Let’s hear it for Plod. With a bit of bad luck, a dangerous dame and a drop of hubris thrown in for good measure, that’s the idea behind Armored Car Robbery.
Detail, detail, detail is the USP. The villains may be smart but the cops have something the bad guys don’t have – persistence. They do not give up and in the end it’s shoe leather and blunt-force cop procedure that does for a gang who – no surprise, surely – have carried out a robbery on an armoured car.
First we meet the criminal mastermind, David Purvis (William Talman), outside Chigago’s Wrigley Field baseball stadium, where he’s just put in a call to the police that the takings at the stadium have been robbed. The call is a hoax, designed to show how long it takes for the cops to get there. Then we meet Dave’s gang. Benny (Douglas Fowley) has signed on for the job because he’s hoping to impress his burlesque-dancer Yvonne LeDoux (Adele Jergens). She only married him because he promised her the high life. Now, stuck with an obvious loser, she’s cold-shouldering him. If he brings home the bacon, Benny reasons, Yvonne’s feelings will change. Unlikely – she’s seeing Dave on the side.
The two other guys, Al (Steve Brodie) and Ace (Gene Evans), are just along for the ride, on the heist and in the movie. It’s Dave and Benny who are important here, in the heist itself and then afterwards, when Benny cops a bullet and neither Dave nor Benny’s wife Yvonne seem to care too much about it.
As said, procedure. Director Richard Fleischer is onto it from his opening shot, of a switchboard at a police station. Then switches back to Dave and his meticulous preparation for the job, starting with that hoax call and then working through to the idea behind his plan – the last pick-up of the day is at Wrigley Field, so the van will be loaded with money – and its execution, using a “broken down” old car as a distraction and gas to neutralise the guys guarding the money.
And then back to the cops. The forensics guy making plaster casts of car tyre treads and footprints. The squads setting up roadblocks. The radio operators keeping everyone in the loop. The dictograph (a bug) used at a crucial moment to glean information.
It’s a good heist, both Dave’s planning of it and Fleischer’s shooting of it, fast and furious. It’s a good cast. Charles McGraw is always good at these manly men roles and here, when his buddy gets killed during the heist, is doubly good as Lieutenant Jim Cordell, a man driven by vengeance as well as cop righteousness.
Jergens is also particularly good, as the cold bitch of a wife disrupting the manosphere with her sexiness. The face she pulls when she hears the unfortunate state her husband is in – priceless.
The whole thing is very unsentimental though. Hard-boiled dialogue, transactional relationships. Fleischer shoots out on the streets, in lumber yards and low dives, going for low angles to accentuate the drama and the unsavoury urban grittiness of everything.
Ultimately, no one is quite as good as they think they are. Dave’s plan goes wrong and he pays a price. The cops aren’t individually that great either, they have feet of clay. But they are organised and have specialists on hand. Teamwork makes the dream work, and all that.
All nicely done in 67 minutes. Chalk up another small success to Fleischer, at this point just about to be promoted out of B movie territory by RKO boss Howard Hughes – his next film, His Kind of Woman, was twice as long and starred Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, each doing what they do best.
Armored Car Robbery – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
