Retrospektive 2018

Armored Car Robbery

Richard Fleischer
USA 1950
67 min
V'18

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

Credits
  • Charles McGraw - Captain Frank Gibbons
  • Douglas Fowley - Emil Herbert
  • Steve Brodie
  • Adele Jergens
  • Don McGuire
  • Don Haggerty
  • William Talman - Emmett Myers
  • Earl Felton
  • Gerald Drayson Adams
  • Robert Angus
  • Robert Leeds
  • Guy Roe
RKO Pictures
35 mm
bw
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