Les hommes de Las Vegas

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.

This is an average to above-average heist film that is helped immeasurably by the lovely Elke Sommer's presence. Once again, she wasn't able to do much with her character, beside being eye candy. Gary Lockwood is staid, Lee J. Cobb gruff, and Jack Palance wired tight as we have come to expect.

A 6 out of 10. Best performance = Elke Sommer. These late 60's crime pics were churned out ad nauseum, but the criminals' plan itself is fairly interesting. Elke adds a measure of class with her beauty and poise that helps it plug along. I remember seeing this at the drive-in on a double bill with THE WILD BUNCH.

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.

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.

After his aging mentor gets killed in a holdup, a youthful criminal protégé named Tony (Gary Lockwood) and his girlfriend Ann (Elke Sommer) plot an armored car heist in the desert southwest of Las Vegas. But things get complicated as Ann works for the armored car owner named Skorsky (Lee J. Cobb) who has ties to the Mafia. And the Feds are trying to nail Skorsky. Still, Tony thinks he can pull it off because, unlike his mentor, Tony has a more modern outlook. When Ann says to Tony: "Nobody can get into a Skorsky truck", Tony replies: " ... it can be done, just a question of information, like where's the key ... see, it's all so simple; information".

The plot starts out okay but bogs down in the middle; the film could probably have been shortened by at least twenty minutes. But I have to say that Tony's solution to hiding the armored car is ingenious; and the film is worth watching if for no other reason.

This is a European production, and it shows. Dialogue is dubbed; some of the actors are Italian or French. And the score sounds like what one would hear in a Spaghetti Western, cold and haunting. But it's the production design and costumes that render this film locked into a cinematic time capsule.

Blonde bimbos wear mini-skirts. Vehicles include Olds Toronados, Pontiac GTOs, Vokswagon bugs, station wagons, and Corvairs. In desert scenes, men use walkie-talkies. And the casting of Elke Sommer adds to the time capsule feel, with her ten-inch long false eyelashes. Computers are big clunky stand-alone machines that use cardboard punch cards and reel-to-reel tapes. And the dialogue doesn't help either; at one point Ann is referred to as a "broad".

Acting is borderline acceptable, except for Elke Sommer, whose robotic movements and emotionless expressions make her seem like some kind of futuristic mannequin. Cinematography is dark, and there are lots of close-up and extreme close-up shots. At one point in the second half there's a physical fight. Because of the photography or maybe because of the Direction, I couldn't tell who was doing what to whom. Rear-screen projection in some scenes also dates the production. And there are a lot of scenes shot along the Sunset Strip in Vegas, which may have been stock footage.

Undeniably different, especially in the way the armored truck is concealed, this gritty film is worth watching once. But the viewer needs to have high tolerance for dated elements, which make the film time-bound, to the point of unintentional humor at times.