Rating: B-
Dir: Sidney Lumet.
Star: Sean Connery, Dyan Cannon, Martin Balsam, Christopher Walken.
The early going here is really great, literally decades ahead of its time. John “Duke” Anderson (Connery) has just got out of prison, after serving ten years for safe-cracking. He has barely taken a breath outside, before he’s planning a new crime. His girlfriend Ingrid (Cannon) is now a kept woman in a swanky apartment on the Upper East Side, and Duke decides to rob every other apartment in the building on Labor Day. He begins to assemble a crew, but the Mafia group bankrolling the operation have a demand, adding a loose cannon [not to be confused with a loose Cannon, the one Duke is in bed with, hohoho] and requiring Duke kill him during the heist.
What stands out from a contemporary perspective is the copious amounts of surveillance Duke is under, from the moment he gets off the bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Cameras and tape recorders track his every move, both public and private, and of varying degrees of legality. Beyond the building’s security system, befitting its high-end location and residents, Ingrid’s jealous “sponsor” has hired a private detective and bugged her apartment. The mobsters Duke is working with are being tailed and wire-tapped. One of the crew he recruits, lives above a Black Panther office, which the FBI are keeping under watch. It’s striking, considering this came out thirty years before 9/11, and the birth of the modern “surveillance society”. Watergate was still a year ahead too.
However, at the time, Roger Ebert considered the emphasis on this, a “serious structural flaw,” even though it was a key element of the novel, which unfolds as a series of transcripts. These elements do take a bit of a back seat once the operation gets under way, and it becomes a more standard heist flick. Things inevitably do not go as smoothly as planned, the team having to deal with recalcitrant occupants (it’s the least likely who proves key in their undoing), and that loose cannon. There’s a good supporting cast, including future Saturday Night Live star Garrett Morris, and the major feature debut of some guy called Christopher Walken (top), all blond and baby-faced. Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, turns up as one of the elderly residents, in her final role on-screen.
I’m a little surprised this hasn’t been remade since. Or perhaps its moment has passed, because the film’s secondary topic of omnipresent surveillance is now almost passé. The vast majority of people voluntarily carry around with them a device allowing their location to be tracked, and it’s taken as read that every site we visit, logs our online activity [for the record: Film Blitz does not give a shit]. Security cameras are on every corner, and an expectation of privacy feels no longer the default setting. The notion of the government watching our every move, would probably generate little more than a diffident shrug these days.