Armored Car Robbery

ARMORED CAR ROBBERY gehört zu einer Serie von abgebrühten Kriminalklassikern, die Richard Fleischer mit stilsicherer Perfektion während seiner frühen Jahre für RKO drehte. Obwohl der Hays Code explizite Gewaltdarstellungen in Kriminalfilmen verbot, zeigte Fleischer einen ebenso effizienten wie rücksichtslosen Polizeiapparat mit Charakterstudien, wie sie zu jener Zeit nur in B-Filmen möglich waren. Mit seiner expliziten Einbettung lokaler Schauplätze rund um Los Angeles reiht sich der Film in den populären Zyklus semi-dokumentarischer Krimis der späten 1940er und 1950er Jahre ein.

Mit THE NARROW MARGIN

ARMORED CAR ROBBERY is just one in a series of violent crime dramas directed with crisp efficiency by Richard Fleischer during his early years at RKO. An important first expression of the heist film genre held at bay by the crumbling Hays Code—which had long prohibited overly detailed depictions of criminal acts—ARMORED CAR ROBBERY came out the same year as John Huston’s seminal expression of the genre, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, yet stands in stark, stripped down contrast to Huston’s soulful peon to the defeated underdog. Fleischer instead delivers a swift and cold-blooded depiction of ruthlessly efficient police and criminal apparatuses set into contrapuntal motion, with William Talman’s harder than hard-boiled mastermind pitted against Charles McGraw’s two-fisted copper, an intense face-off of indelible character actors only possible in the feverish trenches of B-film production. Making great use of Los Angeles area locations, ARMORED CAR ROBBERY bears affinities with the popular cycle of low- budget semi-documentary crime films that flourished in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Haden Guest)

With THE NARROW MARGIN