Armored Car Robbery (1950)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is an astonishing documentary that will wring your heart while it bends your mind

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Who would go to see a film called "Armored Car Robbery"? It sounds like a documentary, or maybe a how-to flick for yeggs. A zippier title would have been more fitting for this taut little noir film, in which intrepid cops (using all that hi-tech early 50s gadgetry) track down a gang of crooks who pull a clever heist right outside a crowded athletic stadium. This is a very early effort for Richard Fleischer, who would later direct box office hits such as SOYLENT GREEN and THE BOSTON STRANGLER. The story moves along at an unflagging pace, with William Talman keeping our attention as the slightly unhinged brains of the gang. It's a great post- war period piece, and deserves to be aired more often.

After an armored car is robbed by a small gang of crooks, a determined cop goes after them. McGraw is good in what was for him a typical role of a no-nonsense tough guy. Talman, who made a career out of playing creepy villains, is also effective as the ruthless mastermind behind the robbery. The curvaceous Jergens provides the love interest. It is a solid if unspectacular crime drama, well executed by B-movie director Fleischer, who specialized in these kinds of gritty films, the best known being "The Narrow Margin," made a couple of years after this and also starring McGraw. It moves at a fast pace, clocking in at under 70 minutes.

Armored Car Robbery in the no frills style of noir that characterized RKO Studios is the story of just that. The execution and then police investigation of the robbery is subject of this film. It plays like an episode of Criminal Intent with the action shifting back and forth from the cops as represented by Charles McGraw and the crooks headed by William Talman.He's quite a piece of work in this film, Talman. He's proud of the fact that he's never even been pinched for anything, hence he's not on anyone's radar. His three accomplices, Steve Brodie, Gene Evans, and Douglas Fowley can't say that however.Also in the mix is the high maintenance stripper wife of the luckless Fowley. That would be Adele Jergens who split these kind of parts with Marie Windsor. Jergens has been trading up and Fowley would like to get the guy she's been cheating on him with. He doesn't have a clue that it's Talman.The Armored Car Robbery takes place in front of Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, it's the last stop on the route. That Wrigley Field was also named for the same guy who owned the Chicago Cubs and was the home of the Triple A Los Angeles Angels franchise of the Pacific Coast League. It's gone now, but just like the friendly confines in Chicago, LA's Wrigley Field was situated in a residential neighborhood as you see in the film.The robbery is successful, but Fowley is wounded and McGraw's partner is killed. Then the tension builds. McGraw is tough and smart, but Talman is ruthless and no fool. It all ends in quite a nice shootout climax. Like last year's The Town which also featured a robbery of a ballpark, Armored Car Robbery doesn't quite have that film's budget. But RKO studios specialized in getting these kind of films done right and tight. Armored Car Robbery is a great example of what this studio specialized in.

"Violent Saturday" director Richard Fleischer maintains momentum throughout his gritty, fast-paced, crime thriller "Armored Car Robbery." An obstinate Los Angeles Police Department detective wants to nab a ruthless career criminal for the fatal shooting of his partner during a daring, daylight hold-up. Most heist movies build up to the crime after the villains have invested considerable time and effort in setting up their score. This straightforward, efficiently fashioned B-movie, however, plunges the bad guys into action during the first third of the tale while the remainder of "Armored Car Robbery" depicts the chief villain's futile efforts to evade the authorities. Altogether, this nifty little RKO Radio Pictures' caper doesn't appear to be anything more than a potboiler, but Fleischer puts his serviceable cast through the paces without letting things simmer down. Essentially, Hollywood makes two kinds of armored car heist capers; those where the crime is an inside-job, and those where it is an outside job. "Armored Car Robbery" fits into the latter category. Fleischer and scenarists Earl Fenton and Gerald Drayson Adams keep things plausible throughout this tightly-plotted, 67-minute melodrama. Half of the plausibility here is the method of operation that the criminals utilize.David Purvis (William Talman, later of TV's "Perry Mason" where he played the chief prosecutor) is a criminal mastermind obsessed with details. He plans to knock off an armored car at Wrigley Stadium in Los Angeles, and he sends the L.A.P.D. some false alarms so he can clock the time it takes for them to reach the stadium. Afterward, he briefs his gang, including Benjamin 'Benny' McBride (Douglas Fowley of "Battleground"), Al Mapes (Steve Brodie of "Badman's Territory"), and William 'Ace' Foster (Gene Evans of "The Steel Helmet") about the stick-up. Purvis describes the robbery as "a one-shot deal" worth a half-million dollars. Purvis stipulates he will take half of the $500-thousand haul, while the other three can split what is left between them. He orders them to "study this routine until it comes out your ears." Fleischer cuts to the following Tuesday when the crime takes place. Meantime, the concept of 'honor among thieves' doesn't apply here when we learn information that Benny doesn't know. Specifically, Purvis is making time with Bennie's high-maintenance burlesque hall dancer wife Yvonne LeDoux (Adele Jergens of "Blonde Dynamite") who wants nothing to do with Benny.Fleischer cleverly stages the actual robbery. Wheeling up behind the armored car, Foster climbs out to tinker with the overheated engine of his old jalopy. At the right moment, they don gas masks and set-off a gas bomb. A stadium cashier alerts the police. Although Purvis had clocked the police response time at 3 minutes, L.A. Detectives, Lieutenant Jim Cordell (Charles McGraw of "The Narrow Margin") and his partner, Lieutenant Phillips (James Flavin of "G-Men"), are cruising in the vicinity. Cordell and his partner go into action with their revolvers blazing, and the criminals blast away at them, with Purvis dropping Phillips, but not before Cordell hits Benny. Mapes whips up in the getaway car, and the criminals take off with Cordell hot on their heels until Purvis stars his windshield with a bullet and a deliver truck crosses his path, forcing him to swerve and lose sight of them. Nevertheless, Benny is badly wounded and the hoods are rattled. Cordell gets gung-ho rookie Detective Danny Ryan (Don McGuire of "Humoresque") to replace Phillips. The police kill Foster but capture Mapes, and Ryan decides to masquerade as Mapes and find out what Yvonne knows about Purvis. The cops install microphones in her dressing room and wire her automobile, like Burt Reynolds and his team would later do the heroine in "Sharky's Machine." The final showdown at the L.A. airport has Purvis and Yvonne taking a chartered two-engine aircraft for parts unknown. The police warn the tower, and the tower halts the aircraft. Purvis thrusts his revolver into the pilot's neck, but an incoming plane prevents them from taking off, and the cops are breathing down Purvis' neck. Scrambling out of the plane, he hoofs it across the tarmac, but Cordell brings him down. Purvis recovers, but it's too late. The plane that kept them from taking off collides with him and kills him. Of course, this scene is nothing like a similar scene in the Charles Bronson thriller "Break Out" where a propeller shredded a guy."Armored Car Robbery" qualifies as a film noir melodrama owing to lenser Guy Roe's high-contrast photography, the gritty urban settings, and the paranoia of Talman's criminal experiences as the robbery unravels. The police procedural part of the action includes some pre "C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation" scenes where the laboratory technicians help point the detectives in the right direction. In many ways, the vicious brain behind the robbery foreshadows the kind of criminal that Robert De Niro portrayed in "Heat." The William Talman thug reprimands his accomplices for jotting down anything incriminating that could be used against them as a clue. Furthermore, he goes to extreme lengths to appear as invisible as possible, right down to slicing the labels off his apparel with a razor blade. Mind you, since the Production Code Administration was still calling the shots in Hollywood, "Armored Car Robbery" is rather predictable because you know that the hoodlums aren't going to get away with the loot. In other words, this is another crime-does-not pay movie. Nevertheless, despite his doomed future, the cunning villain emerges as a more interesting character than the cops chasing him."Armored Car Robbery" is well-worth watching if you enjoy heist thrillers.