The Steal 012
Violent Saturday (1955)
Behind every great robber is a great cop, and some of the best caper flicks are those that really lean into those ‘two sides of the same coin’ personalities. The types who seem to rely on each the other to make sense of themselves and the world.
It’s no surprise that THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) opens with a bank job and builds to that interrogation scene where the Joker tells Batman “you complete me.”
He’s not wrong.
As you might have heard already, HEAT (1995) takes that tension and expertly stretches it like a Hendrix guitar string. When Pacino and De Niro finally sit down for coffee, two men who’ve never met but already know each other completely, you realise this might be the first honest conversation either of them has had in years. That whole scene is cheap therapy for them both. Their wives don’t get it. Their colleagues don’t get it. But the guy across the table gets it more than he’d like to admit.
In RESERVOIR DOGS (1992) Tim Roth takes the blurring of sides up a notch. We watch him build his fake persona piece by piece, telling himself stories until it’s not fake anymore. At some point the line smudges and he’s no longer the outsider. This (under)world is starting to settle in his bones. And when he finally earns his spot in that warehouse with those bickering, paranoid, bleeding men, is there maybe a bit of Mr Orange that would rather die among them? Is bleeding out as part of a highly dysfunctional family okay, because at least it’s a family?
Whereas POINT BREAK (1991) doesn’t even bother to pretend it’s complicated. The police force is supposed to be about trust, community and loyalty, but Keanu’s FBI agent finds more of all that with a gang of masked surfers than he ever did in a suit and a badge. The Bureau might have offered him a desk and a monthly pay packet, but Swayze and his buddies offer him a foster home.
What does it say about heist films and the male sex, society even, that all these examples are men yearning for the companionship of other men? A question for another newsletter maybe. But the heist genre keeps telling us the same thing: Sometimes the people brought together by a shallow sense of greed are capable of building something much much deeper.
This is The Steal.
Seeing as its already Hard Stare Wednesday, Mike is checking in to a hotel right across from the bank on VIOLENT SATURDAY (1955).
“It’s so stupid and pointless to be alive in the morning and dead in the afternoon.”
A sleepy mining town is woken up when three hard men roll in to rob a bank in Richard Fleischer’s VIOLENT SATURDAY (1955). Fleischer was often tagged a journeyman director; reliable, adaptable, capable of moving between genres without a distinct signature. But that undersells him. A studio-era craftsman with bursts of perversity, he could make both 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954) for Disney and THE BOSTON STRANGLER (1968) with an against type Tony Curtis - two totally different tonal works that both succeed because he had an engineer’s precision and clinical curiosity about human behaviour.
That same curiosity shows up in how he blocks a scene with everyone framed like specimens in their own little cages. Even in widescreen, he makes it feel claustrophobic. I wouldn’t describe him as an auteur, but he’s very visually fucking deliberate.
He’s impossible to pin to a single genre: THE VIKINGS (1958). FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), DOCTOR DOLITTLE (1967), 10 RILLINGTON PLACE (1971), SOYLENT GREEN (1973), MR MAJESTYK (1974), CONAN THE DESTROYER (1984). Few directors jumped from grand myth to pulp so smoothly. His style isn’t invisible, but pragmatic. He shoots what the story needs, not what ego demands. The guy was just crazy flexible. His best movie by a country-mile is the train-bound, THE NARROW MARGIN (1952), though we’ve got a soft spot for THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER (1977) and will cover his earlier heist movie, ARMOURED CAR ROBBERY (1950) here soon.
VIOLENT SATURDAY gives top billing to Victor Mature and Stephen McNally as good guy and bad guy respectively, but the supporting cast is where the fun lies. Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine - same year they made BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955)? The bastards from THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967)? Bring it on, right? Sadly, if you’re hoping for a mano-a-mano brawl you’ll be disappointed. Marvin’s great, Borgnine less so, hidden behind a chin-strap beard and equally unconvincing Amish accent as a pacifist farmer.
“Forgive me, neighbour, but I cannot resort to violence.”
Goddamit.
Pamela Marvin’s wonderful, loving biography of her husband, Lee (Faber & Faber, 1997), gives VIOLENT SATURDAY barely a line:
“Lee said he spent most of the time trying to hide behind his own hand, turning his back or anything else he felt he could do to disappear, he felt the movie was so bad.”
Yikes. Fleischer often reused actors, so it’s likely Marvin’s frustration was with the script, not the direction as they reunited for the western-heist hybrid THE SPIKES GANG in ’74. We’ll get around to that too.
McNally’s man-with-the-plan is dull as dishwater, it’s up to the supporting players to keep things alive. Character actor J. Carrol Naish is great as the third hood, Chapman, who carries pockets of candy to pacify hostages:
“Stick these in your kisser and go suck on ‘em.”
Mature is fine as the hero, but after AFTER THE FOX (1966) where he does such a great job of lampooning himself it’s hard to take him seriously. The town’s real standout is the wonderfully craggy, Richard Egan, who can’t get anyone’s name from his bar stool.
Marvin’s character is Dill, a Vicks inhaler-addicted bastard. He’s deep in his standout-thug era, cool and mean, stealing the picture as soon as he walks into frame in a crumpled blue suit and cocked hat. “There’s nothing in this world as mean as a mean woman,” he blankly declares at one point and is happy to shoot noncompliant hostages with bullets to spare for completely innocent bystanders.
Asked if he’s expecting a war:
“I’ve been inside three hitches. One of them was on account of not having enough ammo to back out of a revolving door. Never again.”
The camera, of course, loves him, but he pops in Fleischer’s use of wide frame. The desert swallows everything, but Dill, with the scope making his small-town violence feel both ridiculous and cosmic. The colour and composition throughout is a reminder that this director used Cinemascope better than a lot of his more prestigious peers.
Fleischer was actually offered BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, but got bogged down wrangling Kirk Douglas and rubber tentacles, so this instead becomes his moral petri dish filled with townsfolk hiding a little darkness under the sun. Although there’s a nice scene early on with a one-armed hotel owner, this is a million miles away from the Spencer Tracy classic. Where as that movie is a masterclass in timeless film-making, this one is pure 1950s with gee-whiz kids begging to get shot, VIOLENT SATURDAY is all pressed pyjamas, and pleasantries on the surface. It’s soapy as fuck, but toys with expectation just enough to ripple the surface - the town nurse and town tramp trading catty truths, a librarian pilfering handbags, a bank manager with a sidelining in stalking. The cast paint themselves in broad strokes though the daytime-TV dialogue:
“You’re an alcoholic and I’m a tramp.”
Mature’s family subplot is pure corn. When his son finds him a disappointment with not a single war medal, he’s affable to the point of dullness:
“Every dad wants to be a hero to his son. Some of us just don’t make it, that’s all.”
Shame the war is over. It’s not like he’s going to get a chance to prove himself anytime soon in this sleepy little mining town… Oh look, Lee Marvin!
Naturally everyone converges on the bank two minutes before closing when the crew stroll in with six-shooters and a date with the time lock. Disappointingly it takes almost an hour for Marvin to growl, “Sit down mister or I’ll kill you quick,” but from there, it’s a brisk, satisfying ride toward a final showdown as our trio of lunkheads strong-arm an Amish family, thirty years before Danny Glover would make the same mistake in WITNESS (1985).
Shot in glorious Cinemascope (a widescreen process involving anamorphic lenses that your TV screen just couldn’t compete with) and filmed on location in Arizona means its a vibrant looking movie. Fleischer leans on those bright desert hues to emphasise the manmade ugliness and every wide shot ensures the Blu-ray looks magnificent in 2025 on a big screen. VIOLENT SATURDAY creaks, but never collapses. It’s a solid slice of mid-century pulp: moral rot under sun-bleached skies and yes - great hats.
Man, we love a good hat movie.
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Heist News
Apple has released a teaser trailer for LUCKY, their upcoming series starring Anya Taylor-Joy (who is in her ‘Daryl Hannah in BLADE RUNNER’ era, by the looks of it) . The series is based on Marissa Stapley’s novel of the same name which “follows a con artist forced into survival mode when a multi-million-dollar heist goes sideways.” It airs in July and co-stars Annette Bening and Timothy Olyphant.
CRIME 101 is also an adaptation, this time of a novella by Don Winslow, about a ‘gentleman jewel thief’ who lands the score of a lifetime, and the Police Lieutenant who is trying to catch him. The film stars Chris Hemsworth playing against type a little, as the “very clever” thief; and his Marvel castmate, Mark Ruffalo, definitely not playing against type as the dishevelled detective.
Next Issue
Rob boards an InterCity 125 and heads for 80s London to offer Bernard Hill one last job: reviewing BELLMAN & TRUE (1987).
Thanks for reading. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for sharing. Once the heat dies down we’ll see you at the prearranged location to split the take. What could possibly go wrong?
Great piece, love those clips. Thought I hadn’t seen this one but that description of Borgnine with an Amish chin strap beard jolted my memory! Must have seen it on TV one Saturday or school holiday? Couple of Burt Reynolds heists might deserve a look in - Rough Cut & Breaking In - not gritty but a pair of interesting movies.