Director: Richard Fleischer
Cast: Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens, William Talman, Douglas Fowley
Have I Seen it Before: Never. I’d go on and on about the context of seeing the movie here, but you can read all about it in my review of The Threat (1949), which I saw on the same night.
Did I Like It: Which is made all the more unfortunate, as not only the filmgoing experience bleeds together, but the film itself bleeds together, too. The Venn diagram for the cast of the two films resembles an oval, and making the heavy Threat the hero here isn’t enough to have the two films not bleed together in my memory. By the time this film started to roll, I had run out of popcorn and M&Ms, so it is entirely possible that the film never really had a chance. Might not even be its fault.
Something with such a utilitarian title ought to have the ruthless, unrelenting quality of Hitchcock or the early Carpenter films. This could have opened with the titular robbery, and had their characters perpetually on the run for a breathless hour, after which all of the robbers would either tragically or rightly get their swift justice at the wrong end of a gun.
Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those b-movies that can operate like the cinematic equivalent, ironically enough, of a heist itself. It fulfills all of the requirements RKO likely had for one of its b-pictures (especially in an era where they were supremely disinterested in filmmaker’s hijacking the studio post-Citizen Kane (1941)). It meanders too long on the femme fatale, and dispenses with many of the robbers in dull or inexplicable fashion. I’m thinking that it wasn’t until Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) that someone edited footage of someone running afoul of an airplane correctly.