After his aging mentor gets killed in a holdup, a youthful criminal protégé named Tony (Gary Lockwood) and his girlfriend Ann (Elke Sommer) plot an armored car heist in the desert southwest of Las Vegas. But things get complicated as Ann works for the armored car owner named Skorsky (Lee J. Cobb) who has ties to the Mafia. And the Feds are trying to nail Skorsky. Still, Tony thinks he can pull it off because, unlike his mentor, Tony has a more modern outlook. When Ann says to Tony: "Nobody can get into a Skorsky truck", Tony replies: " ... it can be done, just a question of information, like where's the key ... see, it's all so simple; information".
The plot starts out okay but bogs down in the middle; the film could probably have been shortened by at least twenty minutes. But I have to say that Tony's solution to hiding the armored car is ingenious; and the film is worth watching if for no other reason.
This is a European production, and it shows. Dialogue is dubbed; some of the actors are Italian or French. And the score sounds like what one would hear in a Spaghetti Western, cold and haunting. But it's the production design and costumes that render this film locked into a cinematic time capsule.
Blonde bimbos wear mini-skirts. Vehicles include Olds Toronados, Pontiac GTOs, Vokswagon bugs, station wagons, and Corvairs. In desert scenes, men use walkie-talkies. And the casting of Elke Sommer adds to the time capsule feel, with her ten-inch long false eyelashes. Computers are big clunky stand-alone machines that use cardboard punch cards and reel-to-reel tapes. And the dialogue doesn't help either; at one point Ann is referred to as a "broad".
Acting is borderline acceptable, except for Elke Sommer, whose robotic movements and emotionless expressions make her seem like some kind of futuristic mannequin. Cinematography is dark, and there are lots of close-up and extreme close-up shots. At one point in the second half there's a physical fight. Because of the photography or maybe because of the Direction, I couldn't tell who was doing what to whom. Rear-screen projection in some scenes also dates the production. And there are a lot of scenes shot along the Sunset Strip in Vegas, which may have been stock footage.
Undeniably different, especially in the way the armored truck is concealed, this gritty film is worth watching once. But the viewer needs to have high tolerance for dated elements, which make the film time-bound, to the point of unintentional humor at times.
