Money and martinis go together real smooth like.
Sony's serving up two enjoyable 1971 caper films -- "The Anderson Tapes" and "Dollars" (aka "$") -- in the first pour from its "Martini Movies" collection. This is a DVD series with a nebulous theme (based on the five initial releases), but blessed with a cool title.
Quincy Jones provides music for both movies, with "The Anderson Tapes" jazzy main theme registering as a minor classic in the Q chronicles. The movies both revolve around emerging surveillance and security technologies of the time, horribly dated now but still effective as plot devices. Throw a mobile phone into either plot and it goes blooey, of course.
"The Anderson Tapes
," starring Sean Connery and directed by Sidney Lumet, came three years before "The Conversation," a movie it anticipates with a story constructed from a rat's nest of electronic eavesdropping activity.
Connery plays a bank robber, Duke, just out of the slammer after a decade. He exits prison with a young hipster drug offender, none other than Christopher Walken in his first film role. First things first, as Duke immediately makes love with his girlfriend, a high-priced hooker played with smarts and sass by Dyan Cannon.
The call girl's luxury New York apartment building is loaded with the loaded, inspiring Duke to plan a heist of the tenants' art, jewelry and cash.
While Duke and the druggie ex-con put together a team of assorted crooks and scammers, their moves are recorded and tracked by various crime-fighting agencies. Funny thing is, none of this wiretapping and electronic surveillance is directed at Duke; he just wanders into the webs. The agencies never communicate with each other and they're acting illegally anyway. Sound familiar?
"The Anderson Tapes" has uniformly strong supporting performers, including Alan King as a friendly mobster, Martin Balsam as a swishful antiques swindler, Stan Gottlieb as a befuddled ex-con called Pop and Garrett Morris as a hip SWAT team leader.
While Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" explored the paranoia and creepy personal invasions of electronic surveillance, the guys in "The Anderson Tapes" walk around oblivious. Their robbery jumps the tracks when a kid hostage fires up his old-school ham radio, not from any actions from the indifferent wiretappers.
The movie's slick, mostly comic tone turns dark as Lumet rushes in his commentaries on crime, punishment and wiretapping at movie's end -- an awkward drill but not one that detracts from the many pleasures of "The Anderson Tapes."
"Dollars
" gives us the first pairing of Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn, who would reunite four years later for the magnificent and far better "Shamoo." The "Dollars" story involves an American bank security expert (Beatty) and a happy hooker from Baltimore (Hawn), both working in Hamburg, Germany.
The Beatty character decides to rid some crooks of $1.5 million stashed in a bank's safety deposit boxes. Having designed its high-tech security, he knows how to pull off the job without tipping off his client, the bank president (played by the delightful Gert Frobe of "Goldfinger.") The crooks aren't quite so dumb, and so begins one of the longest chase scenes in movie history as Beatty and Hawn dash with the cash and a champagne bottle filled with liquid LSD -- (this appears to be the titular martini).
Richard Brooks ("Looking for Mr. Goodbar") directs, smoothly shifting from suspense to dark comedy, even though the film goes on too long, for two hours. There is a fair amount of nudity set in a strip club. The unusual German setting, the two sexy stars and Brooks' witty script make "Dollars" a pretty good investment on DVD, considering its bargain price.
Both "The Anderson Tapes" and "Dollars" look and sound good for the age and era. The Martini Movies mix doesn't appear to include DVD extras of any consequence, unfortunately. The other movies in the Sony series' initial releases are "The New Centurions," "Affair in Trinidad" and "The Garment Jungle."
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Speaking of "Shampoo," I caught an AFI screening of the Robert Towne classic a few months back. It plays beautifully today, start to finish, with a 2000s-friendly mix of sex, cynicism and humor. A source at Sony home video, alas, said the movie is not in the pipeline for DVD restoration, which it needs and deserves.
Also, the DVD blog sadly reports that producer Arthur Sarkissian is remaking "The Anderson Tapes" and moving it to Miami. This is the guy behind the "Rush" franchise. The new movie will be based on the original Lawrence Sanders novel.