Small Time Crooks (VHS 2000 Dreamworks) Woody Allen, Tracey Ullman,.

Woody Allen returns to his slapstick days with this comic romp, which centers on a small-time hood, Ray Winkler, who just can't catch a break. It's as if Virgil Starkwell (Allen's hysterically incompetent criminal mastermind from TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN) has finally gotten out of prison and is still up to his old scheming. Against his wife Frenchy's (Tracey Ullman) better judgment, Ray puts together a ragtag group of misfits, including a scene-stealing Elaine May, and immerses them in a crazy plot to rob a bank. But everything gets upended when their front, a cookie store, takes off, thrusting the Winklers into the upper echelons of New York's high society. SMALL TIME CROOKS looks like no other Allen film; gone are the black-and-white shades of Manhattan, replaced instead by the ridiculously loud shirts Ray wears and the perfectly garish furniture and artwork Frenchy accumulates. Even the Allen soundtrack, usually exclusively jazz, big band, and Dixieland standards, features "Tequila" by the Champs as an underlying theme. What stands out most of all, however, is the offbeat, charming relationship between Ray and Frenchy, two ne'er-do-wells who get to spend a little time at the top.