Next up on the list of movies that I recorded off of TCM because it had an interesting synopsis is 5 Against the House. Recently, I finally got around to watching it; as always, that means you're getting a review of it written here and scheduled for some time in the future after I've written this.
A group of Korean War veteran friends, who are now studying law at a law school in the midwest thanks to the GI Bill, have decided to take a trip out to Nevada for a weekend or so -- the exact amount of time isn't quite made clear and I'd guess it's an end-of-summer trip before the next semester begins -- to do a bit of gambling. They have a bit of fun although, since they're at a casino, one of them, Ronnie (Kerwin Matthews), runs out of money and needs to cash a check at the cashier's. Unfortunately, they approach the cashier just at the same time somebody else is trying robbing it, getting Ronnie and his friends Roy (Alvy Moore), Al (Guy Madison), and Brick (Brian Keith) in a bit of hot water before they can prove they weren't involved with the robbers.
However, this gives Ronnie an idiotic idea. He starts coming up with an idea for the "perfect crime", a way to rob the casino nobody at the casino thinks is possible because they have such good security. And, like Walter Pidgeon at the start of Man Hunt, he's going to go back to Reno just so he can show everybody the proof of concept. However, the plan that he comes up with is not one that he can carry out by himself. He'd need some accomplices, and you can just guess who those accomplices are going to be.
At this point, we start learning a bit more about the group of friends. Ronnie comes from a well-to-do family of the sort that expect their son to go to law school. So in any case he wouldn't need the sort of money that comes from holding up a casino. Al, for his part, has been pursuing a woman while in law school. That woman, Kay (Kim Novak), is a nightclub singer, which seems like rather an odd person for a law student to be chasing after, but there you are. Al is definitely the one person who wouldn't want to take part in such a charade, especially after he finally convinces Kay to marry him.
But then there's Brick. Brick saved Al's life over in Korea, which is part of why Al is such good friends with Brick and trying to help him through law school although he's not really suited for it. Worse, Brick's experiences in Korea left him with a nasty case of PTSD for which he spent some time in an Army hospital after getting back from Korea. Al thinks that perhaps Brick could benefit from going back into the hospital and getting more psychiatric treatment, but Brick wants none of that. If anthing, he's become the movie trope of the sociopathic criminal. So when he learns of Ronnie's idea, he takes to it. Worse, he plans to go through with the plot for real and not just Ronnie's idea of proof of concept. And he'll use force to get Al and Kay to take part in the heist as well. So it's a very tense group of friends who make their way to Reno to try to rob a casino....
The idea behind 5 Against the House is quite good, but again, it's another of those movies where it's fairly easy to see why it's not so well remembered today. In addition to a cast of B actors and one A actress, the movie suffers a bit from having a pretty far-fetched plot in that it's not the sort of thing that could possibly work in real life. The cast does a good job with the material and certainly makes it worth watching even if the whole ides sems unrealistic.
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