Charley Varrick

Charley Varrick (1973)

Runtime: 111 minutes

Directed by: Don Siegel

Starring: Walter Matthau, Felicia Farr, Andrew Robinson, Joe Don Baker

From: Universal

Here’s a movie from the 70’s that you may not have heard of before, but it’s quite entertaining. Despite Matthau in the lead it’s more like his work in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three as it’s a drama rather than a comedy, although there is some humor involved.

The plot is rather interesting; a heist is involved as the title character (Walter) leads a gang who robs a bank. It’s in a small town so they expect a small payoff but they’re shocked when they get a large chunk of change. The reason why… the bank is owned by the Mob! They realized their error and the story is that they have to get the money back to them, while dealing with such things as in-fighting, double-crosses, having to resort to crafty plans to get out of the jam they’re in, and a visit to the Mustang Ranch (the real original one in Nevada).

Some of the bad guys that they have to deal with include Maynard Boyle (John Vernon) and a hired killer known as Molly (Baker, who back in those days was more than the title character in Mitchell, as torn apart brutally by Mystery Science Theater 3000 that one time. He’s more than just a boozy cop character in a movie destined for obscurity. Here, it was a quality performance as he played one evil dude rather well.

The movie as a whole is just entertaining to watch. The characters are entertaining, the action you get to see is fun (which includes an escape via car from the bank), and the ending is an obvious allusion to a famous moment in a Hitchcock movie-I won’t mention which one, as it’d probably give it away-and it’s directly nicely by the dude who helmed the first Dirty Harry motion picture. The score by the legendary Lalo Schifrin comes together nicely with what you see on the screen.

I don’t want to give anything else away concerning the plot as I don’t want to give away any surprises. I will close this out by saying that Tarantino was obviously a fan of this too. He almost lifted completely a line of dialogue that Marsellus Wallace ended up saying in Pulp Fiction, and an idea or two was also used for Reservoir Dogs. If you think that his endorsement is worth anything, then you should try and track this down, even though the only DVD in the states of this movie is in full-screen. Likely, you’ll have to be “not so ethical” to find a widescreen version.

I’ll be back Wednesday night.