The Best Laid Plans

Interrogating the Heist Film

Jim Leach, Jeannette Sloniowski

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814342251
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The heist—a carefully organized robbery of a financial institution or other lucrative business—has been a persistent and popular mainstay of the crime film. The Best Laid Plans: Interrogating the Heist Film asks the question: why has the heist film proved so appealing to audiences over many years and in diverse cultural contexts? The twelve essays in this volume, edited by Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski, explore the significance of the heist film in different national cinemas, as well as its aesthetic principles and ideological issues such as representation of gender, race, and class. The essays are organized in three parts dealing with the heist film's international presence, the subgenre's social and cultural implications, and some theoretical ways of approaching it. For example, contributor Tim Palmer challenges traditional notions of French film history that emphasize critically acclaimed art films by pointing to the rich achievements of critically defamed and neglected, but extremely popular, crime films; Gaylyn Studlar surveys heist films in light of feminist theories that illuminate stereotypical characterizations of both men and women in the heist; and Hamilton Carroll compares James Marsh's documentary Man on a Wire—which draws on heist conventions to depict Philippe Petit's unauthorized tightrope walk in 1974 between the two towers of the World Trade Center—to Spike Lee's New York–set heist film Inside Man. The Best Laid Plans includes an accessible group of essays that will meet the needs of students and scholars in film and media studies by offering new insights into an important and neglected area in genre criticism.

PART ONE

The International Heist Film

All for Naught

The American Heist Film in the Fifties

Jeannette Sloniowski

The heist film is a hybrid form born in America in the 1940s. Along with the contemporaneous bandit gangster subgenre, it exhibits conventions drawn from older genres to create a formidable, desperate, and sometimes left-wing depiction of postwar American culture. Both subgenres show the influence not only of film noir and semidocumentary noir on the larger gangster and crime genres generally but also of the strongly held left-wing political views of some of their notable, sometimes persecuted, creators, among others: Abraham Polonsky, Bob Roberts, John Garfield, John Huston, Robert Ryan, Harry Belafonte, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, and even lesser-known character actor Marc Lawrence from The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), who tried to get out from under by telling the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that he joined the Communist Party only “because I heard it was a good place to meet broads” (Server 47). It is virtually impossible to look at the cast lists, directors, and writers of these downbeat and often angry films without becoming aware that several of them were blacklisted, were hauled in front of HUAC, and had serious questions about American culture of their time. It is believed that John Garfield’s untimely death at thirty-nine can in part be attributed to the emotional trauma of being investigated and consequently unable to find inspiring work as an actor. My essay will be a brief survey of some important fifties heists and will address a few others at greater length. This will be done from the point of view of their left-wing politics and social critique, but will also take note of the varying narrative positions and uses of the heist itself in a number of fifties films. I will also argue that the films depict the unreality of the American Dream and that the effects of the postwar consumer culture give many of the fifties heist films their particular power.

The Origins and Conventions of the Fifties Heist

Much of the history of the American crime film in this era is documented in the detailed and important work of Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner in books such as Radical Hollywood and A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left. Jonathan Munby and Fran Mason have also authored important reassessments of the gangster film with historical, ideological, and close cultural readings of the more consequential films of various periods in the genre, including the fifties. These analyses provide breadth and detail to other recent analyses of the influence of left-wingers in Hollywood, despite the blacklist, to create a more factual, industry-driven critique of the crime genre and film noir historically, including the many politically motivated censorship battles that surround the crime film in its various forms. Because crime fiction and films are concerned with crime and “justice,” however defined, they have expressed controversial ideas in many time periods. The anthology “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, also adds detailed analyses of the Cold War era and of the semidocumentary noir in particular, so central to heists of the fifties. Will Straw’s and Thom Andersen’s essays in that anthology are remarkably detailed analyses of the aesthetic and ideological issues surrounding the reappraisal of the politics of noir, film gris, and the semidocumentary.

In “Red Hollywood” and “Afterword” Thom Andersen defines a small group of films as films gris. He refers to film gris as a genre but it might also be seen as a small subgenre of film noir. The essence of his definition is that film gris is a noir film that concentrates very concretely in a leftist way on important social issues. In “Red Hollywood” he names only thirteen films as films gris, but in “Afterword” he expands the list considerably and argues that we probably do not yet know all of the films that might be included in the “genre.” He defines them as films that have “a greater psychological and social realism” (“Red Hollywood” 257) than noir, that are related to the thirties “social problem film” (259), that “implicate the entire system of capitalism in their criticism” (259), and finally, in which “the unreality of the American Dream is a constant theme” (260).

Film noir and particularly the noir-influenced gangster film are also an important and potentially radical departure from other kinds of films of their time and are a crucial part of the heist hybrid. This is a complicated inheritance, since both film noir and film gris have complex origins ranging from German expressionism to French existentialism to hard-boiled fiction and social issue films of the thirties. The semidocumentaries, in something of a turn away from noir, are often made as dark law-and-order police procedurals, such as He Walked by Night (Alfred L. Werker, 1948), a film that in large part paid tribute to modern, seemingly corruption-free, scientific policing. Gone are the “hunches” of the private eye film and earlier procedurals and even the genius of the Sherlock Holmes–style investigator, replaced by ballistics, fingerprints, modern surveillance technology, and computers, all signifying scientific policing, supposedly error and bias free, unlike the more corrupt cops of film noir.

Nonetheless, film noir itself contributes to the heist generally, in that fifties heists never succeed. Painful experience from the Depression, the war, and the Holocaust (to say nothing of the blacklist) taught Americans that humans’ best laid plans can easily fall victim to cruel fate, to hatred, and to incompetence. The last great film gris heist of the fifties was Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). It is a heist that goes horrifically wrong because of the racism of the white “muscle” of the heist, played chillingly by Robert Ryan. Harry Belafonte, who was central to getting this film made, plays the first African American heister—a brilliant blues musician but what is known in gangster circles as a “degenerate gambler” who steals to support his habit but also his estranged wife and daughter. The heist fails as the Ryan character, snarling all the time about Belafonte’s false, racially attributed incompetence, refuses to allow him to carry the car keys. Unfortunately, the man who is carrying the keys is killed and this deprives the remaining two of their means of escape. The film ends, rather didactically, with Ryan and Belafonte shooting at each other in a chase through the grubby suburban streets of small-town New York State and dying in a huge gas tank explosion, an apparent reference to White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) where it was a last defiant gesture by a larger than life, mad bandit gangster. Ironically and in a heavy handed manner, in the Wise film the police claim that they cannot identify the bodies because they are burned beyond recognition. Now the robbers are merely two dead men, their race indecipherable, the stupidity of racism debunked.

Fran Mason, in American Gangster Cinema, argues that the gangster genre, having exhausted the classical form, fragmented into a number of subgenres, including “the death of the big shot” (51) in High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941) and Dillinger (Max Nosseck, 1945), among others. Another offshoot is the bandit film that Garner Simmons refers to as “the Bandit-Gangster Film” (67), including the male-female bandit couple, as in Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) or They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948), that also shares a strong connection to the Western, as do some heist films. The fifties heist is filled with failure, brutality, and death. Not a single one of the approximately twenty-five films features a successful heist, in that even if the robbers get off with the money or the jewels, most of them die nasty deaths during or after the robbery, commit suicide, or end up in jail for life. In fact, a successful heist produces little other than dealings with dishonest fences, violent double crosses, and more death. Dave Purvis in Armored Car Robbery (Richard Fleischer, 1950) runs into the propeller of his escape plane, no doubt ending up in various pieces on the tarmac. The ending of The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956) in an airport is particularly black and ironic, as the cash, for which many people have died, blows away in the wind as a small dog knocks the suitcase filled with money onto the runway.

Gone in these films are the high-flying gangsters of the classical period—violent, aggressive, ambitious, and dressed like dandies. Gangsters were covetous of territory, marshaling armies of thugs to patrol their borders. The heister is a small-time guy with no territory—in fact, part of the failure of his life is his homelessness as he drifts from place to place, spending much of his time in seedy lodgings. He has no fancy wardrobes or palatial residences, and for company only a few ex-cons who perform the technical work of the job. He has little charm and less bravado than the gangster, often an evil temper, and he would not seem to be the hero that audiences pull for as he rises up in the world of crime, although the audiences may well like to see the precisely planned and executed robbery succeed, having no great love of big banks, jewelry stores, or casinos, all institutions that serve the rich. Rather than dying in a blaze of glory in the street like most gangsters of the period, he generally meets an inglorious and miserable end, like the heister in Plunder Road (Hubert Cornfield, 1957), who tries to escape by jumping off an overpass onto the top of a fast-moving transport truck. He fails. Badly. Why audiences like these films is only slightly puzzling, since they can, perhaps, identify with these struggling, working-class everymen, living in dumpy cabins or shabby motels, eating greasy take-out food, and only in the money between heists. They move from crummy place to crummy place, in rural or suburban areas, always short of cash but dreaming of the big score that will take them to glamorous places or allow them to reclaim the family farm. Perhaps they are not that different than many in the audience, dreaming of better times and the ready cash that greater consumer power could provide.

One of the key heavily loaded phrases used in High Sierra (and elsewhere in the period) is “crashing out.” Originally the phrase meant staging a jail break, but in High Sierra Ida Lupino, playing Marie, Earl’s working-class girlfriend, co-opts the term to mean something that poor, desperate Americans like her, and Bonnie Parker after her, long to do—to escape poverty, abuse, and failure for a better life. Many of the heisters of the fifties and after do exactly this: they try to “crash out” though pulling off a big score, often to fund an escape from America to foreign places. Importantly, the heist subgenre also has a number of characters crash out by committing suicide when the grand dream fails—Emmerich, the corrupt lawyer in Asphalt Jungle, shoots himself, and Swede, in The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), allows hired thugs to kill him with hardly a word of protest. Even Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) can be considered here. He must know that his life is finished when he entraps himself in the mountains in High Sierra. And there is Gino (David Clarke) in The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (Charles Guggenheim, 1959), who suicides in a wild fit of terror and rage in the bank’s expressionistically rendered rat trap of a vault. Many of the fifties heist films look like documentaries, and these suicides are shocking, brutal, and moving.

Daryl Lee calls the heist a “process film” (51–52) owing debts to both the war film and the musical—stories about a group of characters trying to pull off a significant job of work requiring great technical skill. The war film is perhaps the more important, along with film noir, since almost all of the heist personnel are male and of an age to have served in the military. However, the only fifties heist to have an all-veteran crew is 5 Against the House (Phil Karlson, 1955), a story about five attractive thirtysomething veterans in college on the GI bill who are starved for excitement. This film, as well as Six Bridges to Cross (Joseph Pevney, 1955), is perhaps a foreshadowing of the heist films of the sixties, whose lead characters are more personably portrayed and whose plots are more caper-like than those of the miserable fifties. The heist fails in 5 Against the House because one of the veterans breaks down, suffering from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As in the war film, but unlike the bandit-gangster film, the “workers” in the heist movie seldom know one another well, if at all, before the robbery. In Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952) a masked Tom Foster (Preston Foster) summons various crooks to a secret meeting in a hotel. The crooks never see his face at all in the film. All have technological skills related to their role in the well-planned robbery, just as military personnel were trained for specific, specialized duties. A crucial scene in many heists is the planning sequence where architectural drawings and blueprints are shown to the robbers and their specific roles rehearsed many times, after which the joint is cased over and over until everyone knows his job. The bandit-gangster robberies are far more ad hoc, with Bonnie and Clyde even trying to rob a failed bank that has absolutely no money at all. Bandit gangsters roam the countryside knocking off banks seemingly chosen at random. Heisters have a plan, often a complex one, with a large score at the end.

Protoheists and the Fifties Cluster

Generally speaking, the fifties heist “cluster” (Mittell 122) or “cycle” (Elsaesser 127) consists of a downbeat, action-oriented, and always violent series of films building on a few notable predecessors of the forties, such as High Sierra, a combination of the early heist and early bandit-gangster subgenres, and Robert Siodmak’s The Killers and Criss Cross (1949), significant noir melodramas featuring heists. Daryl Lee traces the heist farther back to American Westerns and jewel thief films (1–6), and it is even possible to go much farther back in history to recruit Robin Hood and his gang of Merry Men into the generic mix. But it is my intention in this section to spend some time looking at a few important fifties heists: The Asphalt Jungle, Armored Car Robbery, He Ran All the Way (John Berry, 1951), and Plunder Road, all examples of variations within the heist formula. These variations generally concern style, where the heist occurs in the films, and whether the heist is the center of the narrative or is a strategically placed semantic unit, important to the film’s overall meaning but not its center. These films also differ in the amount of empathy asked from audiences, some humanizing the criminals, others more critical of the masculinity depicted and relating it to the gender struggles of those times.

The Asphalt Jungle, for example, uses the heist at the center of the narrative with all of its various and what would become conventional elements: putting the gang together, discussing and perfecting the plan, the heist itself, and its aftermath—fencing the score and escaping (or not). Armored Car Robbery is similar in this way but rather than a film noir is a noir-inflected semidocumentary police procedural lacking the intense character psychology of The Asphalt Jungle. The amount of empathy asked for in this film is far less than in The Asphalt Jungle. He Ran All the Way is yet again different. It is a film gris, family melodrama/social issue film that spends a very short time on the heist, although it is key to understanding the main characters, and concentrates on defining issues of social class, working-class life, and gender in the aftermath of the crime. It has a more obvious political message than the other three films, as film gris often does. Plunder Road is another semidocumentary that differs from many semidocumentary police procedurals in that it concentrates on the gang alone and their inability to master the newly constructed and widely admired American highway system, deconstructing the idea of the open road and all that it seemed to mean to the culture of the fifties.

Other fifties heists, like Violent Saturday (Richard Fleischer, 1955), reduce the time spent on the heist but use it semantically to underscore other important issues. For example, the hero of Violent Saturday, Shelley Martin (Victor Mature), is forced to stay out of the army during the war by government officials because of the importance of his job at home to the war effort. Some in the small town where he lives consider him a coward and torment his son about his father’s suspected cowardice. After a particularly nasty group of heisters, including the vicious Dill (Lee Marvin), come to rob the town, Martin is redeemed by fighting off the very violent gang almost single-handedly, and thus takes his proper and honorable place in the town, his heroic masculinity established. The significance, duration, and placement of the heist thus varies with its importance in the films.¹ Violent Saturday, a more conservative film than many others, places us firmly on the misunderstood Shelley Martin’s side, and we are likely to be appalled by the viciousness of the heisters, career criminals whose motivating reason is avarice alone.

Most of the heist films made in the United States in the fifties show these variations, as do several notable international films such as Rififi (Du Rififi chez les hommes, Jules Dassin, 1955), Piccadilly Third Stop (Wolf Rilla, 1960), and La Città si Difendi (Four Ways Out, Pietro Germi, 1951), the latter written by Federico Fellini. The fifties heist cluster, like its European cou...