This Canadian film features a cat-and-mouse battle of
wits between an immoral bank robber who thinks he is clever and the bank's
amoral head teller who is cleverer still. The teller (Elliott Gould) notices
a series of clues which lead him to conclude that his mall branch will be
robbed by the mall's Santa Claus (Christopher Plummer, who is required by
Canadian law to play the smooth villain in all Canadian films), probably on
the busy day before Christmas. Instead of turning the man in or reporting his
suspicions, he decides to exploit the situation to his own advantage. On the
day of the robbery he systematically moves almost all of the bank's big
bills from the till to his own briefcase. When the robber comes in and asks
for the money, the teller hands him the small amount on the floor, then
trips the alarm late enough to allow the crook enough time to escape. (He
can't be caught or the monetary discrepancy would be discovered.) The crook
makes off with a few thousand dollars Canadian (about thirty eight cents
American, or eleven quadrillion lire, for our Italian readers), while the
teller walks off with the serious money, and eventually moves it to a safe
deposit box in his own bank, intending to ignore it and return to his
Spartan lifestyle until the robbery is
long forgotten. He hides the safe deposit key in a completely secure place
(inside a half-full jar of jam in his fridge), and begins his patient
wait.
Unfortunately for him, the press loves the story and covers it so intensely that the publicity
eventually reaches the robber, who quickly puts two and two together and
realizes he's been had. Since he's a violent sadist who owns the only gun in
Canada in 1978, this spells major trouble for the teller. The rest of
the film is a chess match between the two men, wherein each of the two holds
the upper hand from time to time. The wimpy schnook of a teller gradually
becomes more and more confident of his moves, and this also affects
every other aspect of his life. As he gains confidence, he also starts to
impress the ladies.
Critics of the film argue that the character development in the film is
undercooked and the plot is overcooked. There is certainly some truth to
that. For example, the teller has a dying father who is a stroke victim.
This circumstance is not used to teach us anything about the teller's
personality or background, but simply as a plot device. When one of the
robber's underlings, a beautiful woman, tries to seduce our hero, she
introduces herself as the night nurse at the father's hospital, and reveals
how the old man always said he was proud of his son. Since we have already
seen that the father can neither speak nor recognize his son, we know
immediately that the woman is lying. More important, we also know that the
teller knows, and does not let on that he knows, and is thus scheming to use
the woman in his own counter-move. Frankly, I think this entire scenario was
extremely clever, economical screenwriting, and not a flaw at all. Yes, this
is a plot-heavy film, but the characterization is as deep as it needs to be
in a plot-driven movie. And the screenwriter did not ignore character. The
teller could have just simply manipulated the woman by providing
her with disinformation, but he immediately realized that she would do anything
necessary to gain his confidence, so he didn't plant the seeds of his
counter-plan
until he ... er ... thoroughly plowed all of her furrows, if you catch my
drift. In essence, he realized he was getting the "get laid free" card, and
he took advantage of it. That told us a lot about how his personality was
changing from the unassertive man we saw earlier, who couldn't summon up the
courage to steer his obviously willing would-be girlfriend into the bedroom.
There were a couple of times when I though the plot was getting
unnecessarily convoluted. For example, the bank teller's perfect hiding
place for the safe deposit key got spoiled when his maid cleaned out his
refrigerator and threw out the jam. Unlike the other scenario I described
above, this one accomplished nothing except to complicate the plot, and it
wasn't even remotely believable. (1) How many bank tellers have maids? (2)
The maid was a deus ex machina, never introduced before she was
needed to throw out the jam, never to appear again, and unrelated to the
rest of the plot. (2)
How many maids would throw out a jar of jam without asking their employer?
(3) If it had been weeks-old Chinese take-out, that would have been another
matter, but this was just a regular ol' half-finished jar of jam, and there
was no reason to dispose of it.
At any rate, if you overlook a couple of too-obvious contrivances and
some poor performances in the minor roles, you should really enjoy this
film, which provides a variety of guilty pleasures:
* You'll keep guessing until the end of the clever plot written by
Curtis Hanson, who would later win an Oscar for his screenplay for L.A.
Confidential.
* It has a
slick, psychotic villain played in the Plummer style, employing surprisingly
graphic violence by 1978 standards. (Celine Lomez gets beheaded by the sharp
glass on the side of a broken aquarium, and Plummer leaves her head in
there to sleep with the fishes.)
* It has a rare screen appearance
from John Candy in the days before he left Second City for Hollywood,
although for some reason the director assigned Candy to a non-comedic role
that could have been played by anyone, despite the fact that SCTV had been
on the air for two years before this was lensed.
* There is nudity from five different women, including full frontal and
rear exposure from the beautiful Celine Lomez.
* Best of all, there's no nudity from John Candy.
Although the film is all but forgotten, it gets a thumb up from me. It's
an excellent example of how a good script can create an inexpensive film
($2.5m Canadian, about the cost of a pack of cigarettes in Canada) that is
fun to watch and doesn't look or feel cheap.
