Bank Shot

Some of the channels on the Pluto TV service show a fair number of movies I haven't heard of before, mostly because they have a totally different library from what TCM can most easily get access to. Seeing as the movies on the 70s channel are pushing 50 years old, they're getting to be in the "classic" range, even if they're not all great movies. The new-to-me 70s movie for this post is Bank Shot.

Clifton James plays Streiger, warden at a prison in California and the character that provides some of the narration for the movie. One of Streiger's most notorious prisoners is Ballentine (George C. Scott), a career criminal whose heists always seem to be beset by bad luck. But he's got a "friend" in the form of Al Karp (Sorrell Booke), who has come up with yet another can't miss heist scheme, this time to rob a bank.

This thime, the scheme is interesting in that the bank is a sort of temporary bank, a new one that's currently housed in a trailer while the real bank facilities are being built. In some ways security is less because of the limited space but in some ways more since the bank isn't in the normal place that a business would be. That, and the bank company realizes the security threat and has invested in a safe that's a lot more difficult to crack than the normal safe.

First, Ballentine needs to break out of prison, which he does with the help of a motorcycle, riding to a house where Eleonora (Joanna Cassidy) is waiting for him. Ballentine doesn't like the idea of having a woman in a heist, mostly for the practical reason that one of the guys is liable to fall in love with the woman, complicating matters. In this case, however, it's Eleonora who winds up falling in love with Ballentine. And it's her money that's financing this caper anyway. Worse is that Karp has brought his nephew in to be part of the gang, and the nephew is particularly incompetent.

So they case the bank, and figure out that the best thing to do is have an audacious heist that involves connecting the trailer to a semi tractor and taking the whole bank away. But how to get the bank guards out and how to conceal the trailer? Well, they eventually think of ways to do those things. Meanwhile, Streiger is leading the team of police chasing after Ballentine and his gang.

George C. Scott didn't do much straight-up comedy, apart from Dr. Strangelove, and here he's more of the straight guy while other people around him are supposed to be funny since Bank Shot is more of a comic heist movie than anything serious. Scott is actually pretty good at being the straight guy. The rest of the movie, however, is not quite as funny as I think it could have been. In runs a brief 83 minutes, which is surprisingly short for a movie with a star of this caliber from the 1970s. A lot of the time, it feels like it's that short, as though things needed to be fleshed out a bit more.

None of this is to say that Bank Shot is a bad movie. Not by any stretch, and it's an entertaining enough 83 minutes. But I also think there's a reason why Bank Shot isn't as remembered as a lot of other 70s movies.