Another of the movies I had never heard about before seeing it show up on one of the streaming TV services -- I think it was Tubi, but I'm not certain -- was an early Steve McQueen film called The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery. (Apparently some prints omit the word "Great" from the title.) Since the plot sounded interesting and it was a completely new film to me, I decided to sit down and watch it.
Other than McQueen, I didn't recognize most of the names in the opening credits. The credits also reveal that this movie is based on a real bank heist that happened in St. Louis in 1953, and that, in docudrama fashion, they've used real locations as well as hiring policemen who were involved in foiling the original heist to play cop extras. At least that's a promising sign. Anyhow, getting into the real action, John Egan (Crahan Denton) is the leader of a criminal gang and a man who's approaching retirement age. So he'd like to do "one last heist" and use the proceeds from that to retire to Mexico because of the difficulties in extraditing someone from Mexico back to the US.
John has a close partner in Willie, and a not so close partner in Gino, who has a history of being in and out of legal trouble and needing some money pretty quickly to hire a competent defense attorney for his latest legal issues. The gang needs a driver, and this is partly where Gino comes in. He's got a sister Ann, and she had an ex-boyfriend named George Fowler (that's Steve McQueen in case you couldn't tell) who is a college dropout and could certainly use the money to go back to college if that's what he wants out of life.
John meets George, and decides that George would make a suitable getaway driver, in part because he doesn't have any criminal record and in part because he seems like a nice enough guy. This is going to cause all sorts of problems. First, there's Willie, who gets incredibly jealous and doesn't trust Gino and George. And then there's Ann, who isn't too thrilled to see George back in her life, especially because one of the first things he does when he meets Ann again is to ask her to borrow money. She suspects that something's up, and if she finds out that George is part of a plot to rob a bank, she's going to be none too happy.
Meanwhile, Gino has a drinking problem and Willie has that jealousy, things which are going to make the impending bank robbery a dicey affair. Things get much worse when Willie puts his foot down and insists that he be the getaway driver instead of George. George took the job because he expected that all he would do would be to drive a car; he wants no part of the actual violence, never mind that he knows the other three will be committing a substantial amount of violence anyway. Of course, with the Production Code still in effect, you already knew that the bank robbery wasn't going to go off without a hitch....
Watching The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery, it really had the look and feel of something that was made for television, although as far as I can tell, it was a theatrical release. The low budget and lack of name actors definitely bring the production down a notch or two, but it's easy to see on watching this that Steve McQueen had great potential (although, to be fair, he had already made The Blob). The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery isn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's definitely one worth seeing as an early stepping stone on Steve McQueen's path to stardom.
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