Facínoras Mascarados

For fans of intelligent heist movies, this is one you should enjoy. Four well-developed characters come together in order to try and knock off a quiet small-town bank. They all have backstories that make the characters' success or failure interesting to the viewer. They take their job seriously and this draws in the viewer and holds our attention.

The acting is not aided by the most interesting writing, and among the actors Crahan Denton deserves the most credit, and the character who doesn't want to go back to prison is also quite good. A young Steve McQueen is astonishingly bland. The script is not particularly imaginative, but the characters are interesting enough and the direction is competent. If you like straight forward heist movies, this is one you'll enjoy.

This film, as much the story of the personal lives of the robbers as of the heist, features terrific performances, a highly original script for the genre, and exceptional visuals and direction. Each of the would-be bandits is emotionally damaged in some way and the film reveals their individual quirky weaknesses with raw style. In one such sequence, Gino (David Clarke) is shaving and becomes intensely disturbed and claustrophobic when his roommate and fellow member of the gang (Steve McQueen) unexpectedly closes the bathroom door, a scene which stylistically seems to anticipate "Psycho", released in the following year. The look of late 50's St. Louis, the bandits' clothes and hats, the cars they drive, all provide a fascinating edge to this true story of a bank robbery, and one of the last great Noir films.

Let me begin by pointing out that IMDb makes a mistake when it lists Nell Roberts as "Woman in Bar Talking to George." The woman in the bar is George's girlfriend Ann, played by Molly McCarthy. Nell Roberts is the Salvation Army woman who appears in three places in the film but who speaks only at the end when she tells a cop, "Don't go in. They're robbing the bank." I speak from authority as the great-nephew of Nell Roberts, my grandmother's sister, who was active in community theater in St. Louis in the 1950s, and who also had a bit role (as an old woman who answers the door) in the film, "Hoodlum Priest" (starring Don Murray), which was also made in St. Louis. We always knew her as "Aunt Nelly," so I guess "Nell" was her stage name.

In any case, "The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery" is an interesting little movie -- though there really is nothing "great" about it. The noir approach fits the story line perfectly, but the execution strikes me as stiff and amateurish, especially in the acting and the editing. McQueen was doing what he could to be Brando, but Brando he wasn't. The three other members of the gang and the girlfriend have various small strengths as actors to commend them, but they wouldn't have been enough for professional survival today. The plethora of extras and bit players must have saved the producers some dinero, and they do give the film a certain documentary and amateur-theatrical charm, but their performances (including Aunt Nelly's) are of a type to make the viewer uncomfortable in the expectation of an embarrassing gaff. The homosexual subtext (mentioned by other reviewers) is certainly not imaginary. In fact, the things that make this movie most worth watching are, first, that homosexuality is included as a theme at all -- it was not necessary to the film's integrity unless the producers were aiming at some politically incorrect social commentary or had a personal ax to grind -- and, second, that the gay relationships had to be coded to make the finished work acceptable to the public in the late 1950s.

But I did enjoy the look of the cars and the streets of St. Louis (a la New York in "The Naked City") before the rapid urban disintegration that overtook it shortly afterwards, and from which it has still not recovered. The was the REAL "St. Louis Bank Robbery."

This too little known noir work was filmed five years after the events of which it treats, and employs the settings where it occurred, Southwest Bank and its environs in St. Louis, while carefully utilizing within its cast the actual policemen, bank customers and area residents who were involved in the affair, all of which produce somewhat of a documentary impression. Three ex-convicts are joined by a college expellee, George Fowler (Steve McQueen during his Method period), creating an abruptly formed criminal quartet, with Fowler, assigned as wheel man for his first organized illegal endeavour, and we watch them as the robbery is carefully planned by the group's leader, John Egan (Crahan Denton) amid an assortment of simmering frustrations and jealousies which infest the men. Producer Charles Guggenheim also directs, with assistance from John Stix, and the duo focus upon obtaining a naturalistic setting from the interesting script, which is very intense in feeling, with rather harsh dialogue, resulting in a dark film, at the heart of which is an old fashioned shootout where tactics are forgotten by both sides.

is a must to see. Before he became "one of the System's bad boys". He is refreshing and I would tell any true Steve McQueen fan to see this movie just on the strength of his performance.

The movie itself is a hoot! I mean with not so evasive homosexual references and shades of Noir...and in the early 50's!!....it is worth seeing. I liked it.

It is a story of the "Great St. Louis Bank Robbery" in the early 50's....great period piece for those of us who were alive then....and for those who were not to see what a section of Americana looked like....

Using the real people involved in the actual heist is great! Non-Actors who are reliving their dream or nightmare....depending.

See it. You won't be disappointed.