Peter Falk leads a gang of small-time thieves (Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino, Warren Oates, Allan Garfield, et al) who pull off the biggest robbery of the century, get caught, and go to jail.
The director, William Friedkin, and the screenwriter, Walon Green, do a fine and delicate job of balancing the three elements of the story -- comedy, drama, and tension.
Mostly it's comic, and the laughs are due not so much to the imposition of obvious gags (though there is some slapstick) as to the ludicrous nature of the thieves themselves and the job they undertake; not an armed robbery but a pasquinade. The amusing lines somehow ring true because the setting is working-class Boston, its brick tenements and skeletal wooden porches and staircases, and its stone streets and old cars and dilapidated clothing and its spent values. "Look at dis coat," brags Falk, as he hands his wife a garment of shabby fur bought with some stolen money. "Dat's genuine muskrat. It says so right on da label. I don't want to tell you what it cost because it's a gift and dat ain't right, but here's da receipt in case somebody asks you where you got it." The drama comes later, after the robbery is successfully pulled off and Peter Boyle is holding the $1.5 million until "the statue runs out." Boyle has already disposed of an easily identified fifty grand by flushing it down the toilet, enraging the others, and now he refuses to divvy up the remainder.
The tension is generated during the robbery itself. (Will they get the money? Will someone be killed in the getting of it?) And there is additional tension when Warren Oates and his co-conspirator Kevin O'Connor are arrested and given ten times the usual sentence for minor crimes, the FBI hoping that the pressure and the beatings will cause them to squeal.
That's a plot hole. The FBI is involved on a pretext and spends $25 million to solve a $1.5 million robbery because the director, J. Edgar Hoover, is absolutely convinced that the crime represents a link between organized rackets and communist subversives. Okay. That's understood. Hoover was a notorious bonehead and was always grabbing headlines.
But hundreds of louche Bostonians are being yanked in for questioning, and nothing involving any of the real gang stands out. Cut to Oates and O'Connor, having a meal in a diner in Tonowanda, Pennsylvania, on their way to Pittsburgh. A couple of state troopers walk through the door and arrest them. Well -- why? Oates is convicted of an infraction involving the carrying of firearms and gets a sentence of 20 years instead of the usual 18 months. The FBI is sitting in the audience, smiling with satisfaction. And O'Connor is given several years for equally small-time infractions and is beaten all to hell to get the story out of him. But how did the FBI -- or anyone else -- know that Oates and O'Connor were involved? And how did they know where to locate the pair during their peregrinations?
But, that aside, it's an entertaining story. Friedkin doesn't make the same mistake as Arthur Penn did in "Bonny and Clyde." Nobody is romanticized. One of the robbers has a loving family but that's about as far as it goes. When Falk is leaving for a job, his wife, Gena Rowlands, reminds him to take his screwdriver and gives him a wrapped sandwich, saying, "Take this in case you get hungry later." They don't STAND for anything. They aren't sucked into a life of crime. They're not giving society the finger. It's just something they've chosen for a profession. And despite their occasional clumsiness and pratfalls, they're good at it too. It's "The Asphalt Jungle" but the jungle is Boston and the gang is made up of goofballs.
There's something to be learned from it too. Brinks, the most prestigious cash-transport business in the world, was left virtually unguarded. We are continually rediscovering that security is never as tight as it's thought to be, and our infallible organizations are elementally vulnerable. If the Department of Homeland Security sends 100 explosive- and weapon-laden agents through airport check points, about 18% get through. Security is a very serious business and it mystifies most of us with its high technology and the expertise of its technicians, yet, as the sociologist Erving Goffman remarked with regard to primitive rituals, often the real secret behind the mystery is that there is no mystery at all.
The director, William Friedkin, and the screenwriter, Walon Green, do a fine and delicate job of balancing the three elements of the story -- comedy, drama, and tension.
Mostly it's comic, and the laughs are due not so much to the imposition of obvious gags (though there is some slapstick) as to the ludicrous nature of the thieves themselves and the job they undertake; not an armed robbery but a pasquinade. The amusing lines somehow ring true because the setting is working-class Boston, its brick tenements and skeletal wooden porches and staircases, and its stone streets and old cars and dilapidated clothing and its spent values. "Look at dis coat," brags Falk, as he hands his wife a garment of shabby fur bought with some stolen money. "Dat's genuine muskrat. It says so right on da label. I don't want to tell you what it cost because it's a gift and dat ain't right, but here's da receipt in case somebody asks you where you got it." The drama comes later, after the robbery is successfully pulled off and Peter Boyle is holding the $1.5 million until "the statue runs out." Boyle has already disposed of an easily identified fifty grand by flushing it down the toilet, enraging the others, and now he refuses to divvy up the remainder.
The tension is generated during the robbery itself. (Will they get the money? Will someone be killed in the getting of it?) And there is additional tension when Warren Oates and his co-conspirator Kevin O'Connor are arrested and given ten times the usual sentence for minor crimes, the FBI hoping that the pressure and the beatings will cause them to squeal.
That's a plot hole. The FBI is involved on a pretext and spends $25 million to solve a $1.5 million robbery because the director, J. Edgar Hoover, is absolutely convinced that the crime represents a link between organized rackets and communist subversives. Okay. That's understood. Hoover was a notorious bonehead and was always grabbing headlines.
But hundreds of louche Bostonians are being yanked in for questioning, and nothing involving any of the real gang stands out. Cut to Oates and O'Connor, having a meal in a diner in Tonowanda, Pennsylvania, on their way to Pittsburgh. A couple of state troopers walk through the door and arrest them. Well -- why? Oates is convicted of an infraction involving the carrying of firearms and gets a sentence of 20 years instead of the usual 18 months. The FBI is sitting in the audience, smiling with satisfaction. And O'Connor is given several years for equally small-time infractions and is beaten all to hell to get the story out of him. But how did the FBI -- or anyone else -- know that Oates and O'Connor were involved? And how did they know where to locate the pair during their peregrinations?
But, that aside, it's an entertaining story. Friedkin doesn't make the same mistake as Arthur Penn did in "Bonny and Clyde." Nobody is romanticized. One of the robbers has a loving family but that's about as far as it goes. When Falk is leaving for a job, his wife, Gena Rowlands, reminds him to take his screwdriver and gives him a wrapped sandwich, saying, "Take this in case you get hungry later." They don't STAND for anything. They aren't sucked into a life of crime. They're not giving society the finger. It's just something they've chosen for a profession. And despite their occasional clumsiness and pratfalls, they're good at it too. It's "The Asphalt Jungle" but the jungle is Boston and the gang is made up of goofballs.
There's something to be learned from it too. Brinks, the most prestigious cash-transport business in the world, was left virtually unguarded. We are continually rediscovering that security is never as tight as it's thought to be, and our infallible organizations are elementally vulnerable. If the Department of Homeland Security sends 100 explosive- and weapon-laden agents through airport check points, about 18% get through. Security is a very serious business and it mystifies most of us with its high technology and the expertise of its technicians, yet, as the sociologist Erving Goffman remarked with regard to primitive rituals, often the real secret behind the mystery is that there is no mystery at all.
