Charlie Varrick (1973) has the unalloyed honesty of a personal video. No contiguous editing. No grand-standing performances. No clever lines. No impressive set designs. Unsurprisingly, it was directed by Don Siegel, known for enforcing artistic economy on his art. And he loved the character of a loner— freedom, ingenuity, independence and fate.
Walter Matthau is the eponymous Charlie Varrick, a small-time criminal, and plays the role without his grumpy-man eye-rolling. It’s a Matthau we’re not used to and adds to the personal video vibe.
Varrick isn’t so hapless as unlucky. A well-planned bank robbery goes very wrong, very fast. There is violence and there is death (remember, this is a Siegel film). Varrick and Harman (Andrew Robinson), his one surviving accomplice, soon discover their huge haul of cash belongs to the mob. Trouble.
Everyone in this film seems to be sweating all the time, even when they’re not sweating. The interior shots really do look like interiors and not an air-conditioned sound stage. That wonderful grit that you find in many of the best 1970s American films—The French Connection, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets—is there. The beautiful women—Sheree North, Felicia Farr—are not dolled up. These films—pre-Star Wars, et. al.—always seem closer to Life.
Siegel is skilled at creating a narrative fluency that supports a comprehensible, non-Hollywood world of crime. Everything and everyone, including Joe Don Baker as a brutal hitman/enforcer, leaves us saying, yeah sure, that’s possible.
And now, over fifty years later, we can gaze past the green screens and the blue screens and the virtual AI-this-and CGI-that, and rest and breathe for a blessed moment in this odd analogue world with its smells of gasoline and gunpowder and hamburgers and cigarettes.
In this cinematic universe of dragons and superheroes, this is the kind of film that greets you like a long-lost friend.
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