Last of the Independants

Charley Varrick (1973) is another movie I’m just getting around to seeing. Directed by Don Siegel, and starring Walter Matthau, it’s about the cutest heist movie you’ve ever seen. It starts with Jacqueline Scott and Matthau in a car outside a small town New Mexico bank, where Matthau, in old-age makeup, is going in to cash a check. Two more men in masks jump up and the robbery gets going. But some cops make the Scott’s getaway car as stolen, she starts shooting, they shoot back, the guard shoots one of the robbers in the bank, and Charley and the remaining robber, Andy Robinson, pile in and they take off.

They get away clean, to a van stashed in the hills, but Scott has been wounded and dies. Matthau tells the story of their lives together: He was a stunt pilot and she was a wing walker. When that work dried up, they went into crop dusting. That didn’t pay, so they augmented their incomes with some bank robbery. She was one hell of a getaway driver. They put leave her body in the car and blow it up. This is a beautiful way to show Varrick’s tenderness and love for his wife, and his ruthlessness.

When he and Robinson get back to their trailer, they discover that their haul is much bigger than they expected - so big it must have been a mafia bank they knocked over. That’s bad news, because the police will stop looking some day, but the mafia won’t rest until they are dead. And indeed, we discover that the mob has assigned Joe Don Baker as “Molly” to find and kill the robbers.

Baker, who we know mainly from the MST3K movie Mitchell, gets to be pretty chilling in this. He suspects an inside job, because otherwise how did the robbers know about the money? He doesn’t take coincidence into account.

Meanwhile, Charley is making plans to get away, including going to the dentist to get his wife’s records (so her body can’t be identified). He pulls a little shuffle on some other records as well. He unsubtly digs up someone who can make phony passports, and I’m going “Charley, no!” But he has a plan.

It turns out to be pretty clever at that. In some ways, it’s the best part - we all love it when a plan comes together. In others, it’s too bad because we don’t see so much of his state of mind, just his cleverness. He is established as an old-timer - his crop dusting motto is “Last of the Independants”, and that’s Don Siegel’s motto too.