Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Small Time Woody

Messages from my old New York buddy Barbara are always welcomed, and this one especially so. She had just seen Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks, and she e-mailed me, "Why can’t I learn to appreciate him?" If even someone from my New York period shares my lack of appreciation for Woody Allen, the most New-Yorky of filmmakers, then maybe I am not so out of touch here in my electronic peanut patch. I’m afraid that this new film does little to change my mind.

Small Time Crooks comes across as episodes in a sit-com, because in its hour and a half or so, Allen rambles through about a half dozen stories, or bits of stories, that work out to a film that is less than the sum of its parts. Even I will grant that Allen has had some very high points, but Crooks is much closer to the dreadful Celebrity than to Annie Hall.

If you have seen the previews or heard much on television about this film, you probably have the wrong idea. It is not a romp through a bungled bank robbery, like Martin Brest’s Going in Style (1979). Instead, in the beginning, the first episode, the film is a weird updating of "The Honeymooners," with Tracey Ullman and Allen playing a rather economically-challenged New York couple who fuss, fluster, and threaten, while Allen’s Ray cooks up an absurd bank robbery. It’s The Honeymooners, all right, with all the ugliness but none of the charm that keeps that vintage television comedy so vital to our popular culture that it provides inspiration not only for this film but also, it is said, for the current Flintstone adventure (as for all Flintstone ventures).

The scheme involves renting a vacant store and tunneling from it into the bank vault. Frenchy, Ray’s wife, is recruited to bake and sell cookies to provide a cover for Ray and his dumbbell buddies. These people supposedly know each other, but they all seem to come out of a vacuum and less than halfway through the film, most of them return there. We know that Ray spent two years in prison, where he was called the Brain—sarcastically, as the other conspirators remind him. But, there is no sense of cohesion, no reason to believe or care about them.

That’s a real problem. Robbery has long been a staple topic for comedy on film; think of all the jewel thieves (Marlene Dietrich in Desire in 1936) and cat burglars (Sean Connery in last year’s Entrapment). If we are supposed to violate the moral code, to see some humor in a bank robbery, for instance, and to sympathize with the crooks, then those crooks, small time or otherwise, must be sympathetic in some way. This gang is so unpleasant that I was left feeling that they should have the book or, even worse, this script thrown at them.

In a fanciful fairy tale twist, Frenchy and Ray become millionaires, not as a result of the failed bank robbery but as a result of the popularity of Frenchy’s cookies. The most successful moments of the film are in the television report on the strange corporate culture of the cookie empire. But, at that point, not quite half way through the film, the rest of the series should have been cancelled.

Frenchy and Ray make fools of themselves by trying to join high society (not so much Beverly Hillbillies as Upper East Side Hillbillies). Frenchy hires a snobbish tranquilizer-popping art-dealer played with predictable foppishness by Hugh Grant to teach her how to be a… Oh, well, at one point, he gives her a copy of Pygmalion. Meanwhile, Ray consoles himself with the company of Frenchy’s cousin May (superbly played by Elaine May) and plans for one last heist—a rather simple lifting of a piece of jewelry.

Then, in a conclusion that seems to be the end to some other movie, things do not really work out but just get papered over. I guess there is some subtle brilliance that Woody-ites savor but which I’m still trying to find. But, not yet.

I never feel comfortable with a review like this. Writing one review a week, I would like to celebrate film, share my love of movies with you, but the truth is, this film just does not give me an opportunity to do so.

Looking over recent video issues, I am glad to have the opportunity to call to your attention again two films that I have very much enjoyed by reminding you of my original reviews: Bringing Out the Dead and End of the Affair. Try to avoid the temptation to rob a bank. Just settle for making your fortune in cookies, now that the NASDAQ has cooled down (way down), with your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts.