William Talman

Armored Car Robbery

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Mastermind Dave making a hoax call

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 … Read more

The Hitch-Hiker

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L-R: Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, Edmond O'Brien

1953’s The Hitch-Hiker opens with an on-screen declaration: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours – or that couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.” A gun, a man, a car, those staccato sentences, the threat of death – it’s film noir, and an unusual one not because of its length (a lot of noirs were short B movies), but because it was directed by Ida Lupino, a rare female voice in among the big swinging dicks of … Read more