Yes we have no bananas

One of my recent movie watches was the heist movie The Split.

Jim Brown plays McClain, a man returning to Los Angeles and his estranged wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) after some time away. Possibly McClain spent a fair amount of time in prison, since Eliie isn't happy to see him back and doesn't expect him to go straight. And sure enough, McClain meets Gladys (Julie Harris).

Gladys is the money behind an idea for a heist, one that would make the people in it a bunch of money. The Los Angeles Rams play at the Coliseum, and since most of the take is walk-up sales and concessions, there's going to be a lot of cash at the game. So McClain should find a group of experts in the various phases of the heist, and get them to join him and Gladys for a share. They could net close to $100,000 each, which is still nice today but huge 50 years ago.

So McClain goes to a gym where he finds some muscle if you will, in the form of propietor Clinger (Ernest Borgnine). Then there's the getaway car, so McClain goes to Kifka's (Jack Klugman) limousine service to see how good a driver Kifka is. McClain has a prostitute take safecracker Gough (Warren Oates) to a safe where she leaves him on the dead man's switch and tells him to find a way out, which he should be able to do if he's as good a safecracker as advertised. And then for the sniper, there's Negli (Donald Sutherland in an early role).

With the team assembled, it's time for the actual heist, which involves breaking into the Coliseum in the pre-dawn hours and then waiting for the security people in the cash collection area, who apparently don't show up until close enough to game time that our gang has to hold them for that much more than the 2-1/2 hours or so until the two-minute warning. Still, the heist goes off without a hitch....

Or so it seems. Heist movies always have a hitch, and in this case, it happens a good deal after the heist. The robbers are going to wait a day before getting back together to split the loot, and in that time, McClain decides he's going to hide it at Ellie's place since she's clean. But Ellie's skeezy landlord Sutro (James Whitmore) shows up and sees the money, leading him to kill Ellie and take the money! And in the investigation, Det. Brill (Gene Hackman) sees one of the money bands, so he knows where to look.

Meanwhile, the robbers all think, and in their defense quite understandably, that McClain has taken the money and fled with it. So they find him and, naturally, want him to tell them where the money is. Which of course, he doesn't know.

The Split is entertaining, helped out some compared to earlier heist movies by the color photography and the nice location shooting which is at time stylish and at times filled with a gritty verisimilitude. There's a nice ensemble cast, too, even if some of them are underused. Even though The Split is entertaining, it does at times feel a bit like we've seen it before. I do think it's more than worth a watch, however.

The Split is available on DVD from the Warner Archive Collection.