The fourth version of this big deal 1950 robbery of the Brink’s Boston counting house, $25 mill taken by a third-rate gang of mugs, is too cute for words. Director William Friedkin, just off SORCERER/'77, a disastrously received masterwork, no doubt leapt at the chance to step in when producer Dino de Laurentiis canned John Frankenheimer. The idea was to give Universal Pictures the colorful, splashy followup to hit period caper THE STING/’73 they’d been trying to reproduce in a series of misfires. It helps explain the bright gloss & shiny artifice in spite of being made in & around Boston, Mass. and not at Universal Studios, Culver City. Maybe it would have worked better without the attempt at verisimilitude. As it stands, Peter Falk & his colorful streetwise cohorts all seem to be constantly winking at each other (or us) as they work a ridiculously easy cash takeaway from the wizened Katzenjammer Kids charged with locking up all that protected loot. Money launderer Peter Boyle (the one-eyed man in a gang of the blind) & wild card ‘expert’ Warren Oates manage to freshen up their moldy characters, while Sheldon Leonard, who once played wiseguys before becoming a top tv sit-com producer, is amusingly cast as J. Edgar Hoover. Everyone else, including Friedkin, just take de Laurentiis money and run.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For some reason, this reminded me of the lightweight vehicles Universal was making in the mid-‘50s for a young Tony Curtis. Sure enough, it was one of those vehicles: SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS/’55 (not seen here). OR: Friedkin in excelsis with SORCERER. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/sorcerer-1977.html
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