Roddy McDowall is supposed to be pretty nasty in this one, especially at the beginning. When he's not robbing a bank or shooting a cop to death, he's slapping his girl friend around.
He makes off with the loot and he and his paramour hole up in a hotel room with more than half a million dollars in unspendable cash. They need to launder it somehow. But one or two scenes suggest that if you must be sequestered in a hotel, there are worse people than girl friend Diane Sayer to be sequestered with. She always wears shorts. Her long legs are alluring and her tiny feet inviting, especially when she has hundred-dollar-bills pinched between her toes. She doesn't mind being tossed around once in a while either, which is an appealing trait.
Not that McDowall gives her much thought. He's worried about figuring out some way to get the stash to someone who will give it legally back to him. I think this is called laundering. I once left a dollar bill in a pair of pants I washed but that's as much as I know about laundering money.
McDowall runs into a senile old lady, Ruth McDevitt, who finds him to be a nice polite boy and more or less adopts him. He calls her "Auntie" and she calls him "Gerald", although she can't spell "Gerald." She's a hoarder too. She has old boxes and piles of magazines strewn around her shabby flat. McDowall and Sayer plant the loot in the pages of McDevitt's years-old magazines, draw up a will for her leaving everything to a church charity -- except the magazines. Then they try to kill her.
I don't think I'll give the ending away except to say that it's a satisfying twist that comes with the crash of cymbals. I had a slight problem with Roddy McDowall as a semi-noir gangster. He's not a murdering sadist. He's the kid in "How Green Was My Valley" who finally throws away his crutches. I had no problem with Diane Sayer. None at all. And as the doddering old lady, McDevitt is as good as they come.
He makes off with the loot and he and his paramour hole up in a hotel room with more than half a million dollars in unspendable cash. They need to launder it somehow. But one or two scenes suggest that if you must be sequestered in a hotel, there are worse people than girl friend Diane Sayer to be sequestered with. She always wears shorts. Her long legs are alluring and her tiny feet inviting, especially when she has hundred-dollar-bills pinched between her toes. She doesn't mind being tossed around once in a while either, which is an appealing trait.
Not that McDowall gives her much thought. He's worried about figuring out some way to get the stash to someone who will give it legally back to him. I think this is called laundering. I once left a dollar bill in a pair of pants I washed but that's as much as I know about laundering money.
McDowall runs into a senile old lady, Ruth McDevitt, who finds him to be a nice polite boy and more or less adopts him. He calls her "Auntie" and she calls him "Gerald", although she can't spell "Gerald." She's a hoarder too. She has old boxes and piles of magazines strewn around her shabby flat. McDowall and Sayer plant the loot in the pages of McDevitt's years-old magazines, draw up a will for her leaving everything to a church charity -- except the magazines. Then they try to kill her.
I don't think I'll give the ending away except to say that it's a satisfying twist that comes with the crash of cymbals. I had a slight problem with Roddy McDowall as a semi-noir gangster. He's not a murdering sadist. He's the kid in "How Green Was My Valley" who finally throws away his crutches. I had no problem with Diane Sayer. None at all. And as the doddering old lady, McDevitt is as good as they come.