Inferno

The Film Noir Odyssey

Writer: Francis Cockrell

Director: Roy Ward Baker

Cast: Robert Ryan, William Lundigan, Rhonda Fleming

Cinematography: Lucien Ballard

Music: Paul Sawtell

Studio: 20^th Century Fox

Release: August 12, 1953

Film noir in 3-D? Well, weirder things have happened…

“Inferno” was made at the tail end of the classic noir cycle and also the tail end of the 3-D boom of the early 1950s. After its initial release, the film languished for decades, only seen in its 2-D version on television and on those made-on-request DVDs. But a long-overdue restoration saw it released in 3-D on Blu ray and also a new 3-D print was created to tour the country, which is how I saw it at a revival theater.

The plotline is pretty sparse and unoriginal, with Joseph (William Lundigan) and Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) leaving her rich, difficult husband Donald (Robert Ryan) with a broken leg on a mountain in the middle of the desert. They expect he’ll be dead soon, come up with an easy cover story and then begin to plot their life together with Donald’s money. But Donald is far from dead, managing to create a splint for his leg and scooting on his butt all the way through the desert with revenge on his mind.

Astonishingly enough, the 3-D gimmick works. It raises an otherwise unremarkable, padded minor noir quite a bit thanks to the stunning color cinematography and intelligent use of the technology. It also doesn’t go whole hog into the 3-D for the majority of the running time, instead choosing to use it subtly throughout until the big, flame-filled climax where people are throwing chairs right at camera and roofs are falling… directly out of the screen toward the audience!

I cannot stress enough how much the contribution of iconic noir cinematographer Lucien Ballard (“Murder by Contract,” “The Killing”) matters to the success of “Inferno.” Collaborating with director Roy Ward Baker (“Don’t Bother to Knock”), Ballard wrings every bit of visual interest from what could have been a flat and uninspired location. But under his lens, the mountain looks like a monster and the desert looks like one of Dante’s most uninviting circles of hell – Ballard ups the reds and oranges to a shocking degree, and it works like gangbusters to make things seem even more dangerous.

Can you tell I’m shocked that the 3-D worked as well as it did? Because I am. I previously covered Alfred Hitchcock’s “Dial M For Murder,” which I also saw at a screening in 3-D, and I have to say that it works better here. If you see “Inferno,” you really owe it to yourself to see it with the gimmick intact, because I worry that, without it, the movie would flounder. Yes, you’d still have the great cinematography, but every shot was made with the technology in mind, so you’d essentially be looking at a beautiful, colorful Monet painting with colorblind eyes.

I guess I should get to the story, which feels like something that would have worked well as an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” or “Suspense.” The movie is only 83 minutes, but it still feels padded within an inch of its life, with screenwriter Francis Cockrell (who coincidentally wrote 17 episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”) coming up with manufactured complication after complication to keep things feature length. The screenplay starts with Donald already in the desert on the mountain, and I’m wondering why Cockrell didn’t simply have a prologue sequence showing how the characters got there.

Neither of the two main storylines – Donald in the desert and the lovers trying to make sure he is dead – really get cooking in any meaningful way, though they do dovetail together well in the final ten minutes for the aforementioned cabin fire fight. Once Donald conjures up a way to get slowly (ever so slowly) down the mountain, the air goes out of his storyline because he manages to become Bear Gryllis even with the splint and constant pain. There are several details in these scenes that genuinely impress, like the makeshift leather coverings he makes for his hands or the moment a wolf eats the animal he has just shot. But they are surrounded by a lot of Donald scooting around on his butt and annoying, repetitive voiceover from the character telling us what we are already seeing onscreen.

Ryan acquits himself well to the part, turning in an impressive performance even though he has no scene partner for the majority of the film aside from that awful voiceover. Fleming looks like a million bucks – no wonder she was called The Queen of Technicolor – but doesn’t have much to do aside from looking pained and anxious. Lundigan is unfortunately very miscast and sinks most of his scenes – imagine someone like Richard Conte or Jose Ferrer in the role and you can imagine a better movie.

I’m recommending “Inferno” with a big ‘ole asterisk. Only watch the movie if you can see it in 3-D. There’s not much point in seeing it on TCM or buying the flat DVD because you are missing the best part of the experience. That version I would give two stars to… but the 3-D version? Three stars sound right – one for each dimension.

Score: ***

The Strange Woman

The Film Noir Odyssey

Writer: Herb Meadow

Based on the novel by Ben Ames Williams

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Cast: Hedy Lamarr, Louis Hayward, George Sanders, Hillary Brooke

Cinematography: Lucien N. Androit

Music: Carmen Dragon

Studio: United Artists

Release: October 25, 1946

Well, this is one case where the title doesn’t lie. Jenny Hager is indeed a strange woman. Further, “The Strange Woman” is a strange film. Here is one of those movies that is never uninteresting to watch – but I’m not sure it’s any good.

We’re closing out our miniseries on director Edgar G. Ulmer here, with perhaps (I’m presuming) the biggest budget he ever worked with. Since being exiled from all the major studios for causing the marital break-up of Carl Laemmle’s nephew Max Alexander (he later married Alexander’s now ex-wife Shirley Kassler and remained so for the rest of his life), Ulmer found haven among the Poverty Row studios, particularly PRC. After directing the well-regarded noir films “Bluebeard,” “Strange Illusion” and “Detour” for the studio, executives obviously knew what a talent they’d lucked into, and gave Ulmer his choice of their most high-profile productions, including their first million-dollar feature, the straight melodrama “Her Sister’s Keeper.” Now with a little buzz around him, producing partners Hedy Lamarr and Jack Chertok hired him to make this film, to be released through United Artists, with Lamarr also playing the lead character.

Turns out Jenny was making Bangor, Maine strange way before Stephen King moved in, with the film set in the early 1800s. The abused child of a drunk, Jenny learns quickly how to get what she needs to survive. After being whipped by her father, she shows off her wounds to local lumber baron Isaiah (Gene Lockhart), who marries her immediately despite the fact that she’s the same age as his son Ephraim (Louis Hayward). And before you can Google “Is it incest if they aren’t related by blood?” Jenny has seduced Ephraim and is telling him to off his father. Soon there’s a canoe accident and Isaiah is dead, even though Ephraim keeps claiming he didn’t mean to drown his dear ‘ole dad. Jenny spurns Isaiah and moves on to seducing the new captain of the lumberyard John (George Sanders), even though he’s currently in a relationship with Jenny’s best friend Meg (Hillary Brooke). If that sounds like a lot to happen in 100 minutes, you are correct.

Like “Bluebeard,” “The Strange Woman” almost stumbles into being a noir – most of its running time seems devoted into making a low-budget, less racist version of “Gone With the Wind,” with Lamarr’s Jenny a woman who cannot be tamed. But there are also savage passages where the character goes full-on femme fatale, pulling the movie into noir territory, specifically something akin to “Leave Her to Heaven.” I bring up that movie specifically because production was shut down for almost a month right around the time that “Heaven” was released, immediately becoming a critical darling and exploding at the box office (it would go on to become one of the most popular films of the decade). Now, the shut down was because Lamarr came down with the flu, but I have to wonder if script revisions weren’t made during the downtime to cash in on the success of “Heaven,” twisting Jenny into much darker territory. I have no proof of this, but the timing does make me wonder.

I also wonder this because, to be honest, the storytelling is totally scattershot. The screenplay is by Herb Meadow (“The Unguarded Moment”) and the viewer gets almost no sense of what he’s going for thematically. Jenny is an interesting character, but this is almost entirely thanks to Lamarr’s performance – on page she’s confusing and conflicted. The movie goes to pains to underline her kindness to the town, her love to Meg (until she suddenly stops loving Meg) and her sisterly bond with a town sex worker. But then three minutes later, Jenny is banging John less than five yards away from Ephraim’s still-hanging body – he was driven to suicide because of her. And no, I did not just make up that last sentence… it somehow got past the production code. I fully believe that three-dimensional characters can be capable of great good and great evil… but this feels more sloppy and scattered than purposefully sketching her out. And then there are the riots, evil preachers and the aforementioned canoeing accidents, which seem to come out of nowhere (these might have been in the source novel, but seem wild translated to screen). It doesn’t help that the finale sees Jenny trying to run John and Meg over with a carriage before being involved in a terrible accident at a cliff which didn’t exist one reel prior, and her dying words make almost zero sense thematically considering what we’ve just seen.

If the storyline doesn’t have a coherent throughline, that makes Lamarr’s work all the more impressive. She’s excellent here, managing to single-handedly sand down the weird edges of the storyline and make wild, baffling scenes seem coherent thanks to her work. You can’t look away from her while she’s onscreen, and it’s easy to understand why three men would all overlook gigantic red flags in order to sleep with her. Lockhart, Hayward and Sanders are all fine in their roles… none share much chemistry with Lamarr, but then again Lockhart and Hayward don’t need to. Brooke is very, very good in her thankless best friend role, getting a lot of fury and frustration across in her eyes and cheekbones.

For his part, Ulmer uses every penny of his budget to make things feel more epic than what we are actually seeing. After all, even though this was a huge budget for him, it is still a B-film. The world he creates looks great and feels foreboding-as-hell, and his collaboration with cinematographer Lucien N. Androit (“And Then There Were None”) is well done. The film apparently went over budget by almost a million dollars, but I have no idea whether this was because of Lamarr’s health crisis causing delays or Ulmer deciding to indulge himself.

Ulmer would visit noir only once more, with the abortive “Murder is My Beat.” After this, he would retreat mostly into science fiction, though every now and then get a decent budget to make an action flick as an Italian co-production, like the mostly forgotten “Hannibal”… the one with Victor Mature, not Anthony Hopkins and Ray Liotta’s exposed brains. If I’m being very honest with myself, I’m not sure that I’ve learned that much about Ulmer as a filmmaker through this mini-Odyssey… what I’m taking away is that he’s a visually accomplished director whose film quality rises and falls dramatically depending on the quality of his scripts. I liked “The Strange Woman” well enough, but what I’ll remember from it is Lamarr’s performance, not Ulmer’s direction.

Score: **1/2

Strange Illusion

The Film Noir Odyssey

Writer: Adele Comandini

Story: Fritz Rotter

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Cast: Jimmy Lydon, Warren William, Sally Eilers

Cinematography: Philip Tannura

Music: Leo Erdody

Studio: PRC

Release: March 31, 1945

Back in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, there was a trend in Hollywood where classic Shakespeare plays would be adapted to a high school setting. “10 Things I Hate About You.” “O.” “She’s the Man.” It made sense – the stories themselves were great, but now younger audiences didn’t feel like they were being taught a lesson by watching, and the young actors didn’t have to worry about the iambic pentameter. Turns out 50-something years earlier, poverty row studio PRC had the idea to do the same thing… probably because executives knew the actors couldn’t handle Shakespeare’s dialogue, nor did they have the money for the period setting or costumes. Turns out that they were groundbreaking – who knew?

“Strange Illusion” is a very loose adaptation of “Hamlet,” but twisted into a noir presentation. It focuses on a young man named Paul (James Lydon) who is still emotionally recovering from the death of his father by a mysterious train accident. He is having vivid, horrifying dreams of an evil force taking over his family and stealing his mother away, with life-or-death consequences. Concurrently, his mother Virginia (Sally Eilers) is being romanced by a clearly evil dude named Brett (Warren William)… who Paul begins to suspect may be planning to murder her after marrying her – and may have had something to do with his father’s death.

The script is incredibly blunt, right from the start. Paul’s dreams tell him to suspect someone who gives his sister a specific trinket and plays a specific song… and the moment Brett is introduced, he does both within three minutes of screentime (just in case we didn’t notice). These early sections grate as we wait for Paul to catch up with the audience and then be disbelieved by nearly everyone else in his life. But the screenplay improves exponentially as it goes along and separates itself from “Hamlet”, with an initially-suspect turn where Paul self-commits him to an asylum in order to do research surprisingly turning into a wonderfully twisted third act. It helps that, despite making the dumb decision of committing himself, everything Paul does inside is smart – I love the bit about how he captures his door key with a newspaper, and the way he ultimately escapes through a two-way mirror that was set up beautifully earlier.

The screenplay is by Adele Comandini (“Danger Signal”), and I was stunned to learn that “Strange Illusion” was produced the same year she wrote the big budget smash comedy “Christmas in Connecticut” for Warner Bros., which remains one of my favorite holiday films. First off, I have no idea why she was working with PRC at the same time, but what I’m more fascinated with is her versatility from project to project – she did well with such distinct genres as hardboiled noir all the way to musicals, and everything in between. Here, she stumbles with the mother character, who is clearly an idiot who would realize what is happening if she simply asked a single follow-up question to anything her fiancé says. But the rest of the characters are surprisingly well-rendered, even the minor supporting ones. I am obsessed with Paul’s sort-of girlfriend Lydia (Mary McLeod), who seems more invested in the mystery than Paul. When he’s about to have his big climactic stand-off with Brett, he tells Lydia to stay put… which she immediately ignores and begins running toward the danger faster than Paul. I laughed so hard I almost spit out the water I was drinking.

If the script is surprisingly smart, the acting is unsurprisingly bad. Lydon is tonally in an episode of “Scooby Doo” and not an intense murder mystery with the fate of his mother at stake, which is a shame since he’s our eyes into the story. Eilers doesn’t have much to play with… and struggles with an almost impossible character. William is fine at playing evil, which is a shame since the film would be stronger if he seemed sweet up front.

Since this is a series of articles about director Edgar G. Ulmer, I suppose I should start talking about him. Bluntly, I don’t like the visual techniques he uses to create the bookend dreams at the beginning and end of the film – I know that there was no budget, but wish he had come up with something else. But everything else? It’s pretty damn excellent. I love the shadowy motif of bars that Ulmer leans into during the asylum sequences, and the way the family home is shot is also quite beautiful. The cinematographer is Philip Tannura (“Night Editor”), and together with Ulmer, they recreate one of the greatest shots in all of noir – the man and woman sitting together near a pond, their reflection upside-down onscreen. It was first used to ecstatic effect in Fritz Lang’s “You Only Live Once,” and works just as brilliantly here.

Now, I would be remiss in my praise of the direction and cinematography if I didn’t mention that the film is in the public domain, just like last week’s featured film “Bluebeard.” As a result, the print quality reflected in the version you are watching varies greatly… some of them are so muddy and damaged that you can barely make out any of the fine work. Like the film last week, I encourage you to take the time you need to find a version that is as crisp as possible – you will be greatly rewarded, I promise. Ultimately, “Strange Illusion” is a smarter-than-it-needs-to-be film with some beautiful camerawork that definitely isn’t the worst adaptation of Shakespeare that I’ve seen.

Score: ***1/2

Bluebeard

The Film Noir Odyssey

Writer: Pierre Gendron

Story: Arnold Phillips and Werner H. Furst

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Cast: John Carradine, Jean Parker, Ludwig Stossel, Teala Loring

Cinematographer:  Jockey A. Feindel

Music: Erdody

Studio: PRC

Release: November 11, 1944

And now we come to Edgar G. Ulmer.

As of late on this Odyssey, I’ve been trying to focus on specific filmmakers whose work has had a huge impact on noir – either during its heyday or in retrospect. I’ve covered Bogie, John Garfield, Fritz Lang and a few others… so it was only a matter of time before I got to Ulmer. Director of the all-time noir classic “Detour,” Ulmer has become known as the master of the low-budget, held-together-with-tape productions, specifically his ability to do so much with so little. I like “Detour” a lot, but his other films which I’ve covered on here I have disliked, and I honestly am struggling to buy into those critics who insist that he is a great auteur. That said, the guy has spunk, and I’m eager to dive into his other noir films in the hope of finding a hidden treasure.

And is “Bluebeard” one of them?

Well, no. But it is a decent little noir, all things considered.

It’s also one of those movies that is almost accidentally a film noir. The film is clearly meant to be bottom-of-the-barrel studio PRC’s answer to the insanely popular RKO horror films of the early 1940s, specifically those produced by Val Lewton. I’ve talked about Lewton before here when I covered his lone noir “The Seventh Victim” – his films use all the atmosphere and dread of film noir but twist the genre into horror. Here, Ulmer and his screenwriter Pierre Gendron (“Fog Island”) keep their content squarely in the realm of noir… well, except for the puppet show.

John Carradine stars as the awesomely named Gaston Morrell, a serial killer and artist who specializes in painting and puppetry in vaguely 1800s period Paris. Painting a beautiful woman often triggers the violence, which is a shame since his works fetch such a high price that he keeps finding himself taking on new projects. Gaston soon finds himself obsessed with dressmaker Lucille (Jean Parker), and will do anything to be with her, including hire her to make dresses for his horrifying puppets. Meanwhile, the police keep trying to catch the killer, and officer Francine (Teala Loring), who happens to be Lucille’s sister, goes undercover to smoke him out… even if it puts her in Gaston’s crosshairs.

The script isn’t great. The puppet bits are obviously shoehorned in because someone at PRC got their hands on some of them and wanted to use them in a production. This is one of those movies where every character is about 30% too stupid to be sympathized with – for example, Francine, who is a police officer, seems so horrified at learning Gaston is a killer that she just sits there and cringes for like thirty seconds while he oh-so-slowly removes his tie when the open door is less than two yards away. Killing off Francine was a mistake anyway, since she is much more engaging than Lucille’s bland nothingness (Parker’s performance doesn’t help). At the finale, Gaston confesses that he is a serial killer to her while she is alone in a house with him… and she commits the cardinal sin of screaming and saying he’s a monster. All she had to do was say “Wow, that’s super hot, Gaston. I’m all in on this and you, but I need to head home to get some sleep – then tomorrow, we begin our new life together!” And then the moment she leaves, she heads for a police station.

Also, don’t get me started on the dialogue. Thanks.

Ulmer seems to have been granted a larger-than-normal budget for the production from PRC, and uses every penny of it. There’s even a climactic rooftop chase, which is unheard of for the company, though it ends lamely with Gaston standing on the edge of a building only to have the edge crumble out beneath him. Apparently they could afford three roofs to climb over and no more, then were running out of film at the end of the day and improvised.

Even though that sequence shits the bed at the end, Ulmer does exceptional work elsewhere. Instead of starting close and going wide as filmmakers with more money would do, he does the opposite… creating the unconscious effect in the viewer that they are seeing more space than they are. He also does some exceptional lighting tricks with credited cinematographer Jockey A. Feindel (“Accomplice”) – Eugen Schufftan (“Eyes Without a Face”) allegedly did a bunch of uncredited work, but I can’t find a second source for this. The way he lights faces in that classic Universal horror way… you know, with the partial light on the eyes, translates perfectly to this film. It’s such a shame that most of the existing prints in the public domain are complete shit because most of the exceptional work is completely lost and looks like mud. Trust me, it’s worth taking the extra time to track down the best copy you can.

Carradine is the only performance worthy of discussion here, and he’s very good. I mean, it should be clear to anyone immediately in the film that he’s a killer, but that’s a script issue, not necessarily a performance issue. What impressed me most is his sudden violence against people multiple times – Ulmer drops the ball with his slow tie-loosening early in the film, but his vicious attacks against the police and his friends later is brutal and memorable.

That said, I can put up with the bad performances from the rest of the ensemble and can deal with the bad script… but that music? Awful! Most PRC films used stock music, so the fact that this has an original score by Leo Erdody (“Strange Illusion”) is surprising in and of itself – he’s named simply Erdody in the credits. The filmmakers must have felt like they had to turn it up way, way too high in the mix… and then no one gave Erdody notes because much of the music is way too emotional (even for the time) and often off-tone with the scenes. It took me out of the film time and again.

Should you watch “Bluebeard”? Sure. It’s worth the investment for Carradine’s performance and Ulmer’s excellent eye – and will especially appeal to fans of Lewton films. Just prepare to grit your teeth through the music… it’s truly the most off-putting musical choices in a noir film this side of using “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in “I Wake Up Screaming.”

Score: **1/2

The Killing

The Film Noir Odyssey

Writer: Stanley Kubrick

Dialogue: Jim Thompson

Based on the novel “Clean Break” by Lionel White

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor

Cinematography: Lucien Ballard

Music: Gerald Fried

Studio: United Artists

Release: May 19, 1956

I think “The Killing” is a fine, flawed film noir that honestly wouldn’t stick very long in my memory aside from the big climactic shot and Marie Windsor’s incredible femme fatale. Dare I say that if the exact same movie were to be released without Stanley Kubrick’s name attached to it, then it would barely be a footnote in the noir genre. But Kubrick’s name is attached, and so the film has become a blockbuster classic noir that is spoken within the same breath as the greats, which is unfortunate because… well… it’s not one of them.

The film chronicles a robbery of $2 million at a Los Angeles racetrack, one masterminded by Johnny (Sterling Hayden) as his last big score before he lives happily ever after with Fay (Colleen Gray). For the most part, he enlists normal guys in the heist instead of professionals – people who work jobs at the track, cops and the like. One of the schlubs who works at the track is George (Elisha Cook Jr.), who blabs about the plans to his femme-fatale-in-training wife Sherry (Windsor), who then immediately blabs to her lover Val (Vince Edwards), with Val planning to steal the stolen money. The first two acts are told in non-chronological fashion, zipping back and forth through time with a narrator informing us that we are a few hours before the last scene, or after the previous one, and so forth.

The broken timeline is an audacious idea… but doesn’t really pay off in any meaningful way. In fact, it alleviates suspense in several passages because Kubrick cuts out of the tension instead of continuing to build it. It’s doubly odd because, once the heist itself begins, all things settle chronologically and it stays straightforward for the rest of the runtime. So what was the point? Why not just tell the story and build the tension in a classic sense? I can think of other noir films that have variations of this same trick, but they tend to do something with breaking time. Look at “The Locket,” for example, which has flashbacks within flashbacks, but they serve to build the narrative to an explosive finale. Not so here. Kubrick could have easily used the broken timeline to hide the Sherry/Vince subplot and then reveal the complication later as a twist… but it was not to be. Instead, we have a great idea that is executed in a just-okay manner.

That said, there are many excellent moments to savor here. Kubrick indulges in his fetish for masks during the heist sequence, and the actual theft of the money is a beautiful moment, with a poor track employee forced at gunpoint to stuff millions of dollars into a burlap sack as we watch and see loose bills falling everywhere. The multiple scenes between the sharpshooter (Timothy Carey) and the parking attendant (James Edwards) who will ultimately kill him crackle with tension. Despite the eye-rolling nature of the annoying woman and her dog, the shot of the money flying away at the airport is astonishing. And every scene between George and Sherry is a master class in great noir storytelling, first in the way she keeps emasculating him in their first scene together and second when he has shot her & she screams about the injustice of it all as she fades away.

Windsor is incredible in the role and given the very best bits of dialogue courtesy of novelist Jim Thompson, who bafflingly only gets dialogue credit for the movie instead of co-writing credit with Kubrick. Granted, it’s the only real showy role here – the rest of the ensemble of seasoned noir veterans were clearly cast because of their type and then aren’t given much to do. Edwards and Hayden are perfectly fine. Gray must have only been on set for one or two days and is completely wasted.

Kubrick’s visual style has much improved since his last film, “Killer’s Kiss.” I love the subtle long takes that would become a hallmark of his style, and the way he frames violence is exquisite. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard (“Murder by Contract”) does an excellent job of marrying the style of the film itself with the myriad of stock racetrack footage that is used throughout.

Because of the whole Kubrick of it all, “The Killing” is probably one of the first noir films that many filmgoers encounter with the genre. As a result, the movie is often given credit for things that it didn’t really create (it was made in 1956, very late in the classic noir cycle) and is considered groundbreaking despite not breaking any ground. I also suspect it’s being overhyped by critics because Kubrick has so few feature films (13, but really 11 if you discount “Fear and Desire” and “Killer’s Kiss”)… so critics and movie fans will focus, then re-focus, on those few movies much more than work from a famed director with 30-40 films under his belt. As a result, everything in Kubrick’s oeuvre is getting a ton of critical re-evaluation all the time, skyrocketing nearly every one of his projects to masterpiece status… even if it isn’t worthy. And yes, I’m looking at you, “Eyes Wide Shut.” “The Killing” has been swept up in this same tide.

That said, it’s a good movie. If this was indeed your introduction to noir, it’s not a bad way to start. And it’s influenced a bunch of (better) movies, most notably Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and “Jackie Brown.” That said, if you are a fan of “The Killing,” I encourage you to check out other noir films that are stylistically interesting in the same way this film is, like the aforementioned “The Locket.” Right at the top of your list, though, should be “Armored Car Robbery,” which did nearly everything done here (including spilling money at the airport!) but six years earlier.

Score: ***