Charley Varrick (1973)

Charley Varrick
Directed by Don Siegal
Written by Howard Rodman and Dean Reisner from a novel by John Reese
1973/US
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Harold Young: I can’t start my life over again now.
Maynard Boyle: You don’t have much choice, Harold. They’re gonna try to make you tell where the money is. You know what kind of people they are. They’re gonna strip you naked and go to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.

This gritty heist movie is quite OK.  I’m on the fence whether Walter Matthau was a great choice for a brilliant, gutsy, babe magnet.

The story is set in New Mexico.  Charley Varrick (Matthau) was formerly a stunt pilot and now flies crop dusters.  He plans a series of small bank robberies with his wife acting as driver and psycho friend Harman Sullivan (Andy Robinson) in second seat.  The very first try goes spectacularly wrong.  Charley’s wife is killed.  Then, the robbery netted $750,000.00 cash when it should have netted no more than $30,000 at such a small country bank.  Charley correctly guesses that the money is being held by the bank on the way to its laundering.  So he knows he has the cops, the mafia, and the dirty bankers on his trail.

He holes up in his trailer with Harman, who is a loose cannon to say the least.  What Charley would like to do is figure out a way to return the money and leave the country but Harman wants nothing to do with that.  Charley leaves with the money while Harman is sleeping.  The bank hires a sadistic hitman named “Molly” (Joe Don Baker) who is close behind at all times.  I will stop here.  The movie ends with a spectacular stunt that left me gasping.

This is the kind of movie Don Siegel was born to make – taut and with plenty of action.  I felt like I had seen this story before and couldn’t get too invested in it.  If you are in the mood for this kind of thing, though, it could be just the ticket.