Charley Varrick is a 1973 film noir directed by Don Siegel and starring Walter Matthau. In the opening scenes, Matthau, who is leading a bank heist, appears in disguise -- however, the grey wig, moustache, and silver eyebrows are not even remotely adequate to disguise his weary, pug-ugly face. Matthau was usually cast as an avuncular middle-aged businessman and, in Charley Varrick, he plays against type, acting the part of a highly intelligent, ingenious and ruthless bank robber. There's very little backstory and it's not clear what misadventures have led Varrick into this line of criminal enterprise -- he previously was employed as a barnstorming pilot who has retired from his carnival exploits into the trade of crop duster. His unfortunate wife, killed in the opening shoot-out, was a wing-walker in his air shows. The movie is a relic, produced after the golden era of the cheaply made B-movie film noir. It endorses and enacts all of the cliches of the genre, is unpretentious and doesn't aspire to anything more than ninety minutes of engaging entertainment -- by the time the film was made noir had mostly migrated either to big ambitious psychological thrillers (like Polanski's Chinatown) or become a staple of network TV in the form of shows like Mannix and The Rockford Files. Charley Varrick resembles the latter -- the movie has a charismatic leading man, an edge of cynicism, but is, generally, family- friendly: no one curses, the violence is mostly off-screen, and the sex is primarily a matter of ribald innuendo. Varrick's crop-dusting business alleges that its employees are "the Last of the Independents", but this slogan isn't really thematic and the movie doesn't explore the hero's independence. Typical for Siegel, the film is very well-written and carefully constructed; the narrative is clear and all elements work together in a satisfying manner. Characterizations are broad, even cartoonish. The action scenes are very crisp and well-staged and, certainly, not over-the-top or ridiculously exaggerated as if often the case today. The thrust of the film is that the unpretentious Varrick is smarter than all of his adversaries and figures out clever ruses to achieve his objectives. The exception to this rule is the rather dim-witted penny-ante bank robbery with which the film begins -- one wonders how the cool and cunning Varrick got hoodwinked into this enterprise. But the bank heist is transparently a plot device, just something to put the story in motion.
With his wife (the wing-walker) driving the getaway car, Varrick and a dullard sidekick, apparently employed at his crop-dusting business, stage an armed robbery of a podunk bank in a podunk town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in northeast New Mexico. The robbery goes awry and two cops are killed; two bandits who are thrown into the movie as cannon fodder -- we never even see their faces -- are also gunned-down. Varrick and his henchman drive into the hills where the hero's wife dies of a gunshot wound. Varrick is a survivor and casually callous. He sets a bomb on fuse and blows up the getaway car and his dead wife with it -- this sequence is important in establishing that Varrick has skills with high explosives. The money stolen in the heist, predictably, turns out to be laundered funds in a huge sum (about $750,000) owned by the Mafia. The mob's factotum in Albuquerque is a corrupt banker played by John Vernon -- Vernon, who appeared in Peckinpah movies, was a "go-to" actor for roles involving crooked and malign businessmen. Vernon's evil banker contacts of mob enforcer whose name is "Molly" -- this is much to the amusement of the other hoods and hookers, until Molly (played by the chubby Joe Don Baker) beats them senseless. Molly, like most villains of his ilk, is given a good vocabulary and smokes a pipe, a instrumentality that he also uses to rap on doors. (The pipe is a sort of trademark like the benzedrine inhaler that Richard Widmark uses in Kiss of Death). Molly pursues Varrick and his sidekick; he's relentless and sadistic as befits his profession. The cops play next to no role in the movie which, after the first half hour, becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Varrick and Molly. Various people get tortured and killed and there's a final showdown in which Molly's pick-up truck is pitted against Varrick's fragile-looking biplane crop duster. (This scene bears some remote resemblance to the climax of Siegel's Border Incident involving death by farm cultivator). Molly is the kind of guy who uses whorehouses as motels, virtuously announcing that he doesn't sleep with prostitutes -- this seems to dismay the girls. When he has to spend a few hours with a moll who forges passports, he whiles away the time by having sex with her, efficiently punching her in the face as foreplay -- she responds with a sloppy wet kiss and by groping him. The film has a sort of curdled residue of the "swinging sixties" -- even Matthau gets a sex scene, although he plays it for laughs, involving John Vernon's mistress and her perfectly circular fuck-pad bed. (The woman asks Matthau for more sex announcing that they haven't yet done it "South by Southwest" in the compass-shaped bed -- the reference is obviously to the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest.) There's a bawdy old lady who sings dirty songs and is a snoop. The dialogue references Clint Eastwood, another inside joke since Siegel's work with Eastwood in Dirty Harry is, perhaps, the director's most famous film. Siegel himself appears in a cameo as a hardware store clerk who sells Varrick a fuse, timer, and some sticks of dynamite -- prices were very reasonable in the early seventies: the entire explosive package costs 9 dollars and Varrick pays with a ten, getting change from the clerk. (I may be mistaken on this ID; according to internet sources Siegel appears as a man playing ping pong in the basement of a Chinese restaurant that is also a mob den. The film features some nonchalantly racist slurs -- a Jew is called a "bagel snapper" -- of the Archie Bunker All in the Family sort.)
Charley Varrick was critically praised but sunk like a stone at the box office. It's more highly regarded in England and Europe than in the United States. It's very good but forgettable since it cleaves so closely to film noir conventions -- I am unable to distinguish one film noir from another: they are all more or less the same and, as Andy Warhol said about cokes, all good. Charley Varrick is a little better than the average, elevated by the character actors and Matthau's rather somnolent, but effective, performance.
