In a sub-series: Backtracking thru the Woodland
Seventeenth in a series: Post–Soviet Union Adventure, Days of Clintons Past: A
recollection of cultural ephemera of the 1990s*
(*Counting 2000 as the end of
the decade of the 1990s.)
“…a trivial
picture. A silly little picture.”
—Allen’s
assessment of this film in Eric Lax, Conversations
with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007), p. 184
Subsections below:
A long-known quantity has acquired a trademark image among the publicAllen turns a corner into the more opportunistic and varied-quality late-afternoon of his career
A caper involving subterfuge among street-punky types
A farce-of-manners and caper among rich folk—with a clash of societal types
A few points of note
A long-known quantity has acquired a trademark image among the public
Woody Allen, as my reviews of
his films will hopefully have made clear, has been helped and hindered by what is common to a popular-art creator who has
fairly wide appeal and recognition, and got his start in more widely-popular
work. Like The Beatles, who first appealed to fans as the “mop tops” who could
layer their vocal “hooks” onto songs like the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout”
(with The Beatles later aiming hungrily for more-adult work), Allen started as
the stand-up act who presented himself as an unusually frank “neurotic” who
then started writing and directing films on a range of topics that were
regarded (in the 1970s) as among the funniest out there.
Along with this, as always helps
to seal the recognition of a trademark among the public, he religiously
maintained his physical appearance, with the frumpy hair, receding hairline,
somewhat tweedy clothes, and thick-rimmed glasses: and today his Web site
echoes (with the image of eyeglasses) the same almost-cartoonish look (of his
face) in a very schematized way. Notice that his face, almost in line with the
way babies first recognize faces by means of schematic features, is
interpretable as a set of trapezoids: his whole face is shaped like a
trapezoid, tapered from top to bottom; and each lens of his eyeglasses echoes
the same shape, a trapezoid tapered from top to bottom.
Of course, as his interviews in
Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen,
get across, he realizes that people have come to expect a Woody Allen character
in his new releases, and they still seem to long for the old comic who was
guaranteed to make you laugh at some point. (Earlier this year, when it was
announced he would do a comic TV series for Amazon, some opined on the Internet
that he could secure his end of the bargain by doing Bananas and Sleeper–type
work. I thought, Is that how people think he can still best do pop-audience
fare?)
It was perhaps in honor of those
people still wondering, “When is Woody going to make an old-time funny movie
again?,” that Small Time Crooks got
churned out. Except for the possibility of his musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996), STC seems to have a lock on what could be judged his worst film of the
decade 1991-2000. Even so, it’s worth a look in my ongoing series of reviews on
him. (End note 1)
Allen turns a corner into the more opportunistic and varied-quality
late-afternoon of his career
Now about 15 years ago, this was
the first Woody Allen film I saw in the theater since Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986, which goes to show how long an informal
moratorium I placed on seeing his films (not due simply to him), while I
declined to see a lot of other films, too. When I did see Small Time Crooks in 2000, I
was surprised at what I felt was the type of shoddily crafted, thematically
small-scale film he had come to be making.
But what a difference 15 years
makes—along with seeing a wealth of Allen films in 2014-15. While this would be
on no one’s list of Allen’s top 10 or 15 films, we can now appreciate a few
things about it: (1) it is the last of his films under producer Jean Doumanian
(and for that, it doesn’t have quite the long train of stars as were in the
likes of his 1996-98 films), and (2) it was the first Allen film distributed by
DreamWorks—which somewhat argues for how Allen was finding a
producing/distributing bridge away from Doumanian, but shows more decisively
how he was starting his catch-as-catch-can way of getting distribution deals,
which would last through much of the new decade until he was picked up for a
long run by Sony Pictures Classics.
Less esoterically, STC is only his second under two new
craft-level conditions: the train of varying cinematographers he would have
from 1999 on; and his editor’s being Alisa Lepselter (since 1999’s Sweet and Lowdown), who
would tend to give his films a slightly more modern (efficient?) visual look,
different from the characteristic even-keel editing by Susan E. Morse and non-flashy
cinematography by old hands like Carlo Di Palma and Sven Nykvist. (Actually, I
think in general his films seem more visually modern from about 1999 on due to a
host on influences that congeal in the finished product; but we can also
appreciate that what might have seemed a bit stodgy [at times] in the years of
Morse [and, often, Di Palma] actually, in retrospect, looks pretty elegant
compared to [some of] Allen’s later work.)
The cinematographer for STC was Zhao Fei, who also did Sweet
and Lowdown and would do The Curse of
the Jade Scorpion (2001). Zhao uses a lot of (artificial) light for indoor
scenes, which gives Allen’s films a clarity and brightness (and artificiality)
as of TV. I think this aspect threw me a bit in 2000, but now it looks fairly
par for the course—as one alternative among several—for Allen if you’ve seen a
lot of Allen’s films from 1999 on.
So the visual look, I guess you
could say, seemed (for Allen) a bit superficial to me in 2000—while now I
appreciate it more. But the story and acting, if they seemed a bit second-rate
in 2000, can be assessed about the same way today. But with the benefit of
hindsight and knowing Allen’s larger oeuvre more, we can say STC is Allen delivering a goofy comedy
(under economizing conditions), with audience expectations to be adjusted
accordingly. Allen doing a blue-collar Shmoe (named Ray Winkler) with a heavy
city-slob accent and haranguing his wife “Frenchy” (nicknamed after her being
Frances, not for anything else; and here Allen’s Ray sprinkles out comic
signals of domestic abuse that might jar among some today, seeming a bit like Jackie
Gleason’s Ralph Kramden to his long-suffering wife Alice). Ray, to a good extent,
recalls Allen’s Danny in Broadway Danny
Rose (1984), and unless you surfeit on what is conveyed in 2000 of Allen’s familiar
manner, his Ray can be pretty amusing.
A caper involving subterfuge among street-punky types
This film has two basic story
parts: the first is the shorter part, with Ray wanting to do a bank heist with
help from some friends, by buying a closed pizza shop and, in it, opening a
cookie shop as a front while he and his pals tunnel from the basement into a
bank nearby. If this sounds hackneyed and as if it promises stupid goings-on,
it actually is the more fun part, on the film’s terms. Here, Allen has help
from some character-type actors from his 1990s period: Tony Darrow, who was in Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999) (and who plays
Primo Sindone’s assistant in Harold Ramis’ Analyze
This [1999]); Darrow is here as Tommy (at one point his surname sounds like
Beales, and later on, in a TV interview, it seems to be Walker).
Also, Michael Rapaport, who
played the dopey boxer in Mighty
Aphrodite, is here as Denny Doyle (Allen says of Rapaport that he has a
“great mug persona”—an ability to play a “mug”—and is “incapable of a fake
reading” [Lax, pp. 183-84]). Darrow’s and Rapaport’s characters both seem like
earthy street types, apt to hang out with the rather coarse, scheming Ray, who
is a dishwasher by trade (as well as a former prison inmate).
Another partner in the planned
crime—stumbled on when Ray tries to buy the pizza joint from the apparent
Jewish female who is said to have bought it—is Benny (Jon Lovitz), who has used
the Jewish-female name as a pseudonym and who Ray finds had been in prison the
same time he was.
So this part sounds like a crook
caper that could easily fall flat, but if you take it for what it’s worth, it
isn’t too bad to watch (and this phase of the story might impress you with how
much it has in common with the Coens’ The
Ladykillers [2004]).
##
In media coverage of STC, more attention, in terms of who is
noted as stars of this film, has been paid to Tracey Ullman as Ray’s wife Frenchy, a manicurist by trade;
Ullman here affects a lower-class NYC-area accent. Ullman had worked for Allen
in Bullets Over Broadway (1994). Also
making news for STC was the presence
of Elaine May, here as Frenchy’s dopey
relative who actually is pretty funny with proving to be the type of halfwit
who threatens to give away the ongoing caper by inadvertently revealing—with
May expertly showing a deadpan face while playing a fool—what her role is when
asked (at a party, she dopily explains to a friendly attendee that she is a
lookout). (At other times, May [the
character] shows her quality as a klutz-cum-screwball when, in chitchat with a
party-goer, she asks to verify from him, “Is Helen your wife or just a woman who
died?”)
(Allen liked the work of both
Ullman and May in STC, per Lax, p.
161. Ullman got a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for her work here,
and Elaine May won a Best Supporting Actress nod from the National Society of
Film Critics, according to the film’s Wikipedia article. Amazing how even
Allen’s decidedly-lesser films can get award nominations and wins for his
actors.)
Adding to your “familiar faces”
fun is the occasional presence of two people from CBS: doing a street reporter
interview from Frenchy’s shop is Dana Tyler,
a longtime anchor at WCBS-TV, the New York station; in real life, of course, she
has been there for about 25 years, but by today seems to have aged only 15
years in that time. Also adding some comedy is Steve Kroft, the 60
Minutes correspondent; in STC, he
seems slim and youngish, doing a special report on Frenchy’s gone-national
business; this is actually one of the more amusing sequences in the film.
(Kroft, of course, has become something of a successor to Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes: you don’t want to be
buttonholed by him [with his seasoned face] with unsparing questions about your
scam.)
This film seems to have been
produced very quickly. In Lax (p. 205), there is an indication it was in
preproduction in early 2000; the Wiki article says the film was released in May
2000, which would suggest it was “mounted” (Allen’s typical term) in much less
than a year. Maybe Allen could turn around a project in less than a year fairly
commonly, but if this was meant to be a rush job, it certainly seems that way
in the viewing (End note 2). For
Allen fans, it’s worth a look, if their expectations are kept on the low side.
A farce-of-manners and caper among rich folk—with a clash of societal
types
The film’s second half—when Ray,
Frenchy, and their associates have become rich when Frenchy’s knack for making
delicious cookies is parlayed improbably into a massive, multi-franchised
cookie empire—is drolly amusing, but is more hackneyed, and becomes more
labored, than the robbery first half. In part, it plays off the tradition of
upscale-life farce such as Allen might esteem from the 1930s and ’40s. (In STC, Elaine Stritch--sorry, I mistook her for a suitable dowager presence in his The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985], who is in fact played by Zoe Caldwell--Stritch, nevertheless, is present in STC
as a high-society personage from whose house Ray gets a late desire to rob some
renowned jewelry, to solve his ongoing socioeconomic doldrums. Stritch is also in Allen's drama September [1987].)
Seeing Ray and Frenchy as the
epitome of nouveau-riche slobs has a certain limited amusement factor, with
visually tacky clothes and house décor (Ray’s clothes can have colors that,
ordinarily, you wouldn’t catch a middle-aged man dead in outside a golf course or a circus; you know, yellow pants
in one scene). (The Wiki article shows an apparent-foreigner’s forgivably naïve
grip on the situation when it says, “[Frenchy] asks an art dealer named
David…to train her and Ray so they can fit in with the American upper class”
[!]. Maybe Donald Trump could have used the same “training.”)
A few points of note
* The one cinematic coup here
is, in an early scene when Ray tries to get Frenchy to agree to his
bank-robbery plan, his talking to her on the roof of their apartment building.
The shots are against a fading sunset, and Zhao helps the beautiful look with
some colorful laundry hanging in the semi-twilight. This scene actually roots
the name of the cookie-shop front and the later successful big company, Sunset Cookies.
(Actually, a fair number of shots in this film are on the nice side, but they
seem to comprise wasted visual beauty for a fairly empty story.)
* Allen aims for touching base
on one his favorite themes by having Ray and Frenchy go through some marital
stresses. Of course, being the lower-class types they are, the language is
starkly comical. At one point Ray makes a point like, “Didn’t we have dreams?
Granted, I was in the rackets….”
* Relatively late in the film,
Ray utters longingly [possible paraphrase], “I wish I was a crook [again], then
I’d feel like an actual person again!”
* Allen gives his
lesser-character actors good lines. At one point, in the TV segment led by
Steve Kroft, Denny (Rapaport) is explaining why Sunset’s cookies are advertised
in men’s magazines. Because, he explains, the men will salivate at the pictures
of the women, then turn the page and see the cookies, and automatically
associate the salivating with the cookies. He points out, with the sort of
jauntiness of One Who Knows, that this is like “Pablo’s theory… Pablo, with the
dogs.” (I.e., Ivan Pavlov.)
##
Who would enjoy this film? Or
rather, what state of couldn’t-care-less or exhaustion would you need to be in
to like it? I’m reminded of the Bloom
County print cartoon from about 1984, where Opus, the talking penguin,
dressed for a shower, calls out in his rooming house that there are a host of
cockroaches in the bathroom, and would someone please come and help?! No one
comes. He sets to stomping the cockroaches himself, with his penguin feet. He
emerges from the WC, holding aloft a foot encrusted with dead cockroaches, and
says, addressing the audience, “I kind of enjoy this the same vague, awful way
I enjoy The A-Team.”
If Allen did no worse than STC for his Amazon TV series, I think he
could get the same kind of enjoyment out of his audience as the likes of Opus
had for The A-Team.
End note 1.
As I’ve gone slowly through
Allen’s films, learning details of his career along the way, I’ve gradually
cleared up my confusion and ignorance tied to the Doumanian phase of his
career. I had (last year) thought the last film she produced for him was The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, but I
found it was actually Small Time Crooks—and
started to correct some of my entries on Allen accordingly. This means
Doumanian only produced seven of the films he wrote/directed. However, another
ambiguity is harder to clean up easily. For instance, a June 2001 New York Times article dealing with an
early phase of the Allen/Doumanian suit, which I’ve referenced a few times in
my Allen reviews, remarks on Doumanian’s having produced eight films for him. This may have led me to suspect Jade Scorpion was the eighth, but
further looks at details in various sources contradict this idea. But it’s
possible the eighth film cursorily referred to by the Times is Wild Man Blues
(1997), on Allen’s sideline of performing in a jazz band. This documentary
Doumanian actually produced, but Allen didn’t direct it; Barbara Kopple did.
Aside from this, I’ve casually
referred to Allen’s having been associated with Doumanian (for film production)
for “about eight” years; I leave this for now, assuming that her work with him
started in 1993, presumably when production for Bullets Over Broadway started, and continued through about 2000-01
(the inclusive range of years would add up to about eight, with 2001 (in May,
apparently) indeed being the year Allen filed his suit against her. This may
seem like a lot of fussing, but for a busy career like Allen’s, and the
controversy that has attached to this privately quiet, workaholic man, it pays
to be careful on such facts.
End note 2.
As I said last year in a review
of his Crimes and Misdemeanors, the
fact that Allen can be almost mercurial in choice of projects shows in even why
he chose to do three films (in a row) around the turn of the millennium that no
one would consider among his best: Small
Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Hollywood Ending (2002): “…all three on the desk. And I said, ‘Hey,
I’d like to knock off these three comedies and get them off my desk.’ And I did
them one after the other. There were people who said, ‘Gee, he’s doing trivial
movies. […]’ But I don’t think that way. I just think, I want to do this one
because it’s on my desk. That’s the idea I wanted to do at the time” (in Lax,
p. 357, said within the period November 2005-November 2006).
