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The Criminality of Charley and Nadine

posted 11 years ago by ecarle
5 replies | jump to latest

"Charley Varrick" is a great little movie...but it is a little movie.

Things happen plot-wise like a well-built watch, but director Don Siegel and his screenwriters seem content to "gloss over" certain plot points and just move along. They don't spend a lot of time exploring "back story" EXCEPT for plot: that Charley Varrick was once an airshow pilot who did a drunk act and could flip his bi-plane upside down; that he turned to crop-dusting to make a living and failed and that and then -- he became a bank robber? Located a psycho ex-Vietnam war vet like Andy Robinson's Harmon to work with? Found a tough guy like Al Dutcher(killed before we can meet him, in the botched bank robbery escape, but we're told he served prison time for killing his wife!).

And what about Nadine? Seems like a mature enough ol' gal, but when the cops start asking questions -- she shoots one point-blank in the face and the other in the gut.

In short, there seems a "disconnect" between how Charley and Nadine went from being air show performers to crop dusters to bank robbers...and exactly WHY Nadine(of all people) could be such a cold-blooded killer.

I suppose the cops had Nadine dead to rights, an arrest was imminent even as the bank robbery was in process. I suppose that Charley and Nadine figured cops just might have to be killed. I suppose Nadine made that call and took that action.

I also suppose the movie hints at what happened here:

Probably Charley and Nadine came from poor, hardscabble backgrounds. An airshow is rather like a travelling carnival, if not the best sort of air show, its like a low-rent circus.

And then Charley failed in crop dusting as "the last of the independents" against "the big combines"(he relates to Harmon in one of the film's few awkward exposition scenes.)

Harmon needles Charley about "is that what made you the big winner you are today?" and we see that Charley lives in a pretty small mobile home.

Hence, its just possible: Charley Varrick and his wife Nadine are among those "losers" in society who decide to get even.

As "Charley Varrick" proceeds, Nadine is dead(shot by the cops she shot) and Matthau is charming and smart and pitted against very deadly Mafia types...but we can never really shake the reality(especially when Varrick is played by funny Walter Matthau), that Charley Varrick's life story went so wrong along the way he decided to join the people who are willing to make a living by pulling guns on innocent others and taking their money. And killing them.

[–] joshua_carpino 11 years ago

you seem to be laboring under an illusion here. charley and nadine weren't supposed to be sympathetic.

[–] ecarle 10 years ago

Perhaps, but that made for a "conflicted" movie, didn't it?

We spend the whole movie hoping that Joe Don Baker's Molly will NOT catch up with Matthau's Varrick, and there is certainly satisfaction when Varrick wins in the end and kills Molly and gets away.

There are other threads around here discussing how odd it is that lovable Walter Matthau is playing a character whose gang kills policemen(in a movie made by the same director who opened "Dirty Harry" in honor of fallen officers.)

I suppose what we are talking about here is an "anti-hero noir." Charley gets away at the end, but his wife is dead and he will be declared dead and can never be "Charley Varrick" again. He'll be on the run for years.

It should be noted that movies like this were made a lot in the 70's. As usual, one blockbuster got the ball rolling: "Bonnie and Clyde" with its anti-hero robbers.

Except they got killed.

[–] tmf_scipio 10 years ago

I like your description.

I'd suggest you watch Failsafe. That movie just might change your opinion about Walter Matthau being just a funny man.

Hitler! C'mon, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade.

[–] ecarle 10 years ago

I like your description.

I'd suggest you watch Failsafe. That movie just might change your opinion about Walter Matthau being just a funny man.

---

Oh, sure. Fail Safe in 1964 gave him a very dramatic role -- and Matthau played "heavies" a lot back in the fifties.

But he reached full STARDOM as a funny guy..."The Fortune Cookie"(even though he's a pretty bad guy) and "The Odd Couple"(where, slob or not, he's a very GOOD guy...the ladies loved him.)

Intermixed with those two hits was "A Guide for the Married Man" and "Secret Life of an American Wife"(sex comedies) and then a string of comedies: Cactus Flower, A New Leaf, Plaza Suite, Kotch(with some drama and an Oscar nom for Matthau), Pete n Tillie(good comedy up front, but tears at the end.)

I'd say that Matthau's one-two-three commitment to three seventies thrillers in a row -- Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policman, and The Taking of Pelham 123 -- reflecred a conscious desire on Matthau's part to prove AGAIN that he could be the man he was in "Fail Safe."

And Matthau intermittently did more dramas in the years after his seventies comedy career faded out in the eighties.

[–] studio_raat 10 years ago

My favorite movies of All Time are "Good Fellas" and 1963's "Charade" with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Matthau definitely wasn't supposed to be funny in that!