La rapina

I enjoyed this film. It has all the elements for an awesome Noir film. The Beatnik music scene was a real treat man. Edward Platt played Mr. Tucker very well. This was a much different role than his role as The Chief on the TV series Get Smart.

I saw this film thanks to the cult show, Mystery Science 3000 where Joel and the gang riffed this caper movie and chances are that is where most people have viewed this film. It was not a super terrible film by any means, just plays out like a lot of other films, but only with worse acting and plot points. The film is titled rebel set, but there is not all that many rebels to be found here. I guess the caper is sort of rebellious, but not really. Though the film is bad I did feel for the main character who was a struggling writer and I wanted to see "Chief" get caught and get his in the end! The movie also moves at a fairly brisk pace as we have an introduction to the characters, we have the plan and then we have the caper and then we have murder on the not so orient express!

The story has a man who seems to run a nightclub where a bunch of beatniks hang out and read poetry and such. Also, three gentlemen frequent the establishment. A writer who is rather bad at his craft. A man who desperately wishes to get out of the shadow of his mother and a down on his luck actor who cannot land a job and whose wife is literally supporting the both of them. They are approached by the man who owns the club about a job that involves them robbing 1 million dollars from an armored car. So they hop a train and during a stopover in Chicago they set their plan in motion and once back on the train and seemingly successful things begin to unravel as greed begins to take over.

This made for a good episode of MST3K and it is rather funny. This film was named, "The Rebel Set" yet the characters resemble beatniks more than they do rebels. Then they riffed a film named "Beatniks" where the characters resembled rebels more so than they did beatniks! The short at the beginning of this one featuring a little boy lost at the fair was rather funny too.

So, this film is not that great, but it was not a super terrible film. I did pull for the guy who plays the Chief on Get Smart to get his in the end, but at the same time the film just seems like a mess and it totally breaks down at the end with a rather tepid chase scene that goes on for way too long and was probably added to simply pad the film. That being said, at least you could tell what was going on and had more of a plot than The Beatniks that featured rebels...

A nice entertaining suspenseful quirky '50s B-movie with a straight-forward no-frills script and dialogue. I liked this flick each of the two times I saw it, years apart.

Stand-outs are: Edward Platt as an eccentric mastermind crook, Kathleen Crowley: you can feel her pain and disappointment; and Gregg Palmer, torn between love and greed.

The drawback is that the movie was deceptively packaged as a "beatnik/rebel" movie-which, of course, it was not about (except for a few semi-coffeehouse scenes).

Plot-- A slippery mastermind recruits a crew of failed bohemians from a beatnik coffee house. The target is an armored car with a million dollar cargo, and an escape aboard a train. It's all planned out with split-second precision.

Another mediocre heist film trying to emulate the start-up success of Kubrick's The Killing (1956). This one's undone on a number of levels, including spotty acting (a weak Palmer in a central role), slack direction (fails to heighten plot high points), and a leaky script (a number of plot holes). Plus, that opening beatnik scene is more like a spoof than a mood-setting suspenser. At least there's the notorious Vicki Dougan as the waitress. Her way of getting Hollywood attention was to show cleavage from the backside instead of the more usual front. Judging from her credits, it didn't work.

On the other hand, the climax is action-filled with a good look at LA's elaborate train yards. However, I'm still wondering why men crawl under freight cars when they might start up any moment. Too bad that the characterizations never get enough chance to gel. As a result, there's not much sense of irony or loss at movie's end. Instead the story simply plays out in impersonally remote fashion. And that's a problem with the movie as a whole, which I guess is a good reason why the 72-minutes has remained buried in 1950's vaults.

(In passing—the "beatnik" fad was brief, mainly 1958 & '59 on the west coast, and mainly a bohemian reaction to suburban conformity of the Eisenhower years. My guess is the stylistic change of the 1960 Kennedy election undercut the novelty appeal.)

While I would never say that "The Rebel Set" is a good film, it isn't nearly as bad as you'd think. Some time back, the film was lampooned on "Mystery Science Theater 3000"--and because of this it has a reputation as a stinker. This is obvious when you see it has a score of 2.2.--which would indicate it is a 100% terrible film. But, unfortunately, it's not terrible and this rating seems unnecessarily harsh.

The film begins in a beatnik hangout run by a bearded Edward Platt ('Chief' from "Get Smart"). However, his appearing like an old beatnik is a disguise--he's really interested in masterminding a robbery. Using his business, he's learned which patrons are desperate and in need of money--and he approaches them to help him with his caper. Later, aboard a train, the film heats up, as Platt turns out to be a lot nastier than anyone in the gang anticipated. What exactly he does and how the film ends is something I'll leave up to you--it is mildly interesting.

The first half of the film is amazingly dull for a caper film. In fact, being on "MST 3000" you'd think the film was laughably bad, but it's only very slow and a bit amateurish. Fortunately, the second half is a lot better and I actually loved the final showdown. Not at all great but passable entertainment.