To get a sense of the endearingly fluffy humor
that pervades this caper flick, consider a moment when bumbling FBI agent
Streiger (Clifton James) shows his team surveillance footage of master criminal
Walter Upjohn Ballantine (George C. Scott). First, the surveillance camera is
angled away from Ballantine because the cameraman is ogling a pretty girl’s
figure, and second, Ballantine reveals he’s aware of the surveillance camera by
dabbing the lens with the tip of an ice cream cone. Gritty realism this is not.
Yet while some other adaptations of lighthearted crime books by author Donald
E. Westlake spiral into stupidity, the Westlake adaptation Bank Shot comes
awfully close to cooking that most delicate soufflé of pure farce, especially
during sequences of epic-proportioned slapstick. It helps, of course, to have a
leading actor of consummate skill, since Scott plays every single scene
perfectly straight, no matter how absurd the circumstances. Together with an
adept supporting cast and the confident direction of Gower Champion (a former
dancer and choreographer), Scott’s performance makes Bank Shot highly
entertaining.
The plot is a standard Westlake lark. Career thief Ballantine,
whom Scott portrays with comically bushy eyebrows and a pronounced lisp, is
stuck in a prison work farm until his excitable accomplice, A. G. Karp (Sorrel
Burke), visits with news that a bank has been identified as vulnerable for
robbery. Ballantine stages a ridiculous escape by hijacking an earthmover and
bulldozing his way through prison walls. Then he meets the unimpressive crew
Karp has gathered. These offbeat theives include a nebbish ex-FBI agent (Bob
Balaban), a jittery goodfella (Don Calfa), and a sexy society dame (Joanna
Cassidy) who’s moonlighting as a crook for thrills. Karp’s undercooked plan
involves robbing a bank that’s temporarily housed in a mobile home, so
Ballantine arrives at an audacious method—hook the mobile home to a truck, cart
it away to a safe location, and crack the bank’s vault later.
Even though the
movie is very brief (83 minutes), Bank Shot includes a string of goofy running
gangs, like the trope of Ballantine dosing himself with saltpeter in order to
resist the advances of Cassidy’s character, lest he get distracted from his
task. (Cassidy, playing one of her earliest major film roles, enlivens the
picture with her carefree spirit and throaty laugh.) The picture is handsomely
shot and quickly paced, though it slows down, appropriately, during moments
displaying the thieves’ careful technique; watch for the bit when an explosives
man gets more and more frustrated each time a charge proves insufficient for
blowing a safe open. Bank Shot gets
very cartoonish toward the end, with Streiger and his men chasing after a
runaway mobile home—c’mon, you knew that was going to happen—but the
charm of the main performances and the cheerful unpretentiousness of the whole
enterprise compensate for a lot of rough edges.
Bank Shot: GROOVY
