Allen still neglects some of his supporting players. As two of the gang involved in Ray's robbery scheme, Michael Rapaport and Jon Lovitz (one of our most sadly underused comic actors) are out of the movie before we've gotten our fill of them. And Isaac Mizrahi, who exudes the craziness of '30s screwball comedy, deserves more than his one brief scene as a chef. But Allen does more than right by three of his players.

As Frenchy, Ullman is one of the few costars Allen has given himself who's allowed to stand up to him. In the stray moments when his performance lapses into a Ralph Kramden imitation, a look from Ullman is all that's needed to remind him who's boss. And yet Ullman doesn't slight the sweetness that characterizes her work. She's one of those performers who seem to have an instinctive audience rapport. You know immediately why Ray is crazy about her, and you ache for her when she overhears her taste being denigrated. Frenchy is naive -- and yet it's hard to think of her that way because denying the expectation that lights up Ullman's face just seems churlish. It's a little delight of a performance.

Grant has been pushing his nice-guy charm for so long that his role as David -- a heel whose nice-guy charm is all an act -- liberates him. Grant takes to playing a bastard. This is the first time he's really seemed an actor since "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (before his appeal became shtick) and Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon." He lets something self-satisfied and prissy and slightly acrid worm its way into his persona. The slyness becomes him. If he could find a way to work a bit of this nasty-mindedness into his romantic leading roles, he might give himself an edge that could make him more appealing than ever.

But it's Elaine May as Frenchy's cousin, a chatterbox simpleton, who walks off with "Small Time Crooks" in what is the funniest performance you're likely to see this year or the next. She's simply flabbergasting. Groucho Marx once said that Margaret Dumont was so good because she didn't get the jokes. May, whom Bill Murray once described as having "a major coconut on her shoulders," acts as if she doesn't get the jokes. She seems to be beaming in from some universe of her own devising, so far inside her character's addlebrained confusion that everything she says (often in a slightly slurred accent that suggests George Jessel) is funny.

Watching May's performance, I found myself stifling my laughter for fear of missing what she was going to come out with next. She's a pixilated kook who has been slugged by life in New York, like a drooping Jewish Gracie Allen. May has the look of a complete naif who wouldn't be surprised by anything because she's seen it all before. There's nothing small time about May's scene stealing here. The laughs she filches are as big as the Hope Diamond.

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