Word: heists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bank heist bigger than the Brink's job, but the bandits used no guns or getaway cars. Rather than being fast on the draw, they had fast fingers on computer keyboards. The Wells Fargo Bank of San Francisco last week filed suit charging that a group of boxing promoters and a key accomplice inside the bank had pulled off a colossal $21 million embezzlement. The alleged sting was by far the largest computer bank fraud in history and raised some troubling questions: How could such an unlikely ring of conspicuous sports personalities so easily rob a multibillion-dollar bank...
This film's premise is simple: contrive, however flimsily, to get Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor into standard comic peril-a barroom fight, a mistaken-identity bank heist, a kangaroo court, a venal prison system, a convicts' rodeo, a speeding car-then watch them wriggle out with their resourceful wit and eloquent body language. Wilder moves with the psychotic serenity of someone who believes everything will turn out O.K.; Pryor trembles with the neurotic certainty that everything has already gone wrong. Wilder's is the fantasy of the liberal do-gooder; Pryor's is the reality...
...reward, where an IRS audit can strain a marriage to the breaking point, where a grandfather must move in with his daughter because grandma has decided that she is a lesbian. The riposte to this rich variety of nonsense is for Lange, Curtin and Saint James to stage a heist. They decide to make off with the day's receipts of a shopping center, which are being displayed in a huge plastic ball as a promotional stunt. There are reasonable suspense and good comic effect as the three nice women stumblingly rehearse, plan and execute the robbery. The strategy...
...very choice of a shopping mall as the target of their heist attempt makes an air-conditioned, claustrophobic comment about the American middle-class. Never mind that if these women sold off even half their wardrobes, they could drive gas-guzzling American cars for years--the cost of living is not only expensive, it is high. And part of that high cost is the material drain of today's values. Curtin, Lange and St. James each play women who would have no trouble voting for Ronald Reagan in November if there were to be a sequel called...
Larry Gelbart's original script-about a couple of high-society crooks, their $30 million heist and the wily Scotland Yard inspector (David Niven) who dogs their trail-may have meant to revive the old Hitchcock tradition of sophisticated comedy. But so frail a genre is more style than substance, and Siegel's trooper-boot direction flattens out the laugh lines and bits of business until they have all the charm of an airport runway. Gelbart was smart enough to remove his name from the credits (hence the screenwriter pseudonym). Reynolds was not so lucky...