Charley Varrick

Don Siegel is best known as the director of Dirty Harry, but he actually had a long and varied directorial career. Also notable is his classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Clint Eastwood vehicle Coogan's Bluff, 1968's terrific police drama Madigan and this action classic from 1973, Charley Varrick. This movie is pure fun, a thrilling caper with just the right amount of action, humor and suspense. And it stars one of my all-time favorite actors, the Late Great Walter Matthau.



Varrick's something of a departure for Matthau. He appeared in a variety of action/thriller films in this period, including The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which I reviewed here. But he was always the comic relief character. In Pelham, he's the hero, and all the truly dark, sharp edges come from supporting players Hector Elizondo and Robert Shaw. In Varrick, he's the centerpiece of a story in which there are no real heroes, just an endless succession of criminals, some more immoral than others.

Matthau is the Charley of the title, a low-level hood who, along with his wife Nadine and two young associates, has pulled off a few bank robberies around New Mexico. The film opens with Varrick's gang pulling their usual job on the wrong bank - a crooked outfit funnelling money to the mob.

So, Charley winds up losing his wife and one partner in a hail of gunfire, only to learn that he has accidentally stolen three quarters of a million dollars from unknown gangsters. Soon enough, we see the owner of the bank (John Vernon, who 5 years later would gain lifelong infamy as Dean Wormer from Animal House) hiring a bizarre, evil hitman named Molly (an absolutely fantastic Joe Don Baker). And that's basically all the film has for plot: Charley must use his wits to control his overzealous young partner Harlan (Andrew Robinson), to evade capture by Molly, and to figure out a way out of the state with the police watching all the roads and airports.

Siegel's film comes off so swimmingly, it almost seems effortless, but producing a film this satisfying can't be simple. Simply everything works: the dialogue crackles with defiant humor, the action is exciting, never overdone or tedious as in other chase movies of the period and the Matthau and Baker performances rank among their best work, with Matthau in particular embodying a strange mixture of levity and mordant pessimism.

Siegel never allows us inside the mind of Charley Varrick, and it's the mystery that surrounds him and most of the action of the film that keeps the proceedings so interesting. We hear sketchy details of how Varrick got started in his life of crime - an unfortunate investment, a string of bad luck and so on - but never get a feeling for who this man was before he became a bank robber. And as for Molly, we know only what we learn in his first scene; he's tough, he's mean and he has a girl's name. Even the Mafioso whom Charley has ripped off never appear in the movie. They exist only as spectres, striking fear into the hearts of petty criminals through reputation alone.

Varrick has been undeniably influential to crime cinema. Quentin Tarantino in particular has lifted a few items from the film. The original title of Siegel's film was Kill Charley Varrick, an obvious antecedant to Kill Bill. Varrick's trailer home in the film eerily resembles that of Buck (Michael Madsen) in KB Volume 2. And at one point, Vernon threatens an underling with Mafia thugs who will "go to work on [him] with a pair of plyers and a blowtorch," a line that appears verbatim from the mouth of Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. And the reason for his admiration is simple: very few crime films add up to much, and almost none pack the punch of Charley Varrick.