Watched: 04/19/2025
Format: Noir Alley on TCM
Viewing: First
Director: Andrew L. Stone
This one is a wild ride.
Look, I just like Joseph Cotten. The man is a movie star, but also can be an everyman like no one's business. And he was absolutely the right choice to be our lead.
He plays a sort of middle-management salary man at a bank, knows all the in's and out's, and is married to Teresa Wright (who played his niece in Shadow of a Doubt). They have an adorable moppet of a daughter. All is post-war happiness. Or is it?
Cotten begins realizing how easy it would be for him to rob his own bank. There's no femme fatale pushing him to do it - he just realizes he's clever enough to pull it off, and people trust him enough that he won't be found out til he's already out of the country. It's basically asking the question of "why am I playing by the rules if the rules aren't doing me much good to really get ahead?"
And, so he waits til no one is looking at the end of a Friday and clears out the vault.
What follows shows up in movies like Quick Change where the heist just will not play by your carefully sorted rules. So for about an hour we're watching every conceivable foul-up get in his way as he has to gaslight his wife (who he is taking with him, telling her he's on a business trip) to get them both on a plane. In a way, it's almost painful as the issues mount up.
By nature, I'm a planner. Jamie is well aware, my least favorite thing is a surprise, maybe even a good one, if it's going to throw off my schedule. I am *much* better about this now than I was ten years ago, where I'd just lose my shit if things got off schedule. So in a way, this movie seems designed to make me crazy.
We were warned by Eddie Muller in the intro that the writer/ directors of this movie are famous for having some bizarre and far-fetched set-ups, and this is certainly one of them. There's no ticking clock at the outset of the movie - our hero just decides he needs to rob this bank NOW instead of just planning it out and re-working the plan until he's got a clean getaway planned.
Ie: for a movie all about planning the perfect heist, what actually occurs is nothing of the sort. And we get to watch Cotten spiral into being a real jerk as the walls he created close in.
Anyway, it wasn't my favorite movie. But it did have a unique ending - that ends just before I'm pretty sure the whole thing would have blown up in his face, anyway, so - as they say - you get a happy ending depending on when you leave the story.