Small Time Crooks

Allen's character, an ex-con sarcastically known as The Brain, opens the film by hatching a half-witted get-rich-quick scheme involving the digging of a tunnel from the basement of a bogus bakery to a nearby bank. To his chagrin, his bumbling assemblage of would-be crooks is singlehandedly upstaged by wife Tracey Ullman, whose cookie recipes are a hit with the neighborhood and offer a legitimate route to the top of the world. Elaine May steals pretty much each scene in which she plays Ullman's dim sister.

So far, so good, but the remainder of the film deals routinely with the divide between high culture and low culture, as embodied in the gap between rich and poor. Gaining wealth but retaining her hopelessly poor taste, Ullman has the misfortune of asking smoothie Hugh Grant to help her gain an appreciation of the finer things. The shady Grant hopes to separate her from as much of that money as possible. Something aspiring to hilarity ensues.

Some of the jokes bear the patina of a canned food shelved long past its sell-by date, but what's worse is the lack of warmth. Allen has made some wonderful movies celebrating the guileless charm of working class New Yorkers, as well as those that find being pampered and neurotic an equally romantic proposition. Unlike the TV writer in Manhattan who found contemporary art hopelessly pretentious, or the working woman in The Purple Rose of Cairo who took solace in Astaire and Rogers movies, it's painfully apparent that the main characters here really are hopelessly gauche. Indeed, the point is that their innate cluelessness transcends even the transformational power of the dollar. I suppose Allen intends the audience to feel a kinship with these simple folks, but it comes across as condescension, which he doesn't wear well. B-

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