Armored Car Robbery

 I will let you have three guesses about the plot and subject of Armored Car Robbery (1950).  

Four crooks plot to rob an armored car outside of Wrigley Field in Los Angeles.  (This was a ballpark torn down in 1969, built in 1925 as the "million dollar palace" of William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing gum mogul).  A professional criminal named Purvis masterminds the operation which involves gas and gas masks.  Purvis has timed police response to an alarm at the stadium -- it's three minutes.  The heist is supposed to be complete in about ninety seconds allowing ample time for a getaway.  As it happens, two cops are near Wrigley Field patrolling in their car when the robbery is reported.  They reach the ballpark when the heist is underway.  There's an exchange of gunfire and one of the crooks is injured; one of the police officers is mortally wounded.  The police initiate a massive man-hunt for the crooks who are hiding in some warehouses between an oil field and docks on the Long Beach harbor.  During a raid on the hide-out, another crook is shot dead.  The wounded criminal has been ruthlessly killed by Purvis for demanding that a doctor be summoned to treat his wounds.  Purvis' moll is a burlesque 'cutie" as she called in the movie.  Purvis tries to escape with her, but their getaway is complicated by a rookie cop working with the officer whose partner was killed in the gun battle.  The rookie, who is repeated denigrated by the older cop (grieving his dead buddy), bravely pursues Purvis and the stripper.  He gets kidnapped by Purvis and the woman but has planted a bug in the escape vehicle.  The police are able to successfully pursue Purvis and the stripper to an airfield after the bad guy shoots the rookie cop.  At the airport, Purvis, who is cornered, tries to escape by running across a tarmac on which a plane lands and cuts him to pieces.  His body lies on the concrete among drifting billows of greenbacks taken from the armored car.  At the hospital, we see the older officer visiting the rookie who is recovering from his serious injuries.  (The rookie seems to sexually harassing a nurse from his wheelchair.)

The film is 67 minutes long and, about eight or nine minutes, are devoted to the stripper's routine -- she stands on stage fully dressed and shows off her legs and arms.  (This salacious stuff was featured on the posters advertising this RKO B picture, a modestly proportioned short feature shown with a more prestigious movie as the first part of a double feature.)  The movie's actors are good, particularly William Talman who plays Purvis, the ruthless boss in involved in engineering the heist.  In the movie, Purvis is having an affair with the burlesque cutie although she's married to one of the thugs recruited for the robbery.  This is the crook who gets wounded and, then, killed by Purvis when he pleads for a doctor treat his wound (and tries to enforce his demand by drawing a gun.)  Talman later became famous for playing the part of Hamilton Burger, the hapless D.A., trounced week after week by Perry Mason in the eponymous TV show.  Talman is ugly, has mean lip on him, and looks a bit like a pale snapping turtle or some kind of sturgeon or other toothy fish.  Before he became a prosecutor on Perry Mason, Talman was a character actor who specialized  in playing psychos.  (He is also famous for some indelible public service announcements that he produced when he was dying of lung cancer -- in those spots, he urges people to give up cigarette smoking. I recall seeing them and being a bit frightened when I was about 12.)  The movie is handsomely shot in typical noir black and white -- night streets glistening with reflections, weird unmotivated swirls of light illumining the slippery cave-like walls of alleys and narrow corridors in the warehouse district.  The robbery with shrouds of roiling gas is well-managed and the gun battles are terse and cruelly efficient, apartments full of showy knickknacks were the crooks live.  An example of the film's effective mise-en-scene is a car chase -- we see the bad guy's skidding around a corner framed by a pumping oil rig; it seems like an unnecessarily showy shot, but a minute later, the same exact camera angle is used to show the cops in their speeding sedan turning the same corner -- hence, the overly composed shot is necessary to establish the location of the turn and the fact that the cops are in hot pursuit.  There's a good suspense scene when the bad guys, with one of them dying from blood loss, have to navigate a road block in the oil field.  The climactic chase, with the wounded cop signaling desperately his location to the bug in the vehicle's upholstered ceiling is also clearly staged and exciting.  A scene in which the dead police officer's wife talks to the surviving partner in a hospital room is also poignant and affecting.  This sequence is also necessary because it serves as a bookend to the denouement in which it is revealed that the wounded rookie (in the same hospital) has survived and will recover.  

Richard Fleischer, the son of the great animator Max Fleischer, directed the movie and his work is unassuming, completely coherent as to action, time and space, and extremely brisk and efficient.  It's the sort of movies that studios seem to have made cheaply and without obvious effort -- nothing special but an exciting entertainment that respects its audience, a bit like an excellent TV show with a good, colorful cast and a lot of snappy wise-guy dialogue.