Another trio of titles is ready to turn up in the online store. Today’s additions include Lotte Reiniger’s “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” “The Trial” by Orson Welles,” and Woody Allen’s “Small Time Crooks.”
“Small Time Crooks” was the first of four consecutive films that Woody Allen directed for Dreamworks that came out during the early 2000s. In a set-up reminiscent of “The Ladykillers,” Allen and his buddies from jail rent a storefront adjacent to a bank and install his wife Frenchy as a cookie-baking front. However, a funny thing happens while Allen’s gang is digging the tunnel for their bank heist: Frenchy’s cookies suddenly become the talk of the town… a situation that propels them into the social elite, where their interactions with the monied class are like something out of “Ruggles of Red Gap” or “The Beverly Hillbillies.”