Charley Varrick

For his role as a small-time bank robber in Don Siegel's 1973 heist film Charley Varrick, Matthau tones down his comic persona - in the midst of escalating tensions, he remains calm, unflustered, subdued - and in so doing delivers a quietly effective performance, one of the finest of his career.

Over a span of four decades Don Siegel directed twenty-seven films, the best of them (such as The Killers, 1964, Madigan, 1968 and Dirty Harry, 1971) lean, muscular forays into the dark milieu of crime and its consequences. Although he was not afraid to branch out into larger themes (see, for instance, the seductive, dreamlike Civil War drama The Beguiled, 1971) Siegel was best known for his ability to tell an action story in simple visual terms. A master of montage, he built his movies one shot at a time, without fuss or pretension.

In the opening sequence of Charley Varrick a bank robbery in a small New Mexico town goes terribly awry when a local policeman stops to question the driver of the getaway car (Felicia Farr, as Varrick's wife). Consequently, two lawmen are gunned down, as well as Farr and one of the thieves. Varrick and his remaining partner (Andy Robinson) then drive out to the desert where they detonate the getaway car (in a beautifully composed long shot, the car explodes into a ball of fire beneath an immaculate blue sky). They then change into work clothes - Charley is a crop duster - and return to their trailer to divvy up the cash. This initial sequence, a virtual blueprint on how to introduce a story without wasting a single frame, sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Without allowing the audience a moment to catch its breath, Siegel then drops the next bombshell. While counting the money Matthau discovers, to his dismay, that the bank they have robbed is a laundering operation for the Mob. Now Matthau realizes that they will be hunted not only by the authorities but, far worse, by the Mafia too. When Robinson asks how long the Mob will pursue them, Matthau laconically replies "they never stop".

As Charley's shortsighted partner Harman, Robinson brings to his character the same febrile intensity he brought to the role of the masochistic killer in Dirty Harry. His scenes with Matthau, (Robinson wants to take the money and run, Matthau counsels caution) have real heat. Joe Don Baker as Molly, a professional hit man hired by the Mob to track down the stolen money, is a grinning, malign force, a careful man who revels in the moral carelessness of the world he lives in. And the often underrated character actor John Vernon excels as Mafia boss Maynard Boyle: his scene with the bank president on a hill above a pasture (one of the many in the film where Siegel uses, to great effect, the clear desert light) is a model of control and technique.

Siegel's command of the story is apparent at every turn. Propelled by the tense, insistent rhythms of Lalo Schiffrin's excellent score, Siegel carefully maneuvers his players through an intricate game of cat-and-mouse, using the locales of the modern underworld as background. In an empty gleaming boardroom high above Reno, Vernon contacts the hit man. In a back-alley gun shop Matthau puts the word out that he has cash, a lot of cash, to sell. At a gambling parlor Baker is given seed money and instructions. Checking into a Mob-run brothel in the desert, Baker turns down the offer of a woman for the night: "I don't sleep with whores", he acidly informs the madam, "at least not knowingly". Later, in a sequence that must have horrified early 70s feminists, a forger (Sheree North) accepts Baker's advances only after he has slapped her.

Ironically Siegel presents this dark vision of crime not in the shadowy urban tones of classic film noir, but in the sunlit desert vistas of the American southwest. The two action sequences that frame the story at the beginning and end take place in the daytime, outside. And many of the interior sets - the gun shop, a hardware store, the bank itself - are suffused with natural light. Typically there are no attention seeking camera angles here, no cinematic tricks, for Siegel was not a showy director. Like the great prose stylist James M. Cain, he understood that the best way to tell a story was to let the story tell itself. Throughout the film Siegel shows us children - as a moral counterbalance to the grim misdeeds swirling all around them -going about their everyday lives. During the opening credits we see them saddling ponies, running through sprinklers, playing ball. When Boyle arrives at the bank, a girl across the street asks him to push her on a swing. A young boy points out to the sheriff that his head is bleeding, and then asks him, in a tone of wonder, if he is going to die. It's a clever device, one that Sam Peckinpah - another director who knew something about the virtues of montage - also used in the opening sequence of his most violent (and best) film, The Wild Bunch (1969).

Like the aging, doomed gunmen in The Wild Bunch, Charley Varrick is a renegade who has chosen to live outside the strictures of society (his

business card reads Charley Varrick, The Last Of The Independents). And there is, as others have pointed out, a certain amount of ambiguity in our response to him. This is the story of a man, after all, responsible - if indirectly - for the death of two lawmen and his own beloved wife. It is also a story told by a director who once dedicated a film (Dirty Harry) to the policemen of San Francisco who died upholding the same laws Varrick ignores. And yet by the end of the film we find ourselves rooting for him, rooting for the last of the independents to foil the company men at their own deceitful game, rooting for good old Charley to simply take the unearned money and run.

Reviewed by Tim Applegate