The Big Caper (Pine-Thomas Productions, United Artists, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Fish Called Wanda Eddie Muller showed a 1957 movie called The Big Caper as part of his “Noir Alley” series that turned out to be surprisingly good. The omens for this one weren’t great: the director was someone named Robert Stevens, who only made five feature films and otherwise worked in the salt mines of series TV (though he directed 44 episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show, more than any other director – Hitchcock himself directed 20 – and was the only Alfred Hitchcock Presents director to win an Emmy Award for the show). The producers were William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, who’d “made their bones” when Paramount subcontracted their “B” production unit to them in the late 1930’s; the two were nicknamed “The Dollar Bills” because their movies were made quickly, cheaply and profitably. The Pine-Thomas films generally achieved reliable entertainment without either aspiring to or achieving greatness, but this time they made a film of genuine quality. The stars were Rory Calhoun and Mary Costa, with reliable supporting actors like James Gregory, Paul Picerni and Corey Allen, the kid who loses the chickie run to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and the script was by Martin Berkeley based on a 1955 pulp novel of the same title by Lionel White. Lionel White was a direct-to-paperback writer of crime thrillers, many of them caper stories, and several major directors filmed his books. Most notably Stanley Kubrick turned White’s 1955 book Clean Break into The Killing, a great caper movie often bracketed with John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle because Sterling Hayden starred in both. Other White novels that got filmed included Obsession (1962), made by Jean-Luc Godard as Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Seppo Huunonen as The Hair (1974); The Snatchers (1953), filmed in 1968 as The Night of the Following Day with Hubert Cornfeld as director and Marlon Brando as star; Rafferty (1958), adapted for film in the Soviet Union in 1980; and The Money Trap (1963), made into a movie two years later with Burt Kennedy directing and Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth starring in the fifth and last of their films together.

Rory Calhoun, an actor with two fairly long prison sentences behind him in real life (once before he started acting and once for punching out an undercover police officer after he’d started making films) stars as Frank Harper, ex-Marine who’s hatched a scheme to steal the payroll money for the U.S. Marine base at Camp Pendleton. Needing financial backing to set the scheme in motion, he seeks out Flood (James Gregory), who’s living in a Southern California home that’s costly enough to have its own swimming pool, where Flood’s girlfriend Kay (Mary Costa) frolics (and titillates straight male audiences with lots of glimpses of her swimsuit-clad body). The payroll money for Camp Pendleton is kept overnight at a bank in the small town of San Felipe, and the plot is to rob the local bank and steal the money over the weekend before its scheduled shipment to the base. Flood hires a crew to carry out Harper’s plot, including crazy alcoholic arsonist Zimmer (Robert H. Harris); Harry (Paul Picerni), the lookout man; safecracker Dutch Paulmeyer (Florenz Ames), who seems to have wandered in from the dramatis personae of The Asphalt Jungle (like Sam Jaffe’s character in The Asphalt Jungle, Dutch is an older man, and as did the safecracker in the earlier film Dutch boasts that he makes his own “soup,” the nitroglycerine he’s going to use to blast the safe); and Roy (Corey Allen), a muscle thug who can’t keep his hands off women no matter what the consequences. The plot involves Frank and Kay posing as a married couple and befriending the San Felipe townspeople for four months before the heist. Frank buys a local gas station with part of the seed money and establishes himself as a presence in the town, liked and respected. Among his new friends are banker Sam Loxley (Patrick McVey), his wife Alice (Louise Arthur) and their teenage son Bennie (Terry Kelman).

Part of what makes The Big Caper so great is that it reverses the central conflict of many films noir; instead of taking people leading normal suburban existences and suddenly plunging them into the depths of the noir universe, it takes people living a noir existence and puts them in the middle of comfortable contemporary suburbia. Kay decides that she wants to be a suburban wife and mother, and Frank is the partner she wants for that life. To that end she tells Frank that as soon as the job is over and they have their money, she’s going to dump Flood, and while Frank is too decorous (and too Production Code-inhibited) to make love with her then and there, he agrees even though he warns her not to tell Flood she’s leaving him until after the heist. Alas, their warm suburban idyll is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Zimmer, whom Frank and Kay take in as a house guest and pass off as Frank’s uncle, “Bill Jameson.” Zimmer keeps hitting Frank up for gin and, when he scores a bottle of another spirit Frank has carelessly left lying around, he lights a match and watches it burn with a fiendish grin that suggests he’s having an orgasm then and there. Then he goes out and actually burns down a building just to get more of his sick kicks. Roy and Harry follow into town shortly afterwards, along with Flood, and Flood is disgusted that Harry brought along a woman, Doll (Roxanne Arlen), whom he picked up in a dive along the way. Doll gets dispatched by Roy in a bizarre quasi-seduction scene on the beach the writers seemed to have ripped off from Lennie’s attempted rape and definite murder of the boss’s wife in Of Mice and Men – a chilling end for Roy, who’s the most compelling character in the film.

Alas, the night Flood and company pick for the big caper is also the night the Loxleys are having a barbecue on their front lawn, and though part of the plan is that Zimmer will burn down the local electric station (thereby starting a blackout and disabling the bank’s security system), a paint factory and high school to divert the town’s police and fire departments so they won’t be able to respond to the robbery, Frank is shocked to discover that the high school won’t be deserted that Saturday night as he had assumed. Instead, a group of students will be rehearsing a concert for the next day’s town festival, and Bennie Loxley will be there as one of the soloists. Frank desperately chases down Zimmer to stop him from setting that fire, at least, so Bennie and the other kids will be spared. Ultimately Flood shows up at Frank’s and Kay’s house with the cash, but Frank knocks him out and tells Kay to call the police, intending to give himself up, return the money and reunite with Kay as soon as whatever sentence he receives for his complicity in the crime is up. The Big Caper is a surprisingly good late noir, with levels of social and moral complexity rare in the genre. What I particularly liked about it is the degree to which Frank and Kay actually grow to enjoy the whole suburban lifestyle they’re at first just pretending to live. Their attitude towards their fellow suburbanites gradually shifts from disdain to a surprising degree of relief and envy for what they have, including stability and so-called “traditional family values” – and though I have no particular love for traditional suburban family values, The Big Caper makes them seem like a welcome alternative and relief from the constant pressures of the noir world and its relationship to crime. The Big Caper is a welcome discovery, a quite impressive and sensitively done thriller with moral overtones rare in a genre piece like this.