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79 Q4 2017 / CINEMONTAGE comic and writer, Allen kicked off his directorial career with a series of raucous, often liberally structured comedies. Yet Kalish, who collaborated with Rosenblum on four Allen films, remembers the director as a subdued presence in the cutting room. "Everybody would say to me, 'Oh, it must be a blast working with Woody, because it must be joke after joke all day long,'" Kalish says. "It was totally the opposite. If something didn't work, he would stare at the wall and say, 'Why doesn't it work?'" If the filmmaker was in a serious state of mind, perhaps it was because Take the Money and Run had a famously fraught post-production. The film, which adopts the format of a faux documentary to recount the criminal doings of bank robber Virgil Starkwell (Allen), was judged insufficiently uproarious when assembled by original editor James T. Heckert (1926-2008). "I kept cutting the film down, shorter and shorter; throwing things away, throwing things away," Allen recounted in the 1994 book Woody Allen on Woody Allen. "Finally I had no film. So the production manager of the film said, 'Let's bring in Ralph Rosenblum, who is a very renowned editor, very gifted.'" The New York-based Rosenblum accepted the assignment, earning the credit of editorial consultant. In his 1979 memoir, When the Shooting Stops…the Cutting Begins, Rosenblum conceded that Heckert was "a competent West Coast veteran," but wrote that the film was "too short, with too few jokes, and with enough dead spots to convince an untrained viewer that the entire work was rather flat or mediocre, if not a total dud." Kalish, who shared an editing credit on the final film with Paul Jordan, recalls that the original editor had dropped wholly edited scenes that were often very funny. "For some odd reason, the editor in California didn't really know how to use them," Kalish says. "We just took everything apart, reset all the dailies, reviewed them and started from scratch." "Since the film was haphazardly plotted, it Ralph Rosenblum, left, on the set of Sleeper with Woody Allen, in costume, in 1973. United Artists/ Photofest Left: Sleeper. United Artists/ Photofest Right: Annie Hall. United Artists