Woody Allen (2000)
One of the memorable characters in Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway (1994) is the gangster (played by Chazz Palminteri) who keeps coming up with ideas to improve the play that the serious-minded protagonist has written and is trying to get produced. There are no such hidden-depths crossovers between crime and culture in Small Time Crooks. The film is moderately entertaining and the performances of Tracey Ullman and Elaine May are enjoyable but Allen’s condescending attitude towards the people in the story is grating – and the last half-hour is laboured, given that it’s clear (and has been from an early stage) how things must end up.
In Brooklyn, ex-con Ray Winkler (Allen) and his dimwit pals (Michael Rapaport, Tony Darrow, Jon Lovitz) sink their savings in leasing premises that once housed a pizzeria: they plan to drill a tunnel in the basement through to the bank, two doors away, and rob it. Ray’s wife Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) provides a front to the operation, selling home-baked cookies in the shop at street level. While the basement operation is comically clueless, Frenchy’s cookies soon become the talk of the town. Her regular customers include a cop (Brian Markinson); when he discovers what’s going on underground, he agrees to turn a blind eye in exchange for going into partnership with the Winklers and franchising Sunset Cookies. You soon sense the flatness of the script: the business in and under the shop lacks invention though Allen gets by with amusing lines, well delivered. It’s once the Sunshine Cookies phenomenon has made Ray and Frenchy rich beyond their wildest dreams that the limits imposed on the characters become a bigger problem.
When Frenchy throws a dinner party in the Winklers’ expensively garish new home, she overhears her snooty guests deploring the hostess’s lack of taste. She decides she needs to get ‘kulcher’ and engages one of the dinner guests, an art dealer called David (Hugh Grant), to be her tutor. Ray tags along on their early visits to art galleries, concerts etc but he hates it all, along with the endless diet of posh French food that his wife now subjects him to. The marriage founders, as Frenchy becomes preoccupied with David and a higher calling. For a short while Ray gravitates towards May Sloane (Elaine May), Frenchy’s dotty cousin, but he misses his old occupation and sets out to steal a valuable necklace from socialite Chi-Chi Velasquez Potter (Elaine Stritch). The revelation that David is only using Frenchy – he means for her to bankroll his own art business projects – comes as no surprise. When Sunset Cookies goes bankrupt (Frenchy has been swindled by her accountants) David promptly drops her but not before she’s recovered the present she made him of a priceless cigarette case once owned by the Duke of Windsor. Ray’s necklace scheme inevitably misfires but he and Frenchy are reconciled. The cigarette case is enough to finance their retirement in Florida that Ray had in mind as the reward for the Brooklyn bank job.
Woody Allen isn’t, of course, believable as a criminal of any dimension but this at least muffles his lazy idea of the crooks as appealingly thick and inept. Frenchy’s ideas above her station are a different matter. The jokes made at her social- and cultural-climbing expense generate some laughs thanks to witty dialogue and Tracey Ullman’s wholehearted verve but the laughter is increasingly grudging. Frenchy, who expands her vocabulary by learning dictionary definitions of all the words starting with A, is no Eliza Dolittle: her education is, to Woody Allen, a contradiction in terms because there’s no intelligence to bring out. Even within his derisive conception of the character, Allen writes it carelessly. Frenchy and David are in Europe when she gets a call telling her to get back to New York quick (to receive the news that she’s penniless again). Her phone goes off during a classical music recital in Paris; she takes the call and, to the consternation of the gathering, carries on a high-volume conversation. Long before this stage, Frenchy, even if unable to appreciate the music she’s hearing, would have known you keep quiet listening to it.
Allen is no less indifferent to May Sloane, who is simply forgotten about in the closing stages, though Elaine May’s unique eccentricity just about saves the day – she makes a virtue of the character’s imprecision. Even the movie references in Small Time Crooks are inconsistent. In an early scene the crooks, Ray included, decide that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is called Treasure Island. Later on, as he and May watch White Heat on television, Ray has turned into the film buff that someone played by Woody Allen usually is.
18 January 2018
