Charlie Varrick- the Last of the Independents

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched a pan and scan version of Charlie Varrick. Directed by Don Siegel in the last years of his life, it’s a straight up gangster film, with the twist of having comic actor Walter Matthau as small time bank robber (and cropduster pilot) Charlie Varrick ‘the last of the independents.’

He robs a little bank in a little town in New Mexico. But it all goes wrong, and his wife who is driving the getaway car is shot and killed. Charlie is left with a half-crazy partner and a couple bags with more money than a bank like that ought to have. Charlie guesses correctly that the bank is just a front for the mob who uses it to drop money to launder it going in and out of the country. So now Charlie has the FBI after him as well as the mafia, and the mafia are worse. Mostly the movie details Charlie’s efforts to get away from the mafia with his life.

He does this by being clever, one step ahead of them. No violence on his part.

And he does succeed.

Siegel shot in Panavision, so I only saw half the frame at any one time. It’s in color, nicely shot but nothing special. Siegel was not a pictorial director, he liked shooting fast and dirty and liked to have his frame a little ragged and messy and more like life, so his sets and locations have a ‘just drove by and found this’ look to them. I’m sure a lot of work went into making the locations look like no work was done on them though.

Lalo Schiffrin did the score, and it’s annoying. Probably not so much back then, but right now it seems so utterly 70s – Schiffrin was incredibly prolific and he might be more responsible than anybody for creating that particular crappy tv-copshow, 70s score sound.

The biggest miscue in the movie comes with sex. Back then you had to have some violence and some sex. Your hero was no hero unless he bedded at least one woman. So we have the unfortunate scene of Charlie, who otherwise through the rest of the picture is all business, ‘no such thing as being too careful’ going to bed with the private secretary of the top mafia guy we see, who is herself portrayed through the rest of the movie as no-nonsense, all business, and somebody who knows what’s going on behind the scene at the ‘western bank’ – so it’s totally out of character for him to want to fool around when his wife got shot to death 3 days ago and he’s desperately trying to save his own life; it’s totally out of character for her to want to fuck this middle-aged, tired nobody who her boss has to order killed – him and everybody who might help him.

Other than that the story is clean and straight, and sometimes I was trying to see if Clint Eastwood could have delivered the lines and been Charlie, and he could, but at that time (just after Dirty Harry) Clint seemed too young. Clint would’ve been more believable bedding the secretary, but he wouldn’t be so believable as the old pilot who has turned to robbing banks only because there aren’t any other jobs to do. In fact Eastwood was plenty old enough to have done that, it’s just that he looked a lot younger and sexier than the part calls for.

Matthau is perfect as the clever, experienced, wiser, older Charlie. But it’s oddly lacking in passion, this film. Part of that is just the breezy way Siegel puts together films, he was never one to go deep into wallowing emotions. Thus we have a sort of fantasy, wish-fulfillment film, but Matthau is not the screen presence that invites us to want him to be our wish-fulfillment alter ego.

But ‘the last of the independents’ was no doubt the way Siegel liked to think of himself, so we can read a lot into Charlie’s fallen state as a mataphor for Siegel himself and other one-time independent directors who now can do the job better than any of the kids, but times have moved past them, and there’s nothing really worthy for them to do anymore.

(written around 4 March 2009)