A few years ago, I wrote about an excellent 1952 Film Noir titled Narrow Margin, which was directed by Richard Fleischer and starred Charles McGraw as a tough cop.
Well, a couple of years before that, Fleischer directed McGraw in another Film Noir, in which McGraw once again played a tough cop.
By the way, if you're a cop, don't partner up with Charles McGraw. Judging from these two movies, his partners don't last long.
In this film, William Talman plays a professional crook with a talent for planning elaborate heists. He assembles three other guys to rob an armored car outside of Wrigley Field one afternoon. The ball park is the car's last stop for the day, so it'll have a fortune in cash receipts aboard.
Talman, by the way, played the bad guy in several Film Noirs before eventually becoming D.A. Burger in the Perry Mason series. He was always quite menacing as a villain.
The robbery goes off, but not quite as planned. What I like about this part is that the plan really is a good one. Purvis (Talman's character) is a smart guy and when things go wrong, it's because of a little bad luck or someone else on his team making a small mistake that the cops can later capitalize on.
The bad guys inititally get away, but they leave a dead cop behind and one of the crooks is badly wounded. The wounded guy doesn't last long, but that's just as well. It's one less person with whom to split the take and Purvis has been playing footsie with the now-dead guy's wife anyways.
What follows is an atmospheric story in which McGraw and his fellow cops use intelligent police work while Purvis works to stay one step ahead of them. But Purvis's relationship with his dead partner's wife might just be his downfall, giving the cops an avenue of investigation that leads them towards him.
McGraw and Talman are both great, the script is strong and the director effectively uses Film Noir techniques to give us a great looking movie.
That I watched this movie pretty much at random recently is quite a coincidence, because for the last few months, I've often been alone at work and I've been listening to lots of audio books as well as old-time radio. This includes listening through the Parker books by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake) about a professional crook who plans elaborate heists.
Between that and this movie, I told my wife that perhaps we were being called on by Fate to become professional thieves ourselves and plan our own elaborate heists. I even told Angela this might give her an opportunity to one day play the role of Double-Crossin' Dame.
Sadly, she shot down the idea without even really considering it.
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