The Big Caper

"The Big Caper" is a neglected noir thriller that deserves a lot more recognition...this is one of Rory Calhoun's best and most atypical roles. The pace is brisk and the acting quite good even in the minor roles. A very effective sense of threat and menace are maintained throughout, building tension, grabbing and holding the viewer's interest. Calhoun's and Costa's criminal characters' pretense of the "straight life" as a struggling young married couple in a small town is very striking as the set up to their elaborately plotted bank robbery. Gregory is appropriately frightening as the murderous kingpin. Calhoun was at his height at this time and shows that he had enough skill and screen presence to justify awarding him bigger and better roles outside of the westerns to which he was mostly relegated. This film has undeservedly been eclipsed by many others, less engaging, of the 50's.

The Big Caper has enough interesting characters to make it worth watching. But this 50s noir caper film could have used a lot of improvement in the characters and their motives.

Rory Calhoun is a conman associate of big time crook James Gregory and Calhoun has blown the proceeds of the last score on slow horses at Del Mar. He wants to work again and has bank job lined up, a small town bank where the money for the pay of the US Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton is located.

Gregory cooks up a scheme and it's a dilly. Part of it involved Calhoun and Gregory's girl friend buying a filling station and a home and living in the town for a few months as Ward and June Cleaver clones. Mary Costa the girlfriend gets to like the lifestyle, Calhoun isn't crazy about it at all.

I can't really believe that Gregory sends Costa off to live with Calhoun and pretend to be man and wife. Is there something wrong with that picture?

The scheme however is something else. And Gregory collects around him some set of helpers. Robert Harris is an explosives guy who gets his jollies from his work and has a real drinking problem. There's muscle bound Corey Allen who has issues and is crushing out on Gregory as a father figure. Paul Picerni brings along the ultimate bimbo Roxanne Arlen and tells her just enough about the score to have to have her taken care of.

These people, especially Arlen really make The Big Caper worth looking at. The plot and the redemption of our protagonists is not especially well dramatized.

Frank Harper (Rory Calhoun) is tapped out due to bad bets at the track, so he comes to big operator Flood (James Gregory) with the idea of stealing the payroll for Camp Pendleton when it sits in the bank at San Felipe overnight. Flood reluctantly agrees to stake and organize the caper, mainly because of the size of the payroll - one million dollars.

But then Flood makes this whole thing much harder than it needs to be. He insists that his mistress Kay (Mary Costa) and Frank pose as man and wife in San Felipe for three months to get the lay of the land with Frank using Flood's front money to buy a gas station and run it. I never actually SEE them doing ANY reconnaissance. Kay seems to spend the day washing dishes and being a childless June Cleaver and Frank is busy all day fixing cars. All this does is set up a situation where the two gradually fall in love and begin to think that maybe going straight would be a good idea. But Flood is not a guy to be trifled with complications ensue. On top of that, Flood has hired more than a few psychos as accomplices. Given that you could see the trouble these guys causing from a mile away had me doubting Flood's "Mr. Big" Bonafide's.

Why couldn't Frank have bought the gas station as a single guy and done the recon by himself? I know it was the 50s, but I doubt every able-bodied single guy over 20 was immediately suspect by the middle class. And the married middle class of San Felipe are so creepy. They are like the Stepford Wives AND Husbands AND kids for that matter. Why this environment and these people would make you want to go straight and join their ranks I have no idea.

Economically shot by the producer team of William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, known as "the dollar bills" because none of their films ever lost money, the film works until the end when it ends abruptly with several bad guys still on the loose and possibly being a problem for the protagonists, who thus have an uncertain future. Not exactly its much bigger brother, the heist film The Asphalt Jungle, its spartanly shot late noir vibe made it worth sitting through in spite of the plot holes and lapses in logic.

I was interested in this film not only because it is a noir, but because it costars opera star Mary Costa.

Conman Frank (Rory Calhoun) approaches a wealthy colleague (James Gregory) with an idea he has to rob a bank. It's in a town that houses the military base payments on certain days. Frank thinks this would be a cinch, but he needs backing.

Flood has an interesting idea. He sets Frank up with a gas station and arranges for Frank and his girlfriend Kay (Costa) to live in the town and establish themselves as good citizens who fit in.

It turns out that not only do Frank and Kay get along better than expected, but the gas station is turning a profit. They also are making friends. Kay confesses she envies her sister's life as a wife and mother and realizes she's been losing out. She wants to break with Flood, but Frank warns her to wait until after the robbery.

The next problem is the unsavory and unreliable people who are supposed to help on the job. One is the alcoholic pyromaniac (Robert Harris), posing as Frank's uncle, who is supposed to distract the police and firefighters by setting some fires. He can barely get around and is constantly asking for booze.

Corey Allen plays Roy, a dumb as a box of rocks muscle man who gets beaten by Flood for showing his muscles off to Kay. Paul Picerni as Harry arrives to the job with a bimbo girlfriend (Roxanne Arlen) in tow, who tries to hold up Flood for a cut of the take.

How anyone expected this group to pull off anything, and how Flood could just send Kay off to live with Rory Calhoun - well, it all seems pretty preposterous. Still, it does hold some interest, and the end is exciting.

Mary Costa was the singing Aurora in Sleeping Beauty for Disney, and had a wonderful career as an opera star. Costa and Anna Moffo set a new high bar for beautiful women in opera. After Costa retired, she worked with children in ChildHelp, and as of this writing, is still alive at 91.

The Big Caper (1957)

Fabulous. Here's where having unknown talent and a plot about ordinary folk really gels into something genuine, without glitz and without the high production values that are terrific in the best crime noirs but are also so slick they become something more and also less. "The Big Caper" obviously has aspirations, beginning with the title (one of the great "Big xxx" films like "The Big Heat" and "The Big Combo" and "The Big Sleep"). And it doesn't let up, or let down.

By the end this is a heist film through and through, but the curious part is the core central part where a couple, with criminal intentions, sets up a normal seeming life in a small and unsuspecting town. But the woman of this pair is married to another man, who happens to be the mastermind of the whole affair. Things go wonderfully right for awhile, and romance blossoms as well as a clever and huge (and simple) robbery. But of course things also go wrong.

All of this is unfolded in an idealized American town, and that's part of the fun. When some of the smaller characters in the crime arrive, they are glaringly out of place. I smelled hints of sexual weirdness (including some possible S&M stuff with a strange blonde guy) and of course there's the conflict between the two leading men and the leading woman. Like Kubrick's "The Killing," a nearly contemporary heist film, this isn't about getting caught at all, but just about the inside workings of some small time thugs with a very big and bad dream. If Kubrick's film is better technically, and has some acting that rises above (several key players are terrific), this one rises up on its quieter simplicity, and on some very solid and less sensational acting.

And on a great job pulling it together. Robert Stevens did mostly television, including a whole series for Alfred Hitchcock t.v., and among his handful of feature films this is probably the best. Nicely filmed with lots of convincing (and real) night stuff, and edited tightly, it never flags. If the ending is a little too sweet, remember this isn't Kubrick after all. But good stuff.