campaign speeches for New York City Mayor John Lindsay. He also coauthored, directed and starred in a hilarious, self-inflicted wound of a film called Take the Money and Run. It was the first movie over which Allen had total control, and the first in which the quintessential Allen style surfaced, blemishes and all.

Money, the saga of an inept robbing hood, was hip, paranoid and eclectic, and it had the fuzzy continuity of a fever dream—rather like the early Marx Brothers movies, or the last films of W.C. Fields. It also had a fine eye for the human cartoon. Allen, playing the master criminal of his youthful fantasies, stands by while a bank teller tries to decipher his scrawl: "I have a gub." The holdup man insists that the word is "gun"; the teller consults higher authorities, thereby spiking the heist. Even Allen's penmanship, it turns out, is masochistic. Occasionally there was a flat, tasteless line, but audiences howled, and the film made money. Allen took it and ran.

In 1969 he wrote and starred in a Broadway hit play about a recently divorced nebbish with an acute inability to score. The show, not surprisingly, coincided with the breakup of his marriage to Louise Lasser. Play It Again. Sam—even brighter in the film than onstage—features the visible shade of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, plus several unseen ghosts. "I never had a teacher who made the least impression on me," Woody says. "If you ask me who are my heroes, the answer is simple and truthful: George S. Kaufman and the Marx Brothers." In Play It Again, Sam, they are all over the screen; yet somehow Woody's strabismic vision always remains completely his own. Even Groucho Marx declares, "They say Allen got something from the Marx Brothers. He didn't. He's an original. The best. The funniest."