"Charley Varrick" review

“Charley Varrick” is a rare old gem much like “Suddenly”, “The Killing” and “Point Blank”. It is a film that few have seen, and those who have seen it rarely speak of it, but it definitely deserves to be seen and talked about. It is a crime film simply about a criminal mastermind, the crime he commits and how he attempts to get away with it. For Charley Varrick the odds are constantly stacked up against him and fate is always conspiring to bring him down and watching him take these challenges head on with strategy, cunning and no emotion is truly a joy to watch.


The title character is played by Walter Matthau. He is a crop duster by trade and a bank robber on the side. Charley and his crew enter a peaceful small town in New Mexico and target the local bank. They come out of the robbery with a bag of money and most of their crew dead, including Charley’s wife who was also the driver. She survives long enough to drive the crew to safety before a mortal gun shot wound takes her life. That leaves Charley and his partner Harman with the money. Sprawled out on the floor of their desert trailer they make a startling discovery: three quarters of a million dollars. This is startling because they only assumed they would come away with a few thousand. For Harman this is a dream come true. Charley isn’t quite as optimistic. He is the smarter of the two, a criminal genius to be exact, and he knows that such an amount of money can only be blood money belonging to some very dangerous people. The mafia he suspects and he may be right.



This information reveals that the bank manager is corrupt and he was one of a few people who knew about the blood money being kept in the bank. The police, who don’t know how much money was really taken, vow to catch the crooks, but they’re out of their league. These bumbling cops aren’t even qualified to catch the Dukes of Hazard. The real opposition is the mafia themselves who never appear on screen. Instead, they send a single man to go into the town and retrieve the money. His name is Molly, nothing more. Whether that is his first or last name is a mystery because this character doesn’t talk enough to expose such information. He is extremely direct in everything he does. He says what he wants to say and does what he has to do. In most of his scenes he walks into a room, insults whoever is in his way and usually smacks around whoever has the guts to stand up to him.

The movie becomes a classic cat and mouse thriller as Molly patiently stalks Charley, even though for most of the time he doesn’t know who Charley is. All he can do is follow the minor clues which lead him a step closer to Charley. It feels inevitable, not contrived, that Molly will find Charley sooner or later. The story, which is based on the novel “The Looters”, is obviously inspired by the classic thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. While in the bedroom, Charley and his lady discuss a round bed and all the directions a person could sleep in, by which they mean all the sexual positions they can try in such a bed. One of those positions is called “North by Northwest”, which if you didn’t know, is a Hitchcock film. The second reference to that same film is a key action sequence that involves a game of chicken between a car and a crop duster, except that the protagonist is the one piloting the air craft and the enemy is on the ground.


The entire film, much like it’s hero and villain is slow and patient with its pacing and plotting and yet it still remains intense and exciting. There’s a brilliant series of events involving dental records that has an incredible pay off. There are many sequences like this that are so well crafted by director Don Siegel, who made “Dirty Harry” and his screen writers Howard Rodman, and Dean Riesnar. They do a brilliant job of planting their plot devices in the first act and then letting it grow until it pays off brilliantly in the final scene.


So what is this film really about? I guess one could say it’s about various degrees of criminals and evil doers. There are few innocent characters. The ones that are have very few lines. Our hero is technically a sinner but a likeable one. The film makers are smart to avoid trying to make Charley into a saint through a contrived character arc. He is the hero because his enemies are so much more despicable. There’s an odd sequence where Molly enters a brothel, insults and then turns down the services of the hookers. So why is he there? To sleep, with no hanky panky before or after. He asks for a fresh egg and toast breakfast before he hit’s the hay, then he claims quite proudly “I don’t sleep with whores”. What a guy.

There’s a line in the film that really made me chuckle. When the mafia is spoken of the bank manager tells his associate that if they don’t find the money, they (the mafia) will “…go to work on them with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.” . Yes that is the famous line from “Pulp Fiction” spoken twenty one years before “Pulp Fiction“, when Quentin Tarantino was only ten years old. Any movie that inspired a line of dialogue in “Pulp Fiction” is cool in my book.