TubiTV seems to have quite a bit of old black-and-white crime/noirish movies in the On Demand section. One that recently showed up in the main list of movies, at least for me since it's probably based on what else I watch, is one I'd never heard of before, The Big Caper. Since I'm up for this sort of 1950s crime movie, I decided I'd give it a chance and watch it.
The star here is Rory Calhoun of all people, someone I think is generally much more associated with westerns. He plays Frank Harper, a small time hood who is stupid enough to gamble his money on the horses and lose it all, as he informs his nominal boss, at least in the gang sense, Flood (James Gregory). Frank needs to make more money, and getting a legitimate job just won't cut it. So he has to come up with some other way, and thinks he has just the right idea.
Camp Pendleton is a military base for the Marine Corps. There are a lot of marines stationed there, and while the pay isn't exactly great, they all get paid in cash, this being the days before direct deposit, and there are a lot of marines. The US government has to bring in a lot of cash to pay all those marines, and the cash needs to be stored somewhere until the government can pay out the marines. And Frank knows which bank they use and what day the money is actually in the bank's vault.
Flood doesn't really need the money right now, but being a crime boss, he does have that admiration for a good crime scheme and this is one of those. So he decides he'll be willing to carry out the heist. But to be honest, a heist like this is going to take a lot of preparation. To prepare for it, Flood proposes sending Frank to the town just north of San Diego where the bank is, to play the part of a family man looking to open up a business in town. Of course, Frank doesn't have a wife, so standing in for the wife is Flood's girlfriend Kay (Mary Costa). Together, they pretend to be husband and wife, buying a gas station that's up for sale as well as a house to live in.
Of course, in a heist movie like this, since there's still that pesky Production Code, you know that the heist isn't really going to work. So how does it fail? There are several ways, but the biggest is that Kay decides she might just like the domestic life. She's got a sister back east who does the family thing, and even though their family isn't rich, they've got love. And that's the second half of the big problem: Kay begins to fall in love with Frank, and the feeling is eventually mutual, even though Frank doesn't really want to settle down in one place, and worse, even though Kay is supposed to be Flood's girlfriend. Flood is going to get exceedingly jealous.
And then there are the other people involved in the heist, since Flood and Frank can't do it alone. One is Harry (Paul Picerni), who is supposed to be the lookout. He brings his girlfriend along, and Flood is no dummy, realizing that the girlfriend will spill the beans. There's also Zimmer (Robert H. Harris), who has the job of creating diversions by setting off time bombs. Zimmer is good at that, but he's also both an alcoholic and a pyromaniac. And Flood tells Frank and Kay to put Zimmer up at their house passing him off as their uncle. There's also Roy (Corey Allen), who is apparently Flood's underling although Roy is written as a character who's probably gay except that the screenwriters couldn't make it explicit in the 1950s. Roy is violent and has a hair-trigger temper....
Most of The Big Caper is about the build-up to heist night, and less about the heist itself. As such, it's more about the relationships between the characters, which makes it an interesting little movie. However, the movie has a big problem in that it doesn't know how to resolve the plot, leading to a climax that makes no sense whatsoever. That's a shame, because the rest of the movie is a surprisingly good little 50s B movie. Rory Calhoun is actually fairly good in a non-western, and James Gregory is unsurprisingly good too. Definitely worth watching.
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