The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959)

To me, this movie is perfection.

From my favorite movies..

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

If you are a Steve McQueen fan this is a must on your check off list. Steve's second major role before Wanted: Dead or Alive where he honed a lot of his skills on camera. Movies like this are similar to Kansas City Confidential where is has that minimalist feel, like you are revisiting time gone by. No extras and low budget give a very realistic sense of time. I would show this movie to a class to unpack what 1959 looked like. From a historical perspective, these films are worth the free YouTube experience. What I find annoying is how a bank robbery with such effort to plan and execute never mentions how easily it would be to get extra time in the bank to pull off the heist. Maybe if a screenwriter inserted this the movie would fall apart. A simple call or riot in a part of time far from the bank would pull all the small town cops to that location giving the robbers the needed extra time to secure their heist. Pay some kids to shoot a gun off, to smash a car, to harass a woman--man with a gun call--and BOOM, they're off! Yet, we never see this in a movie.Recommend this film for the noir quality and to realize CGI, big budget is not needed to entertain.

This is like one of Donald Westlake's early Parker novels, without Parker. Steve McQueen plays a young man falling in with a gang of bank robbers through the brother of his ex-girlfriend (David Clarke as Gino -excellent; Molly McCarthy as Ann - adequate). The robbery is planned in detail, which is interesting and has the feel of Asphalt Jungle, while personal resentments seethe as the misogynist gang leader (Crahan Denton as Egan - unforgettable) seeks to replace Willie (James Dukas), his right-hand man/lover who is going to seed, with the young and good-looking McQueen. The film is bleak as can be, and deliberately paced, but Victor Duncan's arresting on-location cinematography is reminiscent of Odds Against Tomorrow, the sound (supervised by Edward Johnson) is naturalistic, and the music moody without resorting to saxophones. What could have been a fine piece of noir art is let down only by McQueen's James Dean histrionics in the final ten minutes. Fans of noir shouldn't miss it.

A very realistic heist film that is based on an actual crime and uses as a location the bank where the robbery took place.The makers of this film were very professional and did a good job. The only downside to the movie is that it is so sombre; the characters aren't charismatic, witty, or cheerful, and they aren't in the habit of saying things like "Do you feel lucky?" or "Make my day." (On the other hand, that fact adds to the realism.)Steve McQueen performs well, and he's not trying to be Marlon Brando. His character is a young, inexperienced man just out of college who's not too sure of himself and who is trying not to become a habitual criminal.Since the film is in the public domain, a high-resolution copy can be downloaded here: http://www.archive.org/details/Saint_Louis_Bank_Robbery

(Some Spoilers) True story about the armed robbery of the Southwest Bank in St. Louis and the fate of the four bank robbers who participated in it. Getting a crew together to knock off the Southwest Bank head crook John Egan, Crahan Denton, wan't his boys to case out the bank for a week before they rob it. The robbers spends hours at a time checking every angle and escape route to make sure that the robbery goes off without a hitch. Right from the start things start to go sour when one of the robbers Gino, David Clarke, recruits young George Fowler, Steve McQueen, as the wheel man in the operation. George isn't a hardened criminal and only want's to pull off this job to get enough money for him to finish college and make something of himself.Gino knows Geroge from him being his sisters Ann , Molly McCarthy, boyfriend and feels that he won't choke up when things get hot. That very fact, George being romantically involved with Ann, turns out to be the Achillese Heel of the "Great St. Louis Bank Robbery".Needing a place to stay until the day of the robbery Gino tells George to go see Ann, whom he recently broke up with, an ask her for $50.00 and tell her that he needs it to keep him from being sent back to prison in Chicago.Reluctant at first Ann gives George the money, with a personal check to send to Gino. Later Ann sees him in the city, St. Louis, and knows that he and George are up to no good.Depressed at the thought of Gino and George robbing the Southwest Bank, she saw George case it out from a diner across the street, Ann starts to get so out of hand that she jeopardies the impending bank robbery by getting drunk one evening. Later Ann goes a step farther writing in lipstick "this bank is going to be robbed" on the Southwest Bank's windows. Outraged at Ann's behavior, and George and Gino not being able to control or shut her up, John and his partner Willie take Ann to their hideout where John in a fit of anger throws Ann off the fire-escape killing her. With both Gino and George totally in he dark to what happened to Ann, John and Willie tell them that she flew off to Chicago, the four get ready for the big bank heist. Then for some strange reason George is told that he'll have to take part in the robbery and that Willie is to replace him as the wheel man; it was John's way of keeping Willie quite about his murdering Ann. The fact that Willie is put behind the wheel and George, who's not only a better driver but far more responsible and loyal to the group, was sent into rob the bank turned out to be a complete disaster. John gets shot by the cops with Gino killing himself when he saw there was no way out, and the thought of him going back to prison was just too much for him to take. George ending up badly wounded is arrested and sent to prison for the rest of his life. This destroys his dream of being able to finish his education and become an honest and upstanding citizen in the community. The man responsible for all this mess happening Willie, the getaway driver, gets away without as much as a scratch on him leaving the three other crooks to face the music, and police bullets. Solid crime caper with Steve McQueen, as George Fowler, doing his best as he methods acts his way through the movie. McQueen goes from a quite and scared college kid to a hardened and unfeeling criminal within the 89 minutes of the film. The ending is something to watch as George almost bleeding to death and holding a young couple hostage in the bank, Eddie and his wife of two months( Larry Gerst & Martha Gable), finally sees the light to what he got himself involved in. If George was as smart as he though he was he should have listen to Ann, when she was still alive,and all this would have never happened to him or her.