Still playing in the minor key of last year’s Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen has neatly tossed together the good-hearted comedy that is Small Time Crooks.
He plays a rather dim-witted criminal whose cunning masterplans are surpassed by his wife’s skill at making cookies – and life takes a whole new turn into nouveaux riches. Tracey Ullman plays the wife, an hilarious parvenu desperate to get some culture, and Hugh Grant plays the art dealer who is allegedly going to help her do so.
The movie has the simple structure of a morality tale, but into that Allen packs a stream of jokes, often in the form of whining, nagging monologues. The repartee, if that’s not too elevated a word, between Ullman and Allen is particularly enjoyable. And the more slapstick pieces, such as an attempted jewel heist, have a charmingly weary grace.
We laugh at and with these people; at their bad taste and pretensions, with them as they deal with their swivelling fortunes. (The bad taste, by the way, is done superbly, by production designer Santo Loquasto and art director Tom Warren.) Sometimes you wonder about Woody the upper-crust sophisticate taking on these trashy crooks, but in matters of the heart he’s on their side.