Little Cigars

There are some hilarious moments in this comedy caper about a group of circus midgets who rob banks and casinos. Billy Curtis delivers some great lines. Angel Tompkins puts in a good performance as a kind of moll for the midgets. I first saw this film while on board a US Navy ship. It was the ships evening movie and throughout the showing hilarious roaring could be heard from all the compartments on board that had TV sets in them.

Having just watched the little people musical western The Terror of Tiny Town, I decided to go next to fancast.com to watch Little Cigars which stars two of TTOTT's players: Billy Curtis and Jerry Maren. Other members of their gang include Frank Delfino, Felix Silla, and Emory Sousa. There's also a statuesque blond played by Angel Tomkins who reluctantly joins their carnival act when she runs from her former gangster paramour's henchmen. At this point, the movie becomes a series of heists that provide some suspenseful moments. Most of the time, however, there's some highly humorous moments involving size and sex and fighting. In fact, I loved the scene when the Curtis character attempts to get "girlfriend" Tomkins out of the bar by beating up on the guy sitting next to her especially after previously seeing him doing the same to "Little Billy" Rhodes in The Terror of Tiny Town! No great shakes but Little Cigars comes highly recommended for anyone with a taste for the unusual. P.S. Angelo Rossito was another little person who appears here as part of a member of those his size put in a police lineup. His best known movie was Freaks. Also in continuing to point out actors with connections to my birth town of Chicago, Simmy Bow was also born there and Walter Beakel was a founding member of The Second City there.

Another Viet Nam era veteran has commented about first seeing "Little Cigars" on a navy ship; I saw it in our base theatre. Playing to young captive male audiences in 1973 was pretty much the perfect venue for this movie. It played especially well to an audience that was drunk and/or stoned. Actually it's typical of the B-movie junk they showed the troops in those days-movies that did poorly on the domestic market and were quickly shipped to the military. It is not nearly as funny now as it was in 1973.

The premise is a troupe of midgets who travel around the country, performing as a kind of sideshow attraction and using their free time to steal from various places. The idea is to show various clever ways their size works to their advantage when breaking into a building. The writer quickly runs out of clever ideas and the capers get totally moronic. Even in 1973 we realized that the gang's advantage was also a major disadvantage because if they were seen they would be easily identified.

Angel Tompkins is the sexploitation factor, she had recently been featured in Playboy and that probably explained the above average attendance at our theatre. There is a MAJOR credibility problem with her hooking up with the lead midget (played by Billy Curtis). Not because he was a midget but because he looked about 80 years old. Good grief the guy played a munchkin in 1938. But even that was funny in 1973.

Tompkins was the Megan Fox of the 1970's, in that she had a negative charisma and a mean looking face that made her much more suited to bad girl roles.

Bottom line: My rating would have been a two but the movie is unique and Tompkins looks great. It's about as unprofessional looking as anything Hollywood put out in the early 1970's.

This movie doesn't fit neatly into any category. It has elements of comedy, including slapstick, puns, sexual innuendo, and "witty" lines, but also contains foul language, brutal murders, robberies and assaults. Added to this lack of focus is terrible pacing. Some of this is the fault of the editor as he holds to long on a close-up of a character who has just said a "funny" line, but those extended pauses for laughs are present even when the scene does not cut away. I suppose the humor of the movie was supposed to derive from the surprise of seeing little people who are as nasty and cruel as everyone else. Even in 1972, this would not have surprised many people. This would probably have been a lot funnier if made a few years after the Wizard of Oz. The plot is nothing more than a series of "capers" that demonstrate the many clever ways you can smuggle a bunch of midgets into an establishment you are planning to rob. There's no indication of how or why this group of con artists suddenly become brutal armed robbers. There is nothing of the con artist subtlety in their later capers. What dramatic tension there is comes from trying to decide if Cleo (Angel Tompkins) really cares for Slick, or is just stringing him along. Since neither of these characters is sympathetic, it's hard to care to much about this.

A gangster's former mistress (Angel Tompkins) hooks up with a troupe of circus midgets who, as a sideline, rob banks and casinos.

From producer Albert Band comes this very strange version of a gangster and/or heist film, with the criminals being midgets. That alone seems to be the selling point, and strangely enough it works. Angel Tompkins was hired on by Larry Gordon, and first-time director Chris Christenberry was a fan of hers and encouraged it. Band, oddly, seems to have been primarily the money, though he did help Gordon with casting.

I liked the attempt to give a nod to other, better films, especially the nice reference to "Dillinger" on the marquee. (I believe they were made by the same production company, but that might not be true.) And, lastly, I love how it dances around the R rating. Although there is the constant reference to sex and nudity -- and even gang rape at one point -- they never actually show anything and the language is relatively clean. So, it earns a PG despite clearly being an R-level film.

Tompkins recalls Christenberry having an alcohol problem on set, at one point almost falling off the crane. She also recalls having to teach the little people how to wash their hair, an act that earned her the unofficial title "Miss Little People". For the next thirty years, little people would approach her and thank her for making them feel normal.