It feels right that Don Siegel's follow-up to Dirty Harry was finding near-perfect material for directly translating his sturdy, blunt-force filmmaking sensibility and love of technicians/professionals. A heist-gone-wrong thriller with a fairly simple and tense plot involving a gang of small-time crooks led by a former stunt-pilot turned crop-duster turned low-level career criminal Charley Varrick (a wonderfully weary and relaxed Walter Matthau lending some charm and soul to the idea of being “the last of the independents”), who rob a bank and incidentally wind up on the receiving end of a violent manhunt when they realize they’ve run off with mob money.

Many of the usual events and archetypes of the genre ensue: Dirty Harry’s Andrew Robinson as his hotheaded younger crew member who nearly blows their getaway plans; Point Blank’s John Vernon as the cold and stern verbally-menacing businessman who hires Walking Tall’s Joe Don Baker (RIP) for his large, sadistic physically menacing hitman-terminator services, which he does while rocking southern gentleman Stetson/tan-suit combo that makes him feel like a mix of a hired goon for the “organization” in one of Richard Stark's novels and a Texas enforcer in a Coen crime film; Walsh in Blood Simple/Bardem in No Country. And of course the film is bookended by two lean and mean stunt-heavy action setpieces with lots of 70s grit to them, the first an Eddie Coyle style bank robbery that turns into a Burt Reynolds regional exploitation dirt road car chase, the latter a junkyard climax with Matthau ripping around in a biplane similar to the one Tom Cruise just went wing-walking on while Joe Don Baker tries to ram into him with his Cadillac and gets turned into a ragdolled dummy via dynamite.

It’s a genuinely fantastic piece of economical 70s action/crime-thriller entertainment that moves like clockwork but what makes it special is how Siegel’s no-frills workmanlike pragmatism is a style and ethos shared by the characters, giving the film a laid-back almost caper-like sense of patience and momentum. It’s vision of a desperate blue-collar guy going up against ruthlessly cold bankers/mobsters that could’ve (and has) been handled in bleaker, sadder that instead plays its hunter-and-prey process sequences in order survive through such a cutthroat underworld like a series of loosely strung together professionals sighing, clocking in, stopping to chat with co-workers, and even occasionally enjoying the work and ing the time together. (The Matthau sex scene is hilarious.)

The side effect of this perspective is sometimes its collection of goofball characters treat the genuinely tense situation so casually the film feels more low-stakes than maybe it should, but on the other hand if they had turned this into a TV show where small-time gum-chewing working class criminal got into various smirking hijinx and wriggled his way out of various crime-gone-wrong situations while in pursuit by various 70s character actor heavies through intelligent planning/stunt-piloting every week, I would’ve watched every single episode.

Full discussion on ep 384 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.