Want more Woody Allen after seeing 'Midnight in Paris'? Check out 'Small Time Crooks.'
If you want to revisit a Woody Allen classic, check out his 2000 film, 'Small Time Crooks,' a comedy that explores crime, class, and cookies.
Woody Allen, extremely prolific writer, director, and actor, is seen here on the set of "The Bop Decameron', shot in Italy (Remo Casilli/Reuters).
Was 鈥�Midnight in Paris鈥� not enough Woody Allen for you this summer? Was his latest film so dazzling that you are suddenly curious to delve deeper into his extensive filmography? If you answered yes to either of these questions, perhaps you ought to check out 鈥�Small Time Crooks,鈥� Allen鈥檚 2000 annual that bubbles with humor and excitement in a way that only he can deliver.
It鈥檚 a recipe for chaos when the blundering criminal Ray (Allen) asks his short-tempered manicurist wife Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) to be a front for his latest thieving operation. She runs a cookie shop aboveground while he and his dim-witted partners from prison work underground to tunnel into the vault of the adjacent bank. The success story, however, gets inverted when Frenchy鈥檚 cookies become a runaway sensation and Ray鈥檚 robbery totally fizzles.
All of a sudden, fast forward a year and Frenchy and Ray have incorporated their cookie company, coming into more money than they could ever dream of. How they react, however, is totally different. Ray wants to remain the same, humble to his low-brow roots, while Frenchy becomes obsessed with joining the elitist art crowd of New York City 鈥� which is less than happy to take in white trash with money like her.
Their divergent paths lead to inevitable humor as Ray becomes involved with Frenchy鈥檚 spacy cousin May (Elaine May) and Frenchy recruits a high-class aristocrat, David (Hugh Grant), to train her for entry into high society. It鈥檚 not incredibly deep, but it鈥檚 a fun examination nonetheless of class in America and how money can affect some parts of our lives but leave other aspects totally unaffected. And in that uniquely Woody Allen fashion, 鈥淪mall Time Crooks鈥� can make you laugh in spite of its mopiness and defeatism.
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