Bank Job, The (2008) and Armored Car Robbery (1950)

[Steve-O]

Heist Noir: The Bank Job (2008) and Armored Car Robbery (1950)

Film noir was never meant to be realistic. In a 1953 New York Times review of Pickup on South Street reviewer Bosley Crowther called the now-classic noir “brutish and... sadistic” and went on to conclude “Sam Fuller, who wrote it and directed, appears to have been more concerned with firing a barrage of sensations than with telling a story to be believed.” What a perfect way to describe film noir. It's not supposed to be realistic – although film watchers today may think that was a goal of classic-era film makers. The truth is, however, no one ever talked like Walter Neff; and no detective was as clever as Philip Marlowe. It was a made-up world where camera angles and acting were exaggerated for effect. Film noir plots were so dense that movie goers weren't expected to fully understand what happened. It was an attitude more than any other element. Personally, I watched Out of the Past at least five times before I decided to actually try to follow the plot. I was to busy the first four viewings just taking in the amazing camera work and listening to the almost poetic dialogue. I, as a first time viewer, was satisfied with the “sensations” the film gave me more than the story that was being told.

Jack Shadoian, in his excellent book Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, writes:

Noir was an attitude that could be applied to most any kind of film, and was. It hardened and nastied up a soaper like Mildred Pierce (1945), existentialized a Western like Yellow Sky (1948), and confounded a culture piece like the normally imperturbable George Cukor's A Double Life (1947).

Noir cinema is about people who live in the night and make their fearful way through darkness.

Most film noir, however, usually involves a crime and some of the best film noir are “heist films.” Both The Bank Job (2008) and Armored Car Robbery (1950) are excellent examples. Unlike many other heist films considered noir – including The Scar or The Asphalt Jungle – Armored Car Robbery and The Bank Job have a bit of reality mixed in with the classic film noir attitude. Both movies are based on real-life crimes. The Bank Job is taken from the 1971 London vault cleanout on Baker Street labeled the walkie-talkie robbery while Armored Car Robbery is a story based on a 1934 armored car heist at the Rubel Ice Company in Brooklyn. However, if you assumed that these movies are somehow realistic you'd be wrong. They follow other film noir before them by being over-the-top crime movies with attitude.

The Bank Job is a wonderfully sleazy film. It's filled with enough sex and violence that, if made years before, would have made Sam Fuller smile (and review Crowther probably blow his top). The thing I love about The Bank Job is the fact that the criminals who actually pull off the crime know they aren't all that clever. They do the crime knowing it probably won't work out for the best. It turns out that the robbery - that was just supposed to be about “snatching and grabbing” cash in a bank vault - ends up being in reality a set up by British politicians and crooked coppers - an attempt to recover some highly embarrassing blackmail-related sex photos stored in the vault. British intelligence uses just about everything in their power to get the small-time criminals who walk away with said photos and whatever else they could get their hands on in the vault.

Jason Statham (a modern-day B-movie star in the mold of Charles McGraw) has never been better. Statham, who has a dominating movie-star presence on screen, should have a serious talk with his agent and demand he only make movies like this in the future.

The heist plan is hatched when Statham's Terry Leather gets together with a sexy old flame who tells him about an easy bank vault job. Leather jumps on the chance to get rich quick even knowing he's not smart enough to actually get away with it. When he and his colorful gang do pull off the crime early in the movie, the gang goes underground when it seems like the whole country is looking for them. Leather and his gang are forced to play a couple of intense chess games simultaneously against a much smarter mob and MI5 while also being on the run from Scotland Yard. Like most heist films the crime is not the most interesting part. It's the angling to get away with it afterwards that makes the film suspenseful. Supporting Statham is Saffron Burrows as Martine Love – the drop-dead gorgeous femme fatale that sets it all up. She looks just like those skinny 70s models from that period - that's just one of many nice touches that makes the film feel not only that it took place in the 70s but that the actual film was made in that era. Although Terry Leather (love that name) is happily married I can see how no man could resist any temptation offered up by Martine – a woman all the blokes' wives don't trust and one young member of Leather's bunch secretly wants to run away with. Also in the cast is the intense David Suchet (who is probably best known as BBC's Hercule Poirot) as a porn-king you probably never – ever - want to cross.

The crime was called the walkie-talkie caper because they used walkie-talkies in the crime and was overheard by a short-wave radio enthusiast who quickly recorded the conversations and reported it to the police. Some reviewers complained - when the film was released - that there's no way anyone would actually think that walkie-talkie conversations were somehow secure. The funny thing is that's what actually happened during the real crime. People are much more technologically savvy today. I remember using those type of radios years ago and having no idea that anyone else could pick up on them. Lucky I never tried to rob a bank.

Australian suspense-and-action pro Roger Donaldson does a fine job mixing facts from the real crime with fiction to make a very entertaining neo-noir. Mercifully, he doesn't add Tarantino-esque irony to the twisty story – an element so often found in recent British crime films. The film did modest business when it was released but I suspect it will have a cult-like following years down the road not unlike Armored Car Robbery from 1950.

[Steve-O]

Daring armored car heists were seen in a number of film noir. The best film to show that particular crime – Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross – came out just a year before the simply-named Armored Car Robbery (James Ellroy loves the film but was no doubt re-writing it in his head when he called it “Armored Car Heist” on TCM).

The stripped-down 67-minute Armored Car Robbery is a great little crime noir that features some amazing noir photography and outstanding performances from Charles McGraw and William Talman.

Talman is a criminal mastermind out to make a fortune by quickly robbing an armored car. McGraw plays an obsessed cop out to get Talman after he guns down his long-time partner. The two are so good in the film the other actors in it barely register. The only other notable performance is Douglas Fowley playing a pencil-thin mustached thug who still lusts after his sexy wife that dumped him. (Fowley is not unlike the zoot-suit wearing wolf in that old Warner Bros cartoons whistling at Lauren Bacall.)

The film, unlike the real-life crime it's based on, takes place in Los Angeles. Dave Purvis (Talman) calls the cops every day at the same time reporting a hold up at old Wrigley Field (the one in LA, not Chicago). Every time the prowlers get to the park Purvis checks his stop watch and notes the time. He's trying to time out how long cops will get to the park as part of a simple plan to rob an armored car that makes it's last stop there loaded with cash.

Once he's satisfied with the plan, he recruits his gang. Unlike Terry Leather in The Bank Job, Purvis thinks of himself as a criminal mastermind. He's never been arrested – never even had a parking ticket. He keeps no written evidence on any of his plans. He cuts the labels off his suits and doesn't let his fellow criminals write anything down. He wants nothing to be traced back to him after the crime. He invites his criminal recruits (lead by Fowley) to his hotel room. They're easily impressed by the map of the Wrigley Field neighborhood concealed in his window shade. The three men go along with the scheme once they find out that Purvis is involved. Apparently he pulled off a similar heist before and has quite a reputation among his peers. Little do they realize Purvis is not much smarter than they are. He has no plan once the crime goes sour and his decisions afterwards are all questionable.

Steve Brodie (famous for being beat up twice by Elvis in movies) and Gene Evans are the other criminals. However, these familiar faces to fans of 40s and 50s film don't make much of an impression here. Blonde bombshell Adele Jergens plays Benny McBride's (Fowley) wife known by her professional dancing name Yvonne LeDoux. She's shacking up with Purvis – but Benny has no idea.

The heist doesn't go as planned. Lieutenant Cordell of the LAPD (McGraw) and his partner are in the neighborhood right when the crime is broadcast on police radios. They arrive to the surprise of Purvis who shoots Cordell's partner played by James Flavin – movie buffs will remember him as the second mate on the ship that captured King Kong (1933). After shooting the cop, the four criminals jump in a car in front of Wrigley filed and try to take it on the lam. McBride is shot in the gut but the four still manage to elude cops at road blocks on the lookout for them. Eventually they head for a shack near an oilfield where they'll eventually jump in a boat and make their final getaway. The injured McBride throws a monkey wrench into their plans. Purvis's gang begins to unravel as distrust and paranoia begins to build. Benny – who knows he's going to die if he doesn't see a doctor - is killed by Purvis after he demands his share of the loot to get medical care. His body and the get-away car are dumped. Purvis quick gets to work elimnating the other crooks. Gang member Al Mapes (Brodie) gets away and looks up Yvonne at the Burly Q where she works at as a means to find Purvis and get his money taken from him but is trapped. Purvis gets away again.

During an exciting finale, Talman ends up getting killed on the Metropolitan Airport tarmac after kissing the blades of an arriving airplane. The robbery money is blown all over the runway – not unlike the ending of The Killing. McGraw goes to the hospital to visit his second partner – who was also put into harms way and shot by Purvis. Luckily, this partner lives and they can both share a laugh together before the movie ends.

Talman began his screen career as a cold-blooded killer in The Woman on Pier 13 (1949). After Armored Car Robbery Talman would play a number of menacing characters in noir including The City That Never Sleeps (1953), and the prison-escape films Big House USA And Crashout in 1955. He's striking screen presence – bulging lizard-like eyes and high forehead – made him a natural playing heavies. His greatest success would be pairing up with another regular noir villain Raymond Burr in Perry Mason. Talman's inept district attorney Hamilton Burger would battle but ultimately lose every week to Burr's Mason for years on TV. Talman's best role in noir, in my opinion, is the Ida Lupino-directed The Hitch-Hiker (1953) playing killer Emmett Myers.

Charles McGraw, according Alan K. Rode's biography on McGraw - Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy- was immediately cast for Code 3 (the original name of the film) after the success of The Threat in 1949. Up until then McGraw alternated between playing villains and good guys – memorably evil in The Killers (1946), T-Men (1949) and The Threat – before being regularly cast as hard-nosed cops by the time The Narrow Margin was released in 1952.

Rode notes:

As “Lieutenant Cordell” of L.A.P.D. Robbery-Homicide, Charles McGraw was John Law personified. McGraw, decked out in classic Robbery-Homicide mufti of belted raincoat and pulled-down fedora, is relentless in pursuit of the holdup gang who killed his partner. No punches are pulled as he closes ground on the elusive Talman while inhaling reheated squad room java and snapping off terse Earl Felton dialogue.

Eddie Muller in his book Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir says McGraw is the only actor who actually looks like an armored car. Muller praise his performance as well and notes that McGraw “took taciturn to tight-lipped extremes.” Check out how McGraw handles talking to his partner's widow.

Making these kind of thrillers back in the 40s and early 50s meant taking on the Breen office. Any film filled with crime, violence, strippers and sex were bound to be looked at closely. Alan Rode in his McGraw biography talks about how Armored Car Robbery was censored:

An interesting historical perspective about period censorship is provided in some of the correspondence about Armored Car Robbery between RKO and the Production Code Administration. The Code office was run by the resolute Joseph I. Breen. Breen’s office possessed Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) approval authority over all movies released for public exhibition. The studio moguls cemented this system into place after the hue and cry by the Catholic Church and similar public moral guardians who threatened a boycott of Hollywood’s product, hereafter dubbed ‘pre-code’ films, during the early 1930’s. The code was in place, but had been largely ignored. The studios believed they needed an independent enforcer in order to protect their golden goose from themselves. Although Breen was a pompous moralist, the actual roadblock was the narrowly composed, rigid Production Code that the studios tied themselves to in order to placate the state censorship boards and the Church. In practice, the Code system became an administrative limbo bar which producers and directors had to navigate under or around in order to get their pictures approved for release. The initially submitted script for Armored Car Robbery raised some of the moralistic hackles at the Breen office which were retrospectively typical. Breen urged RKO to ensure that Adele Jergens’ breasts remained appropriately hidden during the burlesque numbers in the film. Any hint that Jergens’ character was a loose woman, i.e. stripper must be either “eliminated or downplayed” in accordance with the Code. Breen was also appalled that the audience might conclude that the Jergens character, Yvonne Le Doux was actually having extramarital sex with Bill Talman’s amoral gangster in a motel room. Breen demanded that some of the minimally suggestive dialogue between the two actors during the hotel room sequences be revised to reflect a more exculpatory relationship. Earl Fenton made some cosmetic changes to the script to allay Breen’s concerns before filming began and the finished product was stamped with the MPAA seal and released.

Director Richard O. Fleischer (son of Popeye creator Max Fleischer) did an excellent job with the compact film. Some consider this to be Fleisher's best work while churning out B-movies during the RKO years.

However, if you watch the film expecting to find realistic criminal crime-solving techniques of the late 1940s forget about it. The way the LAPD tracks down the money is highly unlikely. But then again, the movie succeeds because of the heightened emotion and attitude put into it by McGraw, Talman and director Fleischer - not the story itself. Just like most great film noir.

Armored Car Robbery and The Bank Job are two excellent crime films. The two would make a great double feature for film noir fans craving heist movies.

[MartinTeller]

(Armored Car Robbery review from May 2, 2010)

Tight little heist-gone-wrong flick starring noir icon Charles McGraw and Hitch-Hiker baddie William Talman. It could use a little more zip and atmosphere, but it plays along nicely and manages to keep your interest engaged. You can see little echoes of this film in later noirs. Pretty much the exact same heist plan is pulled off in Kansas City Confidential, and the ending is like the end of The Killer, except much grislier. Nothing too special here, nothing to complain about it either. Good times. Rating: 7

[JohnChard]

Heist Noir: The Bank Job (2008) and Armored Car Robbery (1950)

Film noir was never meant to be realistic. In a 1953 New York Times review of Pickup on South Street reviewer Bosley Crowther called the now-classic noir “brutish and... sadistic” and went on to conclude “Sam Fuller, who wrote it and directed, appears to have been more concerned with firing a barrage of sensations than with telling a story to be believed.” What a perfect way to describe film noir. It's not supposed to be realistic – although film watchers today may think that was a goal of classic-era film makers. The truth is, however, no one ever talked like Walter Neff; and no detective was as clever as Philip Marlowe. It was a made-up world where camera angles and acting were exaggerated for effect. Film noir plots were so dense that movie goers weren't expected to fully understand what happened. It was an attitude more than any other element. Personally, I watched Out of the Past at least five times before I decided to actually try to follow the plot. I was to busy the first four viewings just taking in the amazing camera work and listening to the almost poetic dialogue. I, as a first time viewer, was satisfied with the “sensations” the film gave me more than the story that was being told.

Jack Shadoian, in his excellent book Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, writes:



Most film noir, however, usually involves a crime and some of the best film noir are “heist films.” Both The Bank Job (2008) and Armored Car Robbery (1950) are excellent examples. Unlike many other heist films considered noir – including The Scar or The Asphalt Jungle – Armored Car Robbery and The Bank Job have a bit of reality mixed in with the classic film noir attitude. Both movies are based on real-life crimes. The Bank Job is taken from the 1971 London vault cleanout on Baker Street labeled the walkie-talkie robbery while Armored Car Robbery is a story based on a 1934 armored car heist at the Rubel Ice Company in Brooklyn. However, if you assumed that these movies are somehow realistic you'd be wrong. They follow other film noir before them by being over-the-top crime movies with attitude.

The Bank Job is a wonderfully sleazy film. It's filled with enough sex and violence that, if made years before, would have made Sam Fuller smile (and review Crowther probably blow his top). The thing I love about The Bank Job is the fact that the criminals who actually pull off the crime know they aren't all that clever. They do the crime knowing it probably won't work out for the best. It turns out that the robbery - that was just supposed to be about “snatching and grabbing” cash in a bank vault - ends up being in reality a set up by British politicians and crooked coppers - an attempt to recover some highly embarrassing blackmail-related sex photos stored in the vault. British intelligence uses just about everything in their power to get the small-time criminals who walk away with said photos and whatever else they could get their hands on in the vault.

Jason Statham (a modern-day B-movie star in the mold of Charles McGraw) has never been better. Statham, who has a dominating movie-star presence on screen, should have a serious talk with his agent and demand he only make movies like this in the future.

The heist plan is hatched when Statham's Terry Leather gets together with a sexy old flame who tells him about an easy bank vault job. Leather jumps on the chance to get rich quick even knowing he's not smart enough to actually get away with it. When he and his colorful gang do pull off the crime early in the movie, the gang goes underground when it seems like the whole country is looking for them. Leather and his gang are forced to play a couple of intense chess games simultaneously against a much smarter mob and MI5 while also being on the run from Scotland Yard. Like most heist films the crime is not the most interesting part. It's the angling to get away with it afterwards that makes the film suspenseful. Supporting Statham is Saffron Burrows as Martine Love – the drop-dead gorgeous femme fatale that sets it all up. She looks just like those skinny 70s models from that period - that's just one of many nice touches that makes the film feel not only that it took place in the 70s but that the actual film was made in that era. Although Terry Leather (love that name) is happily married I can see how no man could resist any temptation offered up by Martine – a woman all the blokes' wives don't trust and one young member of Leather's bunch secretly wants to run away with. Also in the cast is the intense David Suchet (who is probably best known as BBC's Hercule Poirot) as a porn-king you probably never – ever - want to cross.

The crime was called the walkie-talkie caper because they used walkie-talkies in the crime and was overheard by a short-wave radio enthusiast who quickly recorded the conversations and reported it to the police. Some reviewers complained - when the film was released - that there's no way anyone would actually think that walkie-talkie conversations were somehow secure. The funny thing is that's what actually happened during the real crime. People are much more technologically savvy today. I remember using those type of radios years ago and having no idea that anyone else could pick up on them. Lucky I never tried to rob a bank.

Australian suspense-and-action pro Roger Donaldson does a fine job mixing facts from the real crime with fiction to make a very entertaining neo-noir. Mercifully, he doesn't add Tarantino-esque irony to the twisty story – an element so often found in recent British crime films. The film did modest business when it was released but I suspect it will have a cult-like following years down the road not unlike Armored Car Robbery from 1950.

I absolutely adored The Bank Job when I saw it a couple of years ago. Very much due a revisit soon so I can get a review down myself. Top read Steve and thanks for reminding me to dust this one off for another look.

[Movie Memories]

Really enjoyed both of these films. Armored Car Robbery is one of my favorites.

Armored Car Robbery and The Bank Job are two excellent crime films. The two would make a great double feature for film noir fans craving heist movies.

An excellent idea!

[Adam Lounsbery]

Jason Statham (a modern-day B-movie star in the mold of Charles McGraw) has never been better. Statham, who has a dominating movie-star presence on screen, should have a serious talk with his agent and demand he only make movies like this in the future.

Maybe he did ... he's currently filming Parker with Taylor Hackford, which is based on Richard Stark's Flashfire. I'm cautiously optimistic. Statham isn't even close to how Parker is described in the books. He's bald, he's short, and he has a British accent, but his presence is Parker-sized.

I also loved The Bank Job, although the period-inappropriate music was occasionally really distracting. But overall it was totally solid, and I agree with your review, Steve-O.