The Good Die Young

Four actors that I like a lot but were never huge stars. A British crime drama with touches of American film noir. Oh, and I've never heard of this movie...at all. Released in 1954, The Good Die Young popped up recently on Turner Classic Movie's schedule, and I couldn't pass up the chance.

On a quiet night on the streets of London, four men sit in a car, one of them, 'Rave' Ravenscourt (Laurence Harvey) passing pistols out to the other three. The quartet is readying themselves to pull off a robbery that will net them each some serious money. What drove them to this point? How did they get here? How did they become so desperate that these four non-criminal types would turn to armed robbery? Rave, Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart), Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) and Mike Morgan (Stanley Baker) are just that though, incredibly desperate with nowhere else to turn. Can they somehow pull the job off?

Tweaked from a novel by Richard MacAulay, 'Die' certainly sounded pretty good to me. Director Lewis Gilbert's film was transplanted from America to London, a nice touch, and certainly pays tribute to its American film noir influences. Filmed in a shadowy, moody black and white, the look of the film reflects the pretty dark, doomed tone of the story. I liked composer Georges Auric's score, appropriately dark and foreboding, building up to the finale we all could see coming. As well, the acting is solid across the board, but I still managed to come away disappointed here. I'm disappointed I was disappointed too, mostly because I really wanted to like this one.

What mostly caught my eye was the casting of the four leads. Laurence Harvey, Richard Basehart, John Ireland and Stanley Baker?!? And in a quasi-film noir?!? The excitment unfortunately ends there. Following the quick, hard-hitting, mysterious opening, the rest of 'Die' is all flashback leading up to what we've already seen. The story bounces among the four different storylines/main characters, the quartet eventually meeting in a London bar and bonding over their generally pathetic situations. They meet everyday, drinking early and often even though none of them really have any money. Obviously, this part was necessary to show the depths they've all sunk to, but they get tedious...very quickly. The movie only runs 94 minutes, but it feels significantly longer. I guess I was expecting more of the crime drama angle so my expectations may have been slightly off, but I still struggled in those later portions before the actual crime.

The acting is still pretty decent even if it just gets to be one thing on top of another late. Harvey becomes the villain, his Rave a suave, smooth, debonaire gentleman who married Eve (Margaret Leighton), a very rich, well to do woman who's got a few years on him. Basehart's Joe is trying to get his British wife, Mary (Joan Collins), to come back to the states with him, ripping her from his evil mother-in-law's grip, (played by Freda Jackson). An infantryman in Germany, Ireland's Eddie is married to Denise (Gloria Grahame), a small-time actress aspiring to be more and with her co-stars too. Lastly, there's Baker's Mike, a boxer trying to leave the ring with the little money he's saved with his loving wife, Angela (Rene Ray), but her family keeps causing them issues. Of the four, Harvey and Baker represent themselves the best, or at least in the most interesting fashion. Also look for Robert Morley in a one-scene part as Rave's father who hates everything that his son has become.

If there is a saving grace in 'Die,' it's the last 20 minutes or so, the flashbacks left behind as the actual robbery develops. Harvey's Rave manages to convince them all to go in on the job, the amateur crooks deciding whether the reward is worth risk. If noirs and crime dramas have taught us anything, it's that crime just will not pay in the long run, and that foreboding sense comes true here. It's the ending you would expect here. I wanted to like the movie a whole lot more, but it loses its momentum in the first hour. Worth seeking out for the cast, but disappointing on most other levels.

The Good Die Young (1954): **/****

Seven Thieves

Pick a movie genre, any movie genre at all. Watch enough of that type, and you're going to start seeing repeats.  I'll pick one of my favorites, the heist flick. Here's just a few genre conventions that come to mind.  The last job before backing off that will inevitably go bad. The impossible to rob vault/casino/fortress that is still somehow robbed in the end. The team of experts and specialists briefly putting aside their differences for the greater good, money. The inevitable fallout post-heist when the team turns on each other. Somewhere along the road, a movie had to use these conventions first, but I can't place it. I've seen a lot of heist movies, and eventually they all become the same thing.

The key of course is to bring something new to the table, anything at all.  A twist you didn't see coming, a character that keeps everyone around them suspicious to their motives.  We're not talking rewriting the formula here, just tweaking it to something a little different, a little more exciting. So now in 2011, the movies have had their chance to expand on the formula. But in 1960, it was still something new when bad guys and crooks were allowed to be the main characters far more often than during Hollywood's Golden Era.  Unfortunately for 1960's Seven Thieves, every cliche, every stereotype, every genre convention is used in this often dull, disappointing heist flick.

Visiting the French Riviera, discredited American professor Theo Wilkins (Edward G. Robinson) sends for a friend from his past to come visit him. Paul Mason (Rod Steiger) obliges his old friend, visiting Theo in Monte Carlo and Cannes. The aged professor has a plan for the convict just recently released from a 3-year prison sentence, one that could likely land him back in prison. Theo has assembled a small team to pull of a dangerous heist in the Monte Carlo Casino, but he trusts none of them and needs help from Paul in leading and organizing the job, all the little details that so many others would forget about. Wary of actually being able to pull off the job, Paul agrees almost exclusively as a favor to his old friend, and starts working on how exactly how to put it all together, a huge lump sum of money waiting at the end.

Movies slip through the cracks over the years, and even with the impressive cast here, Seven Thieves couldn't avoid that fate. Generally forgotten, the cast is still worth mentioning and was the main reason I stumbled across it on Netflix. Steiger is always watchable in a weird, eccentric way, and Robinson is a consummate pro no matter the depth of the project he's working on. Joining his team are Joan Collins as Melanie, a dancer/stripper in a cheap Cannes club, Eli Wallach as Pancho, Melanie's protective guardian, Alexander Scourby as Raymond, the inside man at the casino, Michael Dante as Louis, all-around ladies man and safecracker, and Berry Kroeger as Hugo, the strong man and unpredictable muscle.

Robinson assembles this team, but something feels like it was missing in the process.  For one, their parts in the actual heist seem sketchy at best.  Other than wearing slinky outfits and generally being sexy (watch her "scandalous" dance scene HERE), Collins' main role in the job is to open a window. Wallach's Pancho has no real use other than pretending to be a Baron which he ends up failing at. Scourby looks nervous, Dante struggles with heights, and Kroeger is capable of who knows what. Something doesn't add up with director Henry Hathaway not hitting the right notes at all with this team of specialists. 

I guess my biggest problem here is that the movie is just plain dull.  There's no sense of urgency, no feeling of danger. The crew is never really dealing with the threat of being captured. The job itself is criminally simple compared relative to the security they're facing. Are there no guards in this casino at all?  More than that, this is a visually dull movie. Hathaway films in black and white, giving it a romantic, throwback feel to the story.  But that's it. The cast clearly never went to France (Monte Carlo or Cannes), instead relying on long establishing shots that zoom in to green-screen shots of the actual cast "enjoying" beautiful France. Hathaway's filming style isn't so much a style either with the veteran director simply placing his camera in front of the cast and letting them go to work. I'm all for a build-up of tension, but there's nothing here. Just long, uninterrupted shots of the cast talking.

A saving grace for even the crappiest of heist movies can be what everyone wants to see...the actual heist. Compared to the rest of the movie, 'Seven''s heist is nothing special, too simplistic, just too easy after all the build-up about how difficult the job will be. The Ocean's 11 remake channels it in a way, improving on it by leaps and bounds.  A bad heist is one thing, but Hathaway drops the ball in the finale. Wallach's Pancho is supposed to take a pill that will knock him out, mimicking death. He falters, Robinson injects him, and then pockets the still-pristine pill.  SPOILERS STOP READING SPOILERS Robinson actually dies of a heart attack, and I'm thinking "Oh, here we go, big twist." He took the pill, faked his death and will now steal away with the winnings. Yeah, I wish. There's no twist, and Seven Thieves features one of the stupidest endings I can think of in a story/movie of this nature. It limps to the finish, content to go back into the forgotten closet of movies that could have been so much better.

Seven Thieves <---trailer (1960): **/****