The Great Bank Hoax

Another of the movies that I recorded because it had an interesting synopsis is The Great Bank Hoax. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do the obligatory post on it here.

The movie opens up with establishing shots of the fictional town of Pewter, MA (in fact, the movie was filmed in Madison, GA, which explains the M instead of a P on the marching band uniforms later in the movie). It looks like one of those idyllic small towns that populated movies of a previous era, but were becoming passé by the time this movie was released in the late 1970s. After seeing the marching band practice on the village green under the watchful eyes of a retired Army major (Arthur Godfrey in a cameo role), we move on to the local bank, this being one of those old one-bank towns.

Julius Taggart (Ned Beatty) is the bank's chief accountant in charge of keeping the books, and making certain that the books balance when the FDIC bank inspectors come; as you can imagine, keeping those books balanced is a big deal. And Taggart has discovered that not only do the books not balance; they're off to the tune of slightly over $100,000, which for a small bank like this was still a pretty big deal in the late 1970s. He informs his bosses, bank president Manny Benchly (Richard Basehart) and chief loan officer Jack Stutz (Burgess Meredith) about the shortage.

Cut to the town bingo night, hosted by the local church and its man of the cloth, Rev. Manigma (Michael Murphy). Among the players are the bank's chief clerk, Richard Smedly (Paul Sand), and Patricia Potter (Constance Forslund). They start a romantic relationship that's more one of convenience, as Potter is simply looking for a loan for some business idea she has and things that Smedly can approve it, which would be a ridiculous breach of ethics even if he were the loan officer instead of Stutz.

In the meantime, Stutz has gone to Rev. Manigma to make a confession of sorts. What, he asks, would happen if somebody robbed the bank and the books had a shortfall of sorts? Not that he's robbed the bank, of course, and not that he's responsible for the shortfall that only the three officers knows about. But it's becoming clear that Stutz has a nefarious idea, which is to rob their own bank from the inside in order to be able to cover the losses from whoever was responsible for those losses. Taggart especially is uncomfortable with the idea of fake-robbing his own bank, but Stutz is one of those charismatic types who can get people to do things they might not believe in.

And then we learn that it's Smedly who's been embezzling money, and that he's got enough of a conscience that he's not certain whether he should just return the money. And if he does return the money, what's that going to do when the fake robbery is reported, especially when Taggart has been busy cooking the books so that whatever is reported missing from the fake robbery will more or less make the books balance?

The Great Bank Hoax is the sort of material where you can see Hollywood of the 1930s thinking there's the basis of a really fun B movie here, except that in the 1930s Hollywood would have had to deal with the Production Code, and this movie doesn't really offer any good ways to resolve the conflict while adhering to the Code. By 1977, however, they didn't have to worry so much about the Code. Unfortunately, the writers also didn't seem to worry about coming up with a script that rose above the old B movies. The result is a movie that's not terrible by any means, but also one where it's easy to see why it's become largely forgotten.

The Great Bank Hoax will entertain you for 90 minutes, but it's another of the many movies that could have been so much better.