Armored Car Robbery (RKO, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 6), after The Day the Earth Stood Still, Turner Classic Movies showed something called Armored Car Robbery under the rubric of Eddie Muller’s weekly “Noir Alley” telecast. Even Muller admitted that there’s nothing particularly noir about Armored Car Robbery, a film whose clunky title betrays its origins as an attempt by RKO to get out a film that would compete with John Huston’s “caper film” masterpiece, The Asphalt Jungle. The Asphalt Jungle and Armored Car Robbery were even released on exactly the same day: June 8, 1950. And there was an even quirkier connection between the two films: the “bad” girl in The Asphalt Jungle was played by Marilyn Monroe, while the “bad” girl in Armored Car Robbery was played by Adele Jergens, who’d played Marilyn’s mother in the 1948 “B” musical Ladies of the Chorus (even though Jergens was just nine years older than Monroe). I’d watched Armored Car Robbery, directed by Richard Fleischer from a script by Earl Felton and Gerald Drayson Adams based on a story by Robert Angus and Robert Leeds, some years ago with my husband Charles on a VHS tape I’d recorded off an earlier TCM showing, and I’d remembered it as better than it now seems to be. It’s basically a duel of wits between police lieutenant Jim Cordell (Charles McGraw, unusually cast as a good guy for a change) and his nemesis, criminal mastermind Dave Purvis (William Talman, later hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the TV series Perry Mason; when Charles and I watched Talman play a psycho killer in the 1953 film The Hitchhiker, directed by Ida Lupino from a script by Daniel Mainwaring and a much better movie than Armored Car Robbery, Charles joked, “No wonder he was such a lousy prosecutor! Now we know which side of the law he was really on!”)

Purvis, who’s so careful about concealing his identity he cuts the labels out of his shirts and discomfits his friends by moving often, organizes an armored car robbery at L.A.’s Wrigley Field (not the famous one in Chicago but one the Wrigleys built in L.A. to house the original Los Angeles Angels, a minor-league farm team for the Chicago Cubs). Purvis hangs out at Wrigley Field and calls in a false alarm to the police so he can time exactly how long it will take them to respond to a real one. The armored car robbery actually takes place in the first reel and the rest of the movie is about how the interpersonal relationships between the crooks who pulled it off – Purvis, Benny McBride (Douglas Fowley), Al Mapes (Steve Brodie) and William “Ace” Foster (Gene Evans) – break down during the aftermath and lead the police to be able to catch them. Benny is married to stripper Yvonne LeDoux (Adele Jergens, looking properly electric), but she’s having an affair with Purvis, who’s planning to run away with her to Mexico as soon as the job is completed. The robbery happens but Benny is mortally wounded in a shoot-out with the cops and for much of the movie the tension is between Benny’s demand that his fellow crooks get him to a doctor and their refusal to stop or even slow down their flight to attend to their fallen comrade. Purvis finally puts Benny out of his misery with two well-aimed shots, and the crooks dump the car with Benny’s body in it into a nearby lake. Having donned gas masks and haz-mat suits to commit the robbery – part of their plot was to immobilize the armored car guards with gas – they drive through an oil field to reach a boat they have waiting for them to make their final getaway.

Only the cops, after briefly being as bamboozled as the robbers wanted them to be, finally figure it out and give chase. Ace Foster is killed by the police and Al Mapes gets arrested and rats out the locations of Purvis, Yvonne and the loot. Actually the cops had figured it out earlier because Purvis had told everybody in the gang not to write anything down, but to memorize all the contact information. Alas, Benny had not only written down Purvis’s L.A. address and phone numbers, he’d done so on the back of a matchbook and put it in the band of his hat – and naturally the cops find the tell-tale matchbook on the premises of Purvis’s L.A. redoubt. There’s a reasonably exciting chase scene that’s unusual for 1950 in that it takes place at an airport and involves the attempts of Purvis and LeDoux to get the pilot of the plane they’ve rented to take off without any interference from the ground and air traffic controllers trying to get the plane to hold still long enough for the police to arrest them. The pilot, whom Purvis is already holding at gunpoint to force him to ignore the controllers’ instructions, refuses to take off when a big commercial airliner coming in for a landing bears down on them. Purvis gets out of the plane and attempts to flee on foot with the suitcase containing the loot, but ultimately the airliner literally crashes into him and kills him. As he falls, the suitcase flies open and the bills for which several people have already died spill out everywhere – an ending Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson would later copy, much more effectively, for their big-caper film, The Killing (1956). In The Film Noir Encyclopedia, Robert Porfirio is far kinder to Armored Car Robbery than it deserves. He writes, “Armored Car Robbery does possess the noir visual style of many RKO crime and suspense films in the post-Welles era.” No, it doesn’t; cinematographer Guy Roe gets almost none of the classic noir look into it, and in the end it’s just another mediocre movie sucking off the bones of a great one that just happened to be filmed at the same time.