The Big Caper

This is a neglected crime film that is worthy of a Turner Classics Noir showing but ignored by noir critics and writers. It starts off as a humdrum heist film but by 30 minutes in, it goes crazy with a sado-masochistic, homoerotic episode and from then on, the criminal weirdness is nonstop. A very good cast makes it special.

I was interested in this film not only because it is a noir, but because it costars opera star Mary Costa. Conman Frank (Rory Calhoun) approaches a wealthy colleague (James Gregory) with an idea he has to rob a bank. It's in a town that houses the military base payments on certain days. Frank thinks this would be a cinch, but he needs backing. Flood has an interesting idea. He sets Frank up with a gas station and arranges for Frank and his girlfriend Kay (Costa) to live in the town and establish themselves as good citizens who fit in. It turns out that not only do Frank and Kay get along better than expected, but the gas station is turning a profit. They also are making friends. Kay confesses she envies her sister's life as a wife and mother and realizes she's been losing out. She wants to break with Flood, but Frank warns her to wait until after the robbery. The next problem is the unsavory and unreliable people who are supposed to help on the job. One is the alcoholic pyromaniac (Robert Harris), posing as Frank's uncle, who is supposed to distract the police and firefighters by setting some fires. He can barely get around and is constantly asking for booze. Corey Allen plays Roy, a dumb as a box of rocks muscle man who gets beaten by Flood for showing his muscles off to Kay. Paul Picerni as Harry arrives to the job with a bimbo girlfriend (Roxanne Arlen) in tow, who tries to hold up Flood for a cut of the take. How anyone expected this group to pull off anything, and how Flood could just send Kay off to live with Rory Calhoun - well, it all seems pretty preposterous. Still, it does hold some interest, and the end is exciting. Mary Costa was the singing Aurora in Sleeping Beauty for Disney, and had a wonderful career as an opera star. Costa and Anna Moffo set a new high bar for beautiful women in opera. After Costa retired, she worked with children in ChildHelp, and as of this writing, is still alive at 91.

This is one of those intriguing caper films that deals 90% with the build up to it and shows how capers fail simply because of the people they let become involved. There's the mastermind (Rory Calhoun), the big money man (James Gregory), his mistress (Mary Costello), not to mention an alcoholic pyromaniac and a psychotic young man that would as soon stab a cute dog to death let alone strangle a woman who rejected him. To get the caper off the ground, Calhoun and Costello posed as a married couple who move into the community where they intend to rob a bank of a million-dollar account but first established themselves as a respectable business owner and his new wife. becoming friendly with local law enforcement and others in the neighborhood gives Calhoun and Costello a friendly reputation, but things go awry as the drunken pyro gets out of control, the crazy young man turns homicidal, and Gregory discovers that Costello is two-timing him. This moves at the perfect pace to set up each of the characters and each one of them has interesting tidbits about them revealed which makes for intriguing drama as well as a thrilling film nor. usually films that spend so much time on a setup and Abdul, but that is not the case here at all. There are enough important details implemented to provide great psychological drama, and the conflict between everybody involved in the caper build to where you know they'll most likely end up destroying each other. Corey Allen is one of the screen's most memorable crazies, gentle at one moment, then malevolently homicidal the next. Roxanne Arlen adds demention as a stereotypical dizzy blonde. As for the three leads, Calhoun under plays his character's seedy nature, and Costello adds on a dimension of conscience as Gregory's gal pal. Gregory, so memorably sinister as the evil politician husband of Angela Lansbury in "The Manchurian Candidate", is commanding in a role that could have been cliched and colorless. The screenplay, direction, editing and photography are all first-rate, and a wonderfully dramatic score sets everything emotionally in tone. There's no let up on this one. It will keep you enthralled throughout.

The Big Caper has enough interesting characters to make it worth watching. But this 50s noir caper film could have used a lot of improvement in the characters and their motives. Rory Calhoun is a conman associate of big time crook James Gregory and Calhoun has blown the proceeds of the last score on slow horses at Del Mar. He wants to work again and has bank job lined up, a small town bank where the money for the pay of the US Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton is located. Gregory cooks up a scheme and it's a dilly. Part of it involved Calhoun and Gregory's girl friend buying a filling station and a home and living in the town for a few months as Ward and June Cleaver clones. Mary Costa the girlfriend gets to like the lifestyle, Calhoun isn't crazy about it at all. I can't really believe that Gregory sends Costa off to live with Calhoun and pretend to be man and wife. Is there something wrong with that picture? The scheme however is something else. And Gregory collects around him some set of helpers. Robert Harris is an explosives guy who gets his jollies from his work and has a real drinking problem. There's muscle bound Corey Allen who has issues and is crushing out on Gregory as a father figure. Paul Picerni brings along the ultimate bimbo Roxanne Arlen and tells her just enough about the score to have to have her taken care of. These people, especially Arlen really make The Big Caper worth looking at. The plot and the redemption of our protagonists is not especially well dramatized.

Rory Calhoun swaps his horse for a car in director Robert Stevens' taut little heist thriller "The Big Caper" with Mary Costa and James Gregory. If this slickly done melodrama is predictable, you have to remember that when it came out, nobody could get away with a crime. Although the robbers aren't able to get away with a cool million in bank notes, they manage to execute the crime. "The Big Caper" is memorable chiefly because of its gallery of warped rogues, right down to the amoral protagonist who finds the right gal and decides to quit the racket. Stevens and scenarist Martin Berkeley never let the action go slack as the thieves lay out the project. Unfortunately, the trust among the thieves erodes quickly after a gin-swilling explosives experts is recruited into their ranks. Meanwhile, Flood (James Gregory) grows suspicious about the relationship between Frank Harper (Rory Calhoun) and his girlfriend Kay who have settled in town of San Felipe, California, as a couple who operate a gas station. Zimmer drives the wedge in deep between Flood and Harper because Harper doesn't like him hitting the bottle. Things grown complicated because the thieves want something to distract the authorities while they steal a million-dollar payroll intended for the Marines at Camp Pendleton. When the gang isn't slowing deteriorating, Harper grows compassionate with his neighbors. Ultimately, he turns against Flood when he learns that Zimmer plans to plant the explosives for the distraction at the local high school. The catch is that when Zimmer plants the explosives, the school is filled with kids practicing a play. The abrupt ending is the worst thing about this superbly acted drama.

This is a 1.5 hour train wreck. Scene one we know RC (star Rory Calhoun) is determined to rob a bank so we immediately know happily ever after ain't gonna happen. He enlists an old ex-con pal to plan the caper.Normally you would blow into town unknown, pull off the job and split but instead RC buys a gas station and a house, befriends the the community, joins the Country Club to get everyone to know an love him and his fake wife for six months and THEN pull off the bank job and stick around for another month and then split town. Brilliant plan, right? I don't see it that way myself but his old pal is a criminal master mind so what do I know? Half the flick revolves around the fake life of our fake schmaltzy couple until the various characters involved in the caper show up in town to plan and carry out the caper....and boy, do I mean Characters with a capital "C". First the pyromaniac gin addicted torch man, the spooky masochistic body builder looney toon, a floozy dame whose name is Doll, the businesslike safe cracker and a harmless watch-out. As this gang of idiots play out the train wreck really takes place and naturally ends in the inevitable pile up with our rehabilitated fake couple promising to hook up no matter what. The End. Nice old DeSoto's tho.

Adapted, like Stanley Kubrick's more celebrated 1956 crime movie THE KILLING, from a novel by underrated thriller writer Lionel White, THE BIG CAPER is an economical, pacy minor 50s crime movie which, unfortunately, somewhat loses its grip and falls away on the home strait to deliver less than it initially promises. Trapped in an ever-increasing spiral of gambling losses, Frank (Rory Calhoun, taking a welcome break from the saddle) sells his now semi-respectable gangster boss Flood (James Gregory) the idea of bankrolling a 'big caper'. The sleepy Californian coastal town of San Felipe is home to a bank which holds the substantial payroll for a nearby army base, and appears just ripe for the pickings for a team of professional hoods. Flood stakes the plan, and, after buying up the local gas station (an ideal stakeout locale for the bank located across the street), Frank sets up home with Flood's moll Kay (Mary Costa), aiming to win the trust of the local populace based on a seemingly legitimate veneer of domestic normality. Biding their time, Frank and Kay ingratiate themselves with the local 'square' population as they await the arrival of Flood's specialist team. But when this outfit includes an alcoholic pyromaniac, an inveterate womaniser, a psychotically loyal bodyguard and a kingpin who is beginning, rightfully, to suspect that his girl wants out from her previous lifestyle, the seemingly perfect caper begins to look fatally flawed. Swift and punchy, and betraying the best of its paperback origins in swift, sharp characterisation and abrupt narrative gear changes, this benefits from a nicely embittered change-of-pace lead performance from Calhoun (who, in forsaking his cowboy boots and spurs here, suggests he would have made an effectively downbeat noir actor) and a surprising sense of well-oiled coiled-spring menace from the underrated Gregory. Although a tad schematic in its paralleling of the Eisenhower-era nuclear family with Flood's dysfunctional criminal one, and running out of steam on the way to a regrettably contrived ending which involves a Damascene conversion which doesn't quite convince (a more cynical remake would probably put that right, though), this is a diverting slice of 50s criminality which seems, like much of the quirky crime roster from this period, to have slipped off the generic radar in recent years. Worth a look, even if it can't hold a candle to Kubrick's more celebrated Lionel White adaptation from the same period.

I just finished watching "The Big Caper" and thought it among the best film noir pictures I have seen--and I've seen a lot. Because it was so good, I am shocked that its current rating on IMDb is quite mediocre. Believe me, it's well worth your time. The film begins with Frank (Rory Calhoun) approaching Flood (James Gregory) with a plan to knock over a bank. But, it's no ordinary bank--it will have a million dollars for the payroll of the nearby military base. The plan, however, is NOT to just walk in and steal the money--it's much more subtle. Frank and Kay (Mary Costa) will first go to this small town and open a business. Then, after four months of fitting in, they'll launch the caper. There are LOTS of glitches along the way. The biggest one is that after four months of playing house, Frank and Kay find they actually are enjoying their fake married life. The business is going very well and they like the community. For the first time, they like being normal. But, normal is NOT what the rest of the gang turns out to be. They are among the sickest group of misfits I've ever seen--far sicker than the usual noir baddies. Frank's phony uncle is actually a psycho who loves blowing up and burning things...and he's also an unpredictable alcoholic and complete sociopath. Flood's other recruits aren't much better--but you'll just have to see this motley group for yourself to believe it. Where does it all go? As I said, you just have to see it for yourself. The biggest pluses of this film are the character development as well as the assorted group of sick freaks. Frank and Kay's transformation through the course of the film is believable and the sickies are terrifying. In addition, the film is quite taut and exciting. Rarely have criminals seemed so evil during this era than in "The Big Caper". Believe me, they make folks from other contemporary films like "The Asphalt Jungle", "DOA" and "The Killers" seem like pussycats! Well worth your time.

The Big Caper

This is a neglected crime film that is worthy of a Turner Classics Noir showing but ignored by noir critics and writers. It starts off as a humdrum heist film but by 30 minutes in, it goes crazy with a sado-masochistic, homoerotic episode and from then on, the criminal weirdness is nonstop. A very good cast makes it special.