Harry and Walter Go to New York

One of the movies that TCM ran on Diane Keaton's day in Summer Under the Stars was Harry and Walter Go to New York. As is my wont, a made a point to watch it since I had never seen it before, which would give me the opportunity to put up a post on it.

The movie opens up in Sudbury, MA, in 1892. Harry Digby (James Caan) and Walter Hill (Elliott Gould) are a vaudeville double act doing a musical number, although they also do other stuff like a phony clairvoyant bit. In between the two acts, the action shifts to New York. Adam Worth (Michael Caine) is a gentleman thief who likes to rob banks, keep the cash, and then sell back the bonds. Indeed, he's about to sell the bonds back that he robbed from a bank in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the bank president brought some police with a Massachusetts bench warrant.

As for Harry and Walter, their clairvoyant act is an excuse to pilfer cash out of the paying customers' wallets. Multiple men figure out that they've been robbed, and they too bring in the police. So as you can guess, Harry and Walter also get sent to prison, and it's the same prison where Adam is sent. Why else would the characters be introduced in this way? Anyhow, Adam has the sort of pull that Noël Coward's character in The Italian Job does, and is able to get the plans to a bank in Lowell, MA, that he's planning to rob just to show that any bank can be robbed.

This gives Harry and Walter an idea. When the reformer Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton) shows up with a newspaper photographer, Harry and Walter plan to get a picture of the plans, so that they can rob the bank themselves. Not that they know anything about how to carry out a bank robbery. And not that Adam is going to be happy with them if he finds out, which he is because in their attempts to get the photo they burn the plans. But they're able to escape prison with the help of some nitroglycerin, while Adam gets pardoned and goes back to New York. Unfortunately Harry and Walter have to go to New York themselves to get the picture they took of those plans, meaning they run into Adam again who is really pissed.

Eventually everybody gets to Lowell for the climactic bank robbery. The bank is next to a theater, and Harry and Walter plan to blow the door off the vault during the big musical number near the end of the show so that nobody will hear the explosives. Of course, the plans don't quite go off as planned, forcing Harry and Watler to take more drastic action while both Adam and the bank president Crisp (Charles Durning) are on their tails.

With a cast like this and a wacky heist plot, you'd think you're in for a fun little caper movie. Unfortunately, the movie totally fails. Caan and Gould are both irritating in their comic mugging, and the plot is full of incongruencies, with no good reason for Harry and Walter to wind up in the same cell as Adam as one example. It also goes on much too long, at 111 minutes.

What if The Exorcist were a comic heist movie?

I found myself with a couple of Zero Mostel movies unwatched on my DVR and getting to the point where both of them were getting close to expiring. I've watched both of them now and am writing up the reviews, as usual spacing them out because I try to avoid posting about movies with the same star in close proximity unless they're both showing up on TV soon. In any case, the first of the two Zero Mostel movies is The Great Bank Robbery.

A train is heading for the town of Friendly, TX, and we see several people watching the train from afar, with the implication being that they're casing the train for a possible robbery. One group is led by Papa (Akim Tamiroff), father of Juan (Larry Storch); these are Mexicans who have come across the border and, one would guess, are planning to abscond with the presumed gold on the train back to Mexico. There's also Slade (Claude Akins), a gunman who knows a bit more about the bank in Friendly which is part of why he's scouting out the train.

Riding on the train is the Rev. Pious Blue (Zero Mostel), leader of a Salvation Army-style itinerant missionary group. His companion and second-in-command is sister Lyda (Kim Novak), and they're accompanied by a bunch of older character actor types, including Peter Whitney, Sam Jaffe, and John Fiedler. They, as it will be seen, have ulterior motives for making their way to Friendly.

We then learn that the bank in Friendly has two sets of books. One is the official set, although there's a second set and extra vaults because the bank supposedly holds the loot of a bunch of famous bank-robbing outlaws. Why, however, gangs like the James brothers would rob one bank and then trust the proceeds with another, is not answered. Texas Ranger Ben Quick (Clint Walker) has a feeling something is up in Friendly and is there to investigate.

Little does he know how much is up. Rev. Blue's group is, of course, there to rob the bank as well, with their plan being to tunnel under and blow their way into the vault during the Independence Day celebration and then get away with the gold somehow. Of course, they're going to have to stay one step ahead of the law but also one step ahead of the other robbers, who are going to feel aggrieved at having what they think should be "their" money stolen right out from under their noses.

The Great Bank Robbery is played for laughs, so there's a lot of comic styling in the reverend's plans to rob the bank as well as in their planned getaway, including using Sister Lyda to seduce Ben Quick. Complicating matters is the fact that Lyda finds herself legitimately falling in love with Ben.

It's fairly easy to surmise that The Great Bank Robbery was produced in part because there had been a spate of comic westerns in the 1960s as well as a spate of comic heist movies. Unfortunately, The Great Bank Robbery, coming at the end of both of these cycles, suffers greatly from being derivative. I'm also not the biggest fan of Zero Mostel, finding his humor much too broad, which is also a weakness of this movie. Instead of being genuinely funny, the whole thing comes across as the tiresome brand of zany. Ooh, let's have the climax be a hot-air balloon trying to flee the area! The movie is directed by Hy Averbaack, who worked mostly in television, and that shows, too.

Surprisingly, the screenplay is by William Peter Blatty of The Exorcist fame. The Great Bank Robbery does not rise to that level.

Nazi Heist Plot Movie #59486748578267

I mentioned some time back that TCM ran a double feature of movies starring Telly Savalas. The first one, which I already did a post on, was Crooks and Coronets. The second was Inside Out, and now is the time for the post on that movie.

The movie starts off with a prologue set in 1945, the dying days of the Nazi German regime, if you didn't figure that out from the title of the post. A bunch of Nazis are transporting cargo, when they're stopped at a checkpoint. Except that the checkpoint is a ruse for SS agents to shoot the people driving the truck, and take it to a train depot. There, they commandeer one of the trains for, well....

Cut to London in the present day, or, well, 1975 when the movie is set. Harry Morgan (Telly Savalas), is a former US Army officer who served in World War II but has fallen on a bit of hard times, making a living doing scammy things but not enough of a living to keep himself out of debt. He gets a letter from a German he knew, Ernst Furben (James Mason), who meets him to propose a business deal. Apparently, Ernst knows that that train we saw in the opening was supposed to transport looted Nazi gold to the Balkans but never made it there (didn't we see something like this in Charade?) -- the gold just disappeared as far as everyone knows.

Ah, but Ernst knows a way to find out where that gold is. Apparently, the man in charge of the shipment is notorious Nazi prisoner Reinhardt Holtz (Wolfgang Lukschy), who is an obvious stand-in for Rudolf Hess. Holtz is being kept as the only prisoner in a prison co-run by the British, Americans, and Soviets on a rotation basis, which is part of where Morgan comes in. Morgan served in the war with MSgt. Prior (Aldo Ray), who never rose far in the military but is a career officer, is the American who is in charge of day-to-day operations when it's the Americans' turn to oversee the prison. Since Prior and Harry knew each other, perhaps Harry can corrupt Prior to get people into the prison who can get the information out of Holtz as to where that gold really ended up. As if the gold is still where it was 30 years earlier.

Now, at this point, we get the standard second act of a heist movie which involves the protagonist organizing all the other people who are going to be in on the heist. This involves master thief Sly Wells (Robert Culp), currently based in Amsterdam, as well as several Germans. They're able to blackmail the doctor who is the one person who gets to see Holtz on a daily basis, with the plot ultimately being that they're going to drug Holtz, kidnap him, and replace him for a day with the doctor. While under the influence of those drugs, 36 Hours-style, they'll get Holtz to reveal the location of the gold.

Amazingly, this part of the plot goes off without much of a hitch. But when Holtz tells them where the gold is (they're dressed like Nazis and he doesn't realize they're not real Nazis), they discover that the location is in what is now East Berlin. Oops. Good luck getting behind Communist lines. And better luck getting the gold back to West Berlin and then out of West Germany.

Frankly, the heist plot in Inside Out is ridiculous and something that would never work in real life. But this is a movie, and thanks to a cast of professionals who look like they're enjoying themselves, they turn Inside Out into something that's at least 90 minutes of passable entertainment. That is, at least as long as you can suspend disbelief.

Sophie's Place

TCM ran a double feature of films with Telly Savalas some months back; not having seen either of the movies I decided to record both of them. The first of them was Crooks and Coronets.

The opening credits and plot synopsis made this one sound like it was made in England with Savalas one of those Hollywood stars sojourning in the UK. As the movie opens, there's a "state penitentiary" that seems just far enough off. Herbie Haseler (Telly Savalas) is a convict being released from prison, picked up by his friend Marty Miller (Warren Oates) who got out of prison himself a few months back and is supposedly going straight. However, it's quickly revealed that Marty stole the car he used to pick up Herbie from prison.

While confined in prison, Herbie has been reading up on the great manor houses of England, and he's become convinced that he's got a great idea for a heist that would solve all his financial problems. The Fitzmore mansion is owned by some people on hardish times, and they've got a lot of artwork that could easily be stolen and sold off in the States. But Herbie is going to need some money to fund the scheme, and the only person he knows is his old crime boss Nick Marco (Cesar Romero). The thing is, Nick already laid out money for the last scheme, the one that got Herbie and Marty in prison, and Nick has been calculating interest on that money for the entire time the two were in prison. So Nick is reluctant at first to fund Herbie, and certainly not going to accept any failure.

But Herbie and Marty make it over to merrye olde England, and eventually get to the gates of the Fitzmore place, although getting in to case the joint is not without some comic difficulties. The Fitzmores, Lady Sophie (Edith Evans) and her son Lord Freddie (Nicky Henson) are in bad enough straits that they're giving tours of the house for a price. The two crooks take one of the tours, and find somebody trying to fish one of the statues off a table, stopping the heist. That would-be robber is in fact Lady Sophie, under the ruse of trying to test the security arrangements. Herbie and Marty stop it, which gets them in good with Sophie, who being an eccentric old lady also decides to offer the two of them a place to stay, which is just the stroke of luck they needed.

Lady Sophie is so charming that, as Herbie and Marty plan the heist, they start to wonder whether they should go through with it at all, although that's a big problem too since Nick back in the States is beginning to wonder why it's taking Herbie and Marty so long to carry out the robbery. And eventually he's had enough, coming over to the UK himself to take over the heist so that he can make sure it goes according to plan. But by the time Nick comes over Herbie and Marty are thinking up ways to foil Nick in the comedic climax to the movie.

Crooks and Coronets was released in 1969. It's in a genre that had been successful over the years, although by 1969 this sort of view of British society was getting dated. Crooks and Coronets isn't exactly a bad movie, although it's one of those that feels like it doesn't have all that much that's original to it. Had it come out in 1959 it might have worked better, but by now the whole premis is beginning to feel tired. Still, it's also another of those movies where you can understand why the people involved, espcially Savalas and Oates going over the Britain, would have read the screenplay and decided they wanted to make the movie. Crooks and Coronets is modestly entertaining, but nothing spectacular.

How many in favor

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.

Six years before the Dixie Dancekings

Tomorrow's (August 27) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Ossie Davis, who was generally more of a supporting player as well as the husband of actress Ruby Dee. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before is Sam Whiskey. But since it's available to stream from Pluto TV, I decided to watch that (granted, with commercials) in order to be able to do a post here for the TCM showing tomorrow at 2:00 PM.

Once again, it's not Davis who is the star here, although he has a fairly large role playing one of the second bananas to the star. The star here his Burt Reynolds, playing Sam Whiskey. Some time not overly long after the Civil War (the movie plays fast and loose with time and geography) Sam rides into a small town that's been around long enough to have fences and a full range of services. He walks into a bar where he runs into the local blacksmith Jed Hooker (that's Ossie Davis) and getting into a fight with Hooker. Sam is really there to meet a woman, however, Laura Breckenridge (Angie Dickinson).

Laura has a job for Sam. Laura is a widow, but the Breckenridges have a positive reputation. What the people don't know, however, is that her late husband did something that runs the risk of sullying that family name. To wit, he stole a whole bunch of gold bars from the US Mint in Denver, replacing them with gold-plated lead bars. Now, you'd think that Laura might be happy with those gold bars. But she never got them, as the riverboat her husband was on sank in the Platte River, with the bars still aboard. Worse, an inspector from the Treasury Department is supposed to visit the Denver mint soon, whereupon he'll find out about the heist and destroy the Breckenridge name. So Laura wants Sam to find the gold bars, but instead of bringing them to her, put them back in the mint in Denver!

As with any good heist movie, Sam sets out to look for help to carry out the heist-in-reverse. As you might have guessed, Jed Hooker is going to be one of his partners. But he's got a third for the scheme, an inventor named O.W. Bandy (Clint Walker) who can fashion all sorts of devices to help them get the gold bars and then put them back where they belong.

There are several catches, of course. Even before you try to figure out how to get the gold into the vault, there's the issue of getting it off the bottom of the river. The three men are also being followed by another gang of crooks, a gang of whom Laura was aware but never informed poor Sam. They, unsurprisingly, want the gold, but have no intention of putting it back in the vault. And they're willing to kill to get it.

However, Sam and his two friends do get the gold bars out of the boat and then to Denver. But how are they going to get it back into the mint? And surely, even though there's no longer a pesky Production Code to deal with, something's bound to go wrong, isn't it?

As I was watching Sam Whiskey, I couldn't help but find myself thinking of another Burt Reynolds movie, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. Now, I happened to like that later movie, even though I realize it's not a particularly great movie. The reason for liking it comes down to Burt Reynolds' easygoing charm. The same holds true for Sam Whiskey. It's full of plot holes that you'll spot if you pay too close attention. But Reynolds again shows what a charming little rascal he can be, elevating not terribly good or original material into a film that entertains. Just don't think too hard about it.

Le casse

I was looking through TubiTV's list of on-demand movies that are about to leave the platform at the end of the month, and one that I saw that looked interesting was The Burglars. So, I made a point of watching it now while I still could, and moving up the post on it so that the rest of you could have the chance to watch it too if you want.

The movie opens up with some lovely shots of Athens, and somebody doing surveillance on something, but exactly who and what aren't so important to the rest of the movie. After the credits, the movie switches to nighttime Athens, and a 1970-vintage nondescript European sedan of the sort that looks like a wonder it was able to stay together. The driver and his three passengers drive off to some place that's in one of the leafy, well-to-do suburban districts. Since the movie is called The Burglars, you know that there's going to be some burgling, so....

Two of the passengers: Ralph (Robert Hossein) and Renzi (Renato Salvatori) get out of the car and ring the doorbell, waylaying the man who opens the door. They then make their way to a safe located inside the house, and proceed to set about using sophisticated (for 1970, at least) electronics to crack the safe and remove a case full of emeralds, which is supposedly valued at $1 million. Meanwhile, the driver, Azad (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and the female passenger, Hélène (Nicole Calfan) remain outside as guards and to send signals if it's OK to proceed with the robbery.

They get the emeralds and all live happily ever after. Yeah, right. This is a heist movie, so you know that something is going to go wrong with the heist. Or, in this case, two things. The first is that a police car shows up in the neighborhood. Since the crap car parked outside the house is severely out of place, our cop, Abel Zacharia (Omar Sharif), has good reason to suspect that something might be wrong. He gets out and questions Azad, but eventually leaves. The bigger problem comes the next day. Ralph's plan had been to pay big bucks to the captain of a freight ship to ferry the four thieves out of the country, so the four make their way to the port of Pireaus in order to get on that boat and board it. However, when the ship reached port, the captain knew that he was going to have to put in for some unscheduled repairs to make the ship seaworthy again.

Even worse is that Zacharia shows up at the port, watching the burglars from a safe distance, before getting in a car chase with Azad. At this point, Zacharia knows there's something more going on, so he decides to use the lovely model Lena (Dyan Cannon) to get at Azad. Azad is trying to stay clear of the cops so that he can eventually get back to Hélène, who is biding her time at a resort on one of the Greek islands. Zacharia is trying to get proof that these people really did commit the crime, but there's also more going on with Zacharia and his unorthodox methods than he's letting on....

I was wondering as I was watching The Burglars how much of the movie was dubbed in post-production. What I didn't realize until looking up the movie afterwords is that, as with Hollywood in the early days of talking pictures, there were actually two versions of the movie made, one in English and one in French. It's also based on a novel from the early 1950s that Hollywood had already filmed in the late 50s, also titled The Burglars and starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield. I haven't seen that version; I don't know if it's available anywhere.

As for this version of The Burglars, at least it's lovely to look at. Athens, even in the off-season, is beautiful, with the Greek islands (IMDb says Corfu was used for the island resort) being even more beautiful. It's just a shame that the plot couldn't have been executed better. The opening heist and the car chase each go on much too long, while we're not really given enough context to make the characters' motivations (especially Zacharia) comprehensible. In the end, The Burglars is a passable exemplar of the glossy heist films of the 1960s and 1970s, and OK enough to pass the time with. But it feels like there could have been so much more here.

If you go to Tubi's website for the week and a half or so that the movie is still available and do a search, you can find it and watch for yourself. I didn't include a direct link mostly because it's presumably going to go dead soon.

Warren Oates does comedy!

Another of the movies that I hadn't even heard of before until TCM played it a few months back is The Thief Who Came to Dinner. Once again, it was another of those movies that sounded interesting, so I decided to record it and watch it to do a review on here.

Ryan O'Neal is the star, playing Webster McGee. He's a college graduate, working with computers at a company in Houston in the early mainframe era when everything had banks and banks of reel-to-reel tape drives. However, it's not a very fulfilling life and has led to him getting divorced by his wife Jackie (a young Jill Clayburgh who shows up briefly later in the movie). Webster quits his job to look for something more fulfilling, picking...

Upscale jewel heists. He goes and cases a joint posing as somebody from the water company when only the servants are home, and when he returns late at night he robs the safe. However, he doesn't get all that much in the way of traditional value; instead, he finds a bunch of documents. He's no dummy, and realizes that these documents hold valuable information that would get the guy he stole them from, Henderling (Charles Cioffi) into serious legal trouble. Selling them back to Henderling could give Webster a ton of money.

But that's not quite what he wants, having gotten the jewel heist bug. Henderling being rich knows all the other rich people in Houston's high society, and Webster wants to meet them so that he can case their joints as well and steal their jewels. It's through this that Webster meets Laura Keaton (Jacqueline Bisset). Laura had parents who were house-rich but cash-poor; they've died and left her the house. Instead of selling it, however, she lives there in more or less one room presumably wanting to keep being a part of the higher society. She likes Webster's idea of stealing the rich people's jewels, so she's willing to be an accomplice.

Meanwhile, Webster has made his shtick of a calling card be to write down chess moves, as one of the early robberies was in a room with an ornate chess set. The authorities think he might be a good chess player, and enlist the help of the local newspaper's chess columnist, Zukovsky (Austin Pendleton), to try to figure out Webster's next move. Zukovsky challenges Webster to a correspondence match and Webster, not exactly being good at chess, hacks into a computer to get it to give him good moves (even though it would be close to 20 years before computers would finally be able to take on people of Zukovsky's caliber).

As for Warren Oates, he plays Dave Reilly, an insurance adjuster for Texas Mutual, which insures the jewels of several of the people who were robbed by Webster. They don't want to pay out, of course, so they have an incentive to find Webster and possibly not even press charges in exchange for buying back the jewels at a major discount. He even more than Zukovsky winds up as Webster's comic foil since Dave is smart enough to recognize it's Webster doing the heists.

As I was watching the opening credits, I noticed that The Thief Who Came to Dinner was another Bud Yorkin-Norman Lear production. As with all of the other of their movies that I've seen, there's a lot of potential in the plot, but it unfortunately winds up a bit short of reaching that potential. In this case, I think a lot of that has to do with the chess subplot, as Austin Pendleton seems like he's trying just too hard to be funny (and Eastern European immigrant). It doesn't quite work. Oates, on the other hand, shows he's surprisingly good in the role of something other than a western heavy. Oates died much too young. O'Neal and Bisset also make an appealing enough couple, although both of them later suggested this wasn't their best work.

Despite the flaws, The Thief Who Came to Dinner is an eminently watchable movie.

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.

The Biggest Bundle of Them All

Raquel Welch was one of the people TCM honored this past August in Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them was The Biggest Bundle of them All, which I put on the DVR because the plot sounded fun. I recently watched it, and am sad to say that the movie didn't quite live up to my expectations.

Welch isn't really the star here, of course; as in qute a few of her movies she was added as eye candy. The two stars here are Robert Wagner and Vittorio De Sica. De Sica plays Cesare Celli, an Italian-born man who worked as a mobster in the States for a good portion of his career, only to retire back to Italy. At a funeral, he's picked up by Harry Price (Robert Wagner) and his friends. Only, they don't take him back to his house, but to another place where they inform him that they're kidnapping him for ransom, as Harry has written a bunch of bad checks he needs to cover. Cesare calls some of his old friends back in the States, only to find that nobody can (or is willing to) pay the ransom.

Now, this made me think of two movies, the great Terry-Thomas comedy Too Many Crooks as well as the more recent Anthony Quinn vehicle The Happening. And indeed, it turns out that the producers at Columbia found about about this movie being made and forced MGM into an agreement that they wouldn't release it until several months after The Happening finished its theatrical run. I'm getting ahead of myself, however, other than to point out that if you've seen The Happening, you'll have an idea of what happens next.

Cesare doesn't have any way of raising the ransom money himself; despite his life as a higher-up mafioso, he's really not very rich. But he knows the perfect crime for which he needs a gang, and now he's got a gang that could help carry it out. Further, it would solve everybody's financial problems. But Cesare is going to have to bring in the real brains behind the scheme, "Professor" Samuels (Edward G. Robinson).

The actual details of the heist are more of a macguffin, but the short version of it is that platinum mined in Colombia is sent for processing in Italy, where it's transported by train. The gang will hijack the train, relieve it of the platinum, and fence that in Morocco. The real plot of the movie, however, involves Harry and his gang who kidnapped Cesare not being terribly competent, and, in at least one case, fellow American Benny (Godfrey Cambridge), not even wanting to use a gun!

As for Raquel Welch, she's along for the ride as Harry's girlfriend Juliana, and also serves the purpose of being somebody good-looking enough that characters in the movie can be distracted by her beauty, allowing Harry and his gang to do what they need to unnoticed.

The big problem for me with The Biggest Bundle of them All is that the script felt scattershot, jumping from one point of preparation to the next in a way that didn't particularly feel coherent. The movie is supposed to be a comedy, but it doesn't reach the level that Too Many Crooks did, with substantial portions feeling forced and grating in the humor. One thing that the movie does have going for it, however, is location shooting in Italy, which is very picturesque here.

Overall, however, The Biggest Bundle of them All feels like the sort of movie that in the past a studio would have needed to make in Europe because of capital controls, with the Americans involved in the proceedings there for a vacation and a nice paycheck. It's not a particularly good movie, and a serious comedown for actors like Robinson and De Sica.

Hard Rain

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the DirecTV free previews was Hard Rain. It's part of the Cinemax rotation, and will be on again multiple times this week, starting with 2:35 AM tomorrow on ThrillerMax. So as always, I made a point of watching it to do a review on here.

In the town of Huntingburg, IN (a real place, as it turns out, and the same town that was used for filming A League of Their Own), it's raining hard enough and long enough to flood, with people putting up sandbags and the sheriff (Randy Quaid) trying to evacuate people from town. There's a good chance the dam upstream is going to have to release more water, which is obviously a problem for the town below. The sheriff is a lame duck who recently lost his re-election bid, so some people, such as the elderly couple Henry and Doreen (Richard Dysart and Betty White respectively), plan to stay behind and even set traps to stop looters.

Meanwhile, the bank is worried about its money, so they've been sending an armored car to stop at all the towns in the area that are being evacuated and getting the cash out of the vaults. The team in the armored car is Charlie (Ed Asner), who is nearing retirement age; and young Tom (Christian Slater), who just happens to be Charlie's nephew. (I'd think putting relatives together in armored car crews is something that would give management pause, but apparently not in this plot.

It's not much of a secret that there's an armored car going around and collecting money for safekeeping, and as you might guess, that attracts the baddies. In this case, it's a gang led by old Jim (Morgan Freeman). Their plan is to get to the armored car when it gets stuck in the rising waters, as it's bound to do, and take the money, floating off with it before anybody can spot them. And maybe they could have the great good luck to have Tom and Charlie drown waiting for help.

Of course, the heist doesn't go as planned. Jim shows up at the appointed time to "help" Charlie and Tom, but Tom suspects something is wrong because Jim and his friends are deliberately blinding him with their headlights. So Tom reaches for his gun, and a firefight breaks out in which Charlie is shot to death. Since there's a goodly water-filled distance between Tom and Jim's gang, Tom is able to get the cash out of the truck and take it with him, to hide it in the cemetery so that Jim and friends can't find it and will have to keep him alive since he's the one with the vital knowledge of where the cash is.

Tom winds up back in Huntingburg, with Jim and his men following, which brings all of them into contact with law enforcement in the form of that sheriff. However, Karen (Minnie Driver) spots Tom and thinks he's a looter since he just broke out of the school where he'd been hiding from Jim's gang. She waylays him and gets him locked up, which is pretty darn dangerous what with the rising waters. Tom tells the sheriff that he's from the armored car company, but he stupidly left his ID back in the truck so they have no way of verifying his story except to go out to the cemetery themselves to find the money.

With a cool $3 million at the cemetery, it's no surprise that the sheriff, about to be out of a job, thinks about keeping that money for himself, or at least splitting it with the rest of his men. This leaves Tom subject to the rising waters back in the holding cell, and when the water does come, we have Karen rescuing him, leading to an uneasy alliance.

Hard Rain is a movie that's treading no new ground, no pun intended. There's so many plot holes and continuity errors here, notably with all of the lights that are still on in the flooded town. Characters take an inordinately long time to die, long enough for them to get an important scene. And they're also all able to function underwater longer than Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure.

On the other hand, if you just want to sit back and be entertained for 90 minutes without having to think too much, Hard Rain is a movie that will do that. And Betty White provides some pretty good comic relief.

A Nice Little Bank that Should Be Robbed

The latest new-to-me movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation recently is A Nice Little Bank that Should Be Robbed. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow, Sept. 24, at 9:45 AM; as always, with that in mind I made it a point to watch the movie and blog about it now.

Tom Ewell plays Max Rutgers, who runs an auto body shop that doesn't seem to get much business, as he seems to spend more time with his best friend Gus (Mickey Rooney), who is studying for his license to become a race-horse trainer. Unfortunately, Gus always seems to get incredibly nervous when he has to face the actual examiners, he consistently fails the examination. Meanwhile, Max has a long-suffering girlfriend in Margie (Dina Merrill) who would marry Max if only he had the money.

One day, Gus hears a story on the radio about a bank robbery, and comes up with the idiotic idea that he and Max can solve their financial problems if only the two of them rob a bank together! And he's even come up with a plan on how to do it! For whatever bizarre reason, Max decides to go along with this, even though in his mind he's planning to return the money after he can get enough back to repay what he's taken.

Amazingly, the robbery goes off without a hitch, which is something unusual in a heist movie. Of course, there's going to be problems later, thank you Production Code. Gus' plans for the money involve buying a race-horse and running it to win a bunch of prize money; with Max's share of the prize money, he can pay back the bank and have enough left over to get married to Margie. Or at least, that's the plan.

Gus and Max have to go to another state where Gus doesn't need a trainer's license, and there they run the horse. But in the meantime, their mutual friend, taxi driver Rocky (Mickey Shaughnessy) found the money bag that Gus and Max got the bank robbery money in and were too damn stupid to destroy. Rocky is unsurprisingly able to put two and two together, and wants in on his friends' money making scheme.

They'd all live happily ever after if only the scheme works. And it might at that, with their horse winning the first race it's entered in. That is, until the stewards have an inquiry and determine that the horse crowded others out in a way that contravenes the rules, thereby disqualifying the horse. Now Gus and Max are out a bunch more money.

As you might be able to guess, Gus comes up with a daft plan to rob another bank, this time in a different way from the first one, since if they robbed the second bank in the same manner, the police would be able to find them much more easily. Unfortunately, Gus isn't smart enough to realize that the bank vault is on a timer and that the bank manager can't just open it up before hours.

I mentioned that A Nice Little Bank that Should Be Robbed was a new-to-me movie. There's a reason I'd never heard about it before, which is that it's not very good. It looks as though it was done on the cheap, and the attempts at humor fall relatively flat. There's also the predictable plot holes involving incompetent crooks and what they expect reality to be.

Still, watch for yourself, as some people might enjoy this one more than I did.

Seven Thieves

Among the many movies sitting on my DVR, I finally got around to watching Seven Thieves. It's going to be on FXM Retro again tomorrow at 11:00 PM and sometime Tuesday, so you've got a chance to catch it if you want.

The movie starts off with "Professor" Theo Wilkins (Edward G. Robinson) at the seaside at one of those French Riviera resorts, looking like he's enjoying the life there. But he's really down on his luck, and in France for a different reason, as you can probably guess from the title of the movie. As for why he's specifically at the seashore, well, that's where he's waiting for his young friend Paul Mason (Rod Steiger) to show up. Paul is actaully a protégé of Theo's and somebody Theo believes he can trust, which is going to be extremely necessary for the job he's got lined up.

That job, as you should have realized by now, is a heist; in this specific case a casino heist. They're going to go into one of the ritzy casinos in Monte Carlo, rob it of about $4 million in French francs, that being a very tidy sum back in 1960 even split seven ways. As to how they're going to pull it off, well, that will be made clearer a little later in the movie.

Theo has already assembled a cast of candidates suitable for the job: nightclub singer Melanie (Joan Collins); safecracker Louis (Michael Dante); driver Hugo (Berry Kroeger); Mealnie's protector Poncho (Eli Wallach); and inside man Raymond (Alexander Scourby). But, not all of them are quite thrilled about the plan, in part because they're not being given all the details. How, exactly, are they going to get the cash out of the building? The less they need to know, the better. Further, they don't like that Paul is more or less going to be making all the decisions, leaving the rest of them to take orders. And then Poncho in particular finds that his role in the caper requires him to do something very unpleasant.

But of course everybody agrees to participate, since otherwise we wouldn't have a movie. They get to the casino, and we're treated to a standard-issue caper movie. There's good suspense on a bunch of fronts, with a bunch of twists and turns leading the viewer to ask, "Is this the place where the caper will break down?" Since the Production Code was still in place, the plan must eventually fall apart, but the ways in which it does certainly surprised me, which is a good thing.

Overall, however, Seven Thieves comes across as a bit perfunctory. There's nothing particularly wrong, but there's also nothing particularly fresh and memorable the way there is in other heist movies. Robinson is good as always; Steiger might be a bit too intense; Wallach looks dissipated which is what the role calls for; Kroger looks like he's trying to impersonate Erich von Stroheim's chauffeur scenes from Sunset Blvd.. Joan Collins is nice to look at, and gets to display some ingenuity too. The result is something that does entertain, but also something you may not think to put in for multiple viewings. The movie did get a DVD release, but I'm not certain if it's still in print.

Kaleidoscope

I apologize for only giving a couple of hours warning about the upcoming airing of Kaleidoscope, which you can catch at noon on TCM. However, it does happen to be available from the Warner Archive Collection.

Warren Beatty plays Barney Lincoln, who at the start of the movie is heading toward an industrial site somehwere in Europe. He gets up on the roof, and breaks in! He goes to the safe, so presumably he's going for the case or some other valuables like jewels. But he just takes out a couple of printing plates, alters them, and leaves. To do something that crazy, somebody has to have a pretty good reason.

And Barney certainly does have a good reason. Those factory was at the company that makes the playing cards for all the great casinos of Europe, and Barney's alterations of the printing plates subtly marked the backs of the cards so that Barney could see what everybody else was holding. This obviously would enable him to defeat the people he was gambling against, and win large sums of money.

Such winnings, unsurprisingly, brought him to public attention, especially from the various authorities, who aren't so stupid that they can't figure out something hinky is going on. Eventually, Inspector McGinnis from Scotland Yard (Clive Revill) pieces everything together and brings Barney in. The bad guys always go down, don't they? Except, that's not what Kaleidoscope is about. McGinnis understands that if the arrest of Barney were made public, along with his scheme to defraud the casinos, it would cause a great loss of confidence that would result in bigger problems than not prosecuting Barney would.

With that in mind, McGinnis gives Barney a different sort of punishment. Serve the authorities by helping bring down Dominion (Eric Porter). Dominion is a smuggler who has made a bundle of money doing that, and has moved into more "legitimate" businesses as well to keep himselve ever so slightly above the law. So McGinnis figures that the way to go after Dominion is financial. Dominion is known for his love of gambling, so what better than to put him up against Barney in a high-stakes poker game? Barney can win Dominion's money since Barney knows the cards are marked, and that money can go to pay back the casinos he defrauded. Of course, there are a couple of problems. One is that along the way, Barney falls for McGinnis' daughter Angel (Susannah York). Another is that at a key point in the poker game, the cards are changed out -- and by this time, the factory figured out what was going on and the new cards are unmarked!

Kaleidoscope is one of those movies that fits in with all the other heist and caper movies of the 1960s. It's stylish to look at, even though there might be even less here than in most of the other films in the genre. But it does succeed in entertaining the viewer, and in that is more than worth a viewing.