University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

Beatty, Connery In Crooked Capers

Giggly Goldie & Nogoodniks

By KEN BARRY

Makers of "caper" movies
would make good crooks:
While there is no great pressure
on these gentlemen to be
innovative in cinematic
technique, they go have to
devise, right off the bat, a heist
novel and plausible enough to
pique the interest of audiences
who have devoured the latest
in movieland crime and
chicanery ever since they were
old enough to do James
Cagney impressions.

When director Richard
Brooks conceived "$" he must
have faced a tempting choice:
"Do I use the plan or make a
film out of it? Happily, he
chose the path of relative
honesty and directed Warren
Beatty and Goldie Hawn in a
riveting, spine-tingling gambit.

Beatty is bank safety
systems expert who, after
installing an anti-theft complex
in a European bank specializing
in ultra-private safe-deposit
boxes, reverses roles to plunder
the goodies his system
protects. But even for Beatty
this is not easy. He has to track
down the men whose boxes are
most enticing with the aid of
high-class prostitute Hawn; he
must con the rather gullible
bank president; and he must
rig a bomb emergency in the
bank in order conceal himself
in the box room to effect his
light-fingered purposes.

Sympathy is all on the side
of the charming Beatty and his
giggly-cute aide, but this is all
right because his victims are
crooks themselves, "the guys
who can't call 'cop."' A bribing
army sergeant, a tax-evading
Las Vegas tycoon, and a lethal
underworld operative make a
trio whose undoing does not
disturb us in the least; so the
choice between "evil" crooks
and "good" crooks is easy.

The inventive plot is
packaged in a slick, tightly
filmed production. It unfolds
piecemeal, cryptically, so the
guesswork over what Beatty
and his adversaries are up to
furnishes much of the pleasure.
And it finishes with an epic
chase sequence that is a kind of
a suitcase decathlon with
Beatty, money-satchel in hand,
athletically leaping, dodging,
and endlessly running to escape
the hot pursuit of the
nogoodniks he has suckered.

This is an exciting film,
keyed to Quincy Jones' suave
and taunting music, and
brimming with everything the
good caper films of the past
had, short of Walter Slezak. We
are once again convinced the
glamor of crime is perhaps
second only to movie-making.

(Now at the University)