Las Vegas, 500 millones

I saw this movie as a child and still remember it. It has one of those plots that's so interesting that you don't forget it. It reminds me of "Sudden Fury"(Canadian) and "Loophole" (UK). Wish they'd bring it out on DVD. I remember Elke Summer and Lee J. Cobb in it. Didn't recall Jack Palance at all. The movie is very believable and the plot and motives of the characters interesting. At one point it seems the whole thing has reached a stalemate and you didn't have a sense of what direction the plot is going to take which was right down my street. Hate those movies where you can guess how the plot will play out and it does just that. If you want a movie with an unpredictable and interesting plot this is it.

Steve Skorsky (Lee J. Cobb) has a fleet of specially-designed impenetrable armored trucks. Blackjack dealer Tony Ferris (Gary Lockwood) and his girlfriend Ann Bennett (Elke Sommer) work their scam stealing from the casino. She works for the transport company while he's tracking the scheduled shipment from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. They and their fellow criminals plan to take down one of the trucks. Douglas (Jack Palance) is a Treasury agent.

The gang needs fewer members and the other members need more screen time. An Oceans movie would have fun with each member of the gang. In this one, only Tony and Ann are interesting and given enough screen time. The truck looks a little silly but I'm willing to live with that. I get the idea of a 60's futurist vehicle. The same goes for the Skorsky headquarters. They are basically robbing a Winnebago dressed up with some pretend cladding. The other issue about the heist is the desert location. I hoped for a high speed road chase. This is less compelling. It really needs a high speed car chase to inject kinetic energy. The heist gets a bit static after the underground hideout. This is a fine caper flick but it's not the best.

This gets a 4 for some great set decor and Vegas-in-the-60's pastiche. It's filled with cliché Euro-perceptions about American culture and organized crime, suffers from ponderous dramatics, over-posed (and under- talented) character actors, and underdeveloped leads with phantom motivation. Somehow I get the feeling the director dropped a couple of pallets of footage on some half-suspecting, chain-smoking Spanish editor, then got too tied up making a film centered on his new fascination with forklifts to be available to sort out the mess.

It's the same thing that happens when a European chef tries to make chili or barbecue sauce. It tastes strangely like beef Bourgignon or Bolognese.

Well, this crime heist film is excellent in terms of plot, scheme, itself adapted from a French prolific novelist: Andre Lay, who wrote more than one hundred of crime flicks: half of them being domestic thrillers, involving husband, wife and her lover triangle, complex but brilliant "perfect" murder plots in the James Hadley Chase style; and the other half of Andre Lay's books being like this one, very unlikely heist or escape adventure stories taking place in the desert, jungle, very gritty and dark stories from which only a very very few - two actually - were adapted for the screen. The book from this film is the very best of Andre Lay and this is an excellent thing that it was adapted this way, it could have been far worse. I love this late sixties atmosphere, music, photography, cast. The late sixties provided tremendous heist movies, even from the Italian - in co production most of the time - film industry. Remember GRAND SLAM, about a heist in Rio De Janeiro. I have always loved heist films, but only for the fifties, sixties and a bit of seventies. Forget the garbage OCEAN'S ELEVEN (2001) endless rip-offs.... Hundreds of them. There were a few though not bad, including 2010 ARMORED, which the plot and scheme were not so far from this one. The only flaw is that it is too long, the subplot with Jack Palance trying to nail Lee J Cobb, this subplot could have easily been avoided, only focusing on the gangsters. Period. The end of the novel was better, far better. The heist scene is terrific. It reminded me the armored truck heist sequence in LE PACHA.

Lee J. Cobb, Jack Palance, Elke Sommer and Gary Lockwood (2001) in caper film set in Las Vegas. Some wonderful actors who don't really have the chance to interact. Elke is fabulous as usual, but we don't see enough of her, and her dalliances with Cobb and Lockwood to create any real excitement. Palance and Cobb growl their best but are let down by the ponderous pace. Some great scenes and ideas (hiding the armored car in the middle of the Nevada desert), and some truncated interplay between Palance and Sommer that suggests that a lot was left on the cutting room floor. But great fun to watch just to see a great looking classic sixties cast. Whatever happened to Gary Lockwood?