At last, a DVD release for one of the great Don Siegel’s best movies. Originally opening in 1973, Charley Varrick is a terrific crime thriller that was dismissed at the time by middlebrow critics like Pauline Kael as minor drive-in fodder for the shoot 'em up trade. To be sure the movie is violent and its sexual politics are risible; it’s the kind of picture where casual encounters between the sexes begin with a one-liner of innuendo and end up in bed, with satisfied smiles and half-smoked cigarettes, all-round. Still, if the attitudes on hand seem conventional, even retrograde, the movie actually resounds with a passion for the idiosyncratic quirk.
The whole thing hinges on the fact that we are forever underestimating the potential of our hero, who calls himself, 'the last of the independents’, in an irony that Siegel clearly identifies with and relishes. Charley looks, sounds and acts nothing like the hard-boiled professional crook he is supposed to be. Siegel’s casting of Walter Matthau, by then one of Hollywood’s great serio-comic actors in the title role, was a masterful move. With his sleepy expression, lazy drawl and lugubrious physicality, Matthau walks through life and death encounters here like he’s some big old dog blinking awake after a long days sleep in the sun. But, even if Charley has no bark, he’s got a hell of a bite.
Perhaps with a nod to Elmore Leonard’s standard plot trope, Charley Varrick’s narrative is a simple case of bad guys pursuing a bag of money. The cash is mafia dollars, stolen by Charley and his pals in the movie’s stunning opening moments. Joe Don Baker, looking 10-feet tall in an all-white cowboy Sunday best suit and Stetson, plays Sally, the sadistic hit man enrolled to nail Charley and his partner, Andy Robinson. (Robinson played the psycho killer in Siegel’s Dirty Harry, a few years before.)
With its bleached sun-dried landscapes of rolling desert hills, and cast of low-rent hucksters and sad 'trailer-park’ denizens, Charley Varrick ranks as one of the most original of mafia movies. It’s a fascinating mix of styles and thriller-standards; it’s a western, an action-movie, a character-riff and an exercise in twisty plot dynamics, the kind, where the plot is the point. Imagine Tarantino without the post-modern trickery and the Coen brothers without too many jokes and you’re half way there.
