How to Beat the High Cost of Living

1980. Directed by Robert Scheerer.

Mr. Scheerer directed a lot of television before and after this picture. It shows.

THE SHOT: Susan St. James, Jane Curtin and Jessica Lange play are suburban housewives who, financially pressed by the malaise of the Carter presidency, plot to steal a MILLION dollars from a shopping mall during a promotional stunt.

TONE: Kind of all over the place.  Never strays far from 70s TV movie comedy.  Animated titles borrow heavily from Peanuts specials, if that gives you any idea.  Senior citizens dress like hippies, adorable moppets swear like sailors, married couples trade gibes as though scripted by Neil Simon.

Susan St. James plays perky, Jane Curtin plays repressed, Jessica Lange plays flighty.

Lange, after King Kong but before Tootsie, has yet to find her voice as an actress.  She’s all over the place in this, flighty and stupid in one scene, then angry and imperious in the next, then fluttery and tragic in the one after that, none of them convincing.

There are feeble attempts to deal with feminists issues, but they conflict with the scripts need to have the women be ditzy.  Similarly, there are stabs at topical humor, including attacks on Carter, Reagan, the Germans, Japanese and Arabs.

Fred Willard has, for some reason, been asked to play dour and unfunny.  Dabney Coleman has been asked to play sincere and heartfelt.  Richard Benjamin plays his scenes as though in a completely different movie.  Might have been a better one, but still.

Garrett Morris has been given a genuine “surprise cameo” appearance, complete with “turn toward the camera” introduction, as if we the audience is expected to gasp and break out into applause when Garrett Morris suddenly appears on screen.

In a moment that defines “gratuitous nudity,” Jane Curtin performs a striptease and we go in for an utterly unnecessary closeup of some other woman’s breasts.

DOES CRIME PAY?  Yes, although, as is traditional in these types of films (SPOILER ALERT), at least half the money must be blown into the air to be shared by the townspeople.

The Hot Rock

1972. Directed by the great Peter Yates.

THE SHOT: Robert Redford et alia steal a diamond from a museum, but have a hard time keeping ahold of it.  They must plan and execute four different capers in the course of the movie.

TONE: Light, high-spirited 70s realism.  Redford breezy and effortlessly charming in the lead, much more so than he is in The Sting, where he comes off as pretty but forced.  George Segal, Ron Leibman, Paul Sand, Zero Mostel and Moses Gunn are the colorful eccentrics who provide ethnic New Yorkness to Redford’s WASPy charisma.

SPECIAL FEATURES: Helicopter ride, featuring the World Trade Center under construction.

Paul Sand steals every scene he’s in.  What happened to him?

Downtown Theater pillar George Bartinieff appears as a museum guard, as well as (what’s this?) Christopher Guest (really?  Christopher Guest?  Is that even possible?).

Robert Weil is back as a safety-deposit-box guy, as is Lee Wallace (he plays the Mayor in Pelham, a role he would repeat in Batman, 17 years later).

This was one of my favorite movies when I was 11 years old.  I remember the first time it was on TV; back in the days before VCRs, you had to reserve TV time in our family to see what you wanted to see.  I told my mom that I wanted to make sure to see The Hot Rock months in advance, and when it finally came on, she was stunned to find it was a caper film.  She had thought it was going to be a rock music documentary.

DOES CRIME PAY?  Eventually, yes.

Stander

2004. Directed by Bronwyn Hughes.

THE SHOT: Thomas Jane goes from being a guilt-ridden Johannesburg riot-police guy to becoming its most notorious bankrobber.

TONE: Gritty 00s realism.

Good use of locations.  Good sense of place.  Similar in tone to Butch Cassidy and Bonnie and Clyde, both of which it mentions.  Will not achieve the classic status of those films, but who am I to judge.

Old-fashioned bank robberies.  Johannesburg, apparently, was unprepared for the likes of Stander.  They walk in, take the money, walk out.  No one is killed, only a few people injured.

Stander starts out robbing banks to make some kind of political statement.  Later, he just does it for the money.  Still later, it’s unclear why he keeps it up.  The narrative follows a similar course of dissipation.

SPECIAL FEATURES: Several scenes of Thomas Jane nude.

DOES CRIME PAY?  For a long time, it does.  Stander and his gang apparently robbed 80 or so banks over a period of four years or so.  But justice catches up to Thomas Jane on the mean streets of, yes, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Of course, we know now that Thomas Jane went on to clean up the mean streets of Tampa as The Punisher.