6/02/00 5:55 p.m.
Small Time Crooks
Part slapstick comedy, part social satire.

By Rich Lowry, NR Editor

mall Time Crooks is part slapstick comedy, part social satire — and total nebbishy loser Woody Allen. This is the Woody Allen of Take the Money and Run, playing an incompetent misfit crook who has trouble with the ladies and, despite all his self-conciousness, a certain, uh, lack of self-awareness. In prison, he assures one of his criminal conspirators in Small Time Crooks, “they called me the ‘brain.’” “That was sarcastic,” his buddy shoots back.

The Allen character in Small Time Crooks, named Ray, devises a harebrained scheme to rob a bank by opening a cooking store nearby and tunneling over to the bank and instant riches. It doesn't work, and mayhem ensues — this is the slapstick. But the cooking store ends up being a runaway success, catapulting Ray and his gum- and wise-cracking wife, Frenchie (played by Tracey Ullman) into — or at least close to — New York City high society. Enter the social satire. Ray still just wants to go the dog track, but Frenchie becomes a climber. At a dinner party at their new apartment — every inch of which Frenchie has festooned with leopard skins — she tries to impress patrons of the arts, to no avail. “I think she must have been attacked by a tiger once,” one of them sniffs.

Woody Allen can raise complicated moral issues, as Mike Potemra demonstrated on NRO the other day. But Small Time Crooks — like the recent Everyone Says I Love You and Sweet and Lowdown — is primarily a vehicle built for delight. In that too, it resembles Take the Money. In fact, the mock report for a TV magazine show on the stunning success of the cooking store in Small Time Crooks is almost as fun as the mock documentary in Take the Money so many years ago. In a scene where Frenchie is asking an insufferable art dealer — played, appropriately enough, by Hugh Grant — to give her and Ray lessons in culture, Ray thinks about what cultural refinement he would most like to attain. “You know,” he finally muses, “I've always wanted to know how to spell ‘Connecticut.’” May Woody Allen make movies, once every six months, for a very long time.