Small Time Crooks
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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September (1987) was an embarrassment, and other low points, the moments when Allen’s energy and invention flagged the most, include A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Shadows and Fog (1992), and Celebrity (1998). Small Time Crooks never attains the diffidence of the last three, but at times it comes awfully close. The way exposition is handled says a lot about a storyteller, and the dialogue signaling that a cynical and snooty art dealer (Hugh Grant) intends to exploit the nouveau riche heroine (Tracey Ullman) is just about as perfunctory as movie storytelling gets. It’s not only lazy, it reduces human possibility and complexity to the task of carrying us from point A to point B in a script; Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless is more nuanced. Allen’s confidence that viewers will swallow this reveals a frightening contempt–an attitude that was already evident, albeit more explicitly, in Stardust Memories (1980).
Big Deal on Madonna Street carries us through the first part of Small Time Crooks, during which ex-con Ray Winkler (Allen) joins three other New York incompetents (Tony Darrow, Michael Rapaport, and Jon Lovitz) who want to knock off a neighborhood bank. The plan is to rent the former pizzeria next door and drill the tunnel from there. Ray’s manicurist wife, Frenchy (Ullman), becomes part of the plan when she’s enlisted to sell her cookies as a front, and her dim-witted cousin May (Elaine May) is brought in to help sell the cookies.
This suggests that Star Wars would provide Allen with a better model than Wild Strawberries, and here’s where the issue of arrested development comes up. Allen considers himself a philistine and an artist, but because he’s a conformist, he doesn’t have the slightest interest in contesting the equation of culture with money or art with gentility that’s so quintessentially American. To overstate the case, what Allen really seems to like about Wild Strawberries isn’t so much what Bergman does with sound and image or what he has to say about life but the fact that they served espresso in the lobby of the theater where he first saw it. More precisely, what he likes about Bergman’s views of life and filmmaking are inseparable from notions about class–which are what really interest him.
