★★★★1/2 Woody Allen’s directorial debut continues to be a comedic gem. Several elements are already pointed out here that will appear later in the best of his work. It is a fake documentary about the worst assailant in history (Allen himself) who has family traumas behind him and, ahead of him, several neuroses, especially with women. The string of gags is remarkable and the dialogues are a comic machine gun. Direct parody also appears (something that Allen will abandon after Boris Gruschenko’s The Last Night) and a notable love for cinema (the sequence of the robbery that is camouflaged from the shooting of a film is a gem). It is true that it is not a concise film in terms of history or plot, but that same formal freedom to flood the scheme with comic elements is what makes it fresh, in a cinematographic universe that tends to the maximum entropy of conformism, original .
