Sun 5 Jun 2016
A Book! Movie!! Review by Dan Stumpf: THE LIONS AT THE KILL / SEVEN THIEVES (1960).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[14] Comments
SIMON KENT (MAX CATTO) – The Lions at the Kill. Hutchinson, hardcover, 1959. No US edition.
SEVEN THIEVES. Fox, 1960. Edward G. Robinson, Rod Steiger, Joan Collins, Eli Wallach, Alexander Scourby, Michael Dante and Berry Kroeger (that’s seven, isn’t it?), plus Sebastian Cabot and Marcel Hilaire. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm, based on the novel The Lions at the Kill, by Simon Kent. Directed by Henry Hathaway.
This is the first Max Catto I’ve read, and I’m asking myself what I was doing with the rest of my life.
Lions opens with Philippe, co-owner of a moribund Paris night club, reluctantly meeting with a Police Inspector who casually informs him that some of the money stolen a year or so ago in a daring Casino burglary has been passed in his club. (The serial numbers of the hot money were recorded before the theft, meaning it will be necessary to sit on the loot for years before trying to pass it.) Two of Philippe’s employees, Manuel and Melanie, match descriptions of two of the suspects, and the Inspector thinks he can use them and the money to flush out the rest of the gang by the simple expedient of publicizing his news…. the theory being that:
1.) Manuel and Melanie have been holding the lucre for the rest of the gang, and
2.) When the others find out they’re spending it, they’ll converge on the club like Lions at the … kill.
The trap is sprung in a scene of enjoyably terse violence, leaving a few loose ends to dangle intriguingly, whereupon we cut to a flashback about the robbery itself.
This takes up the bulk of the book, and does it very well as Catto details the roles and relationships of the people involved: the planner, the organizer, the technician, the extra hands, the weak-link (unreliable but necessary to the scheme) and the woman who has seduced him into compliance. The characters are not developed so much as they are gradually revealed to us with each turn in the plot, so that the complications (and they are many and well-turned) vie for attention with what we are learning about the people involved, and our curiosity about how they will interact.
Suffice it to say that the caper ends ironically but with edgy realism, whereupon we cut back to the aftermath of the police trap for yet another suspenseful and oddly moving twist to wrap up a tale I will remember.
All of which was too much to put in a movie, and the ending would never have passed the censors in those days, so when they filmed this as Seven Thieves they cut out the beginning and end and just filmed the middle. And I must say they did a fine job of it, too. Writer/producer Sydney Boehm kept the best lines from Catto’s book, threw in a few effective wrinkles of his own, and got the story across quite capably indeed. For his part, that old pro Henry Hathaway filmed it with his usual expertise: effective (but never showy) camera angles, a good sense of pace, and a knowing sensitivity for the actors and the characters they portray.
Barry Kroeger, normally cast as a slimy schemer, plays the Muscle here, and he looks convincing, Michael Dante makes a smooth safe-cracker (especially effective showing a fear of heights at the crucial moment on a high ledge) and Alexander Scourby, normally the tough old Celt, does a surprising turn as a French weakling, visibly crumbling under the pressure of the job.
Eli Wallach is fine as usual but doesn’t have much to do except for a cool Sax solo to highlight Joan Collins’ lusty strip-tease. (She was coached for this by Candy Barr.) Edward G. Robinson displays his usual cold aplomb as the brains of the gang, cool in emergencies and unruffled by rebellion in his ranks.
But most of the attention is focused on Rod Steiger as Robinson’s chosen organizer: the one who keeps the gang in line for him and moves things along, and if the chubby guy seems a bit unlikely as the romantic interest, he carries the tough-guy business just fine. There’s some interesting ambiguity about his relationship with Robinson, too patly resolved near the end, but for most of the picture he remains a complex and intriguing protagonist, and one who keeps us guessing.
Ultimately, Seven Thieves betrays the tough premise of Lions at the Kill, but I have to say it does it so enjoyably that I can’t carp — and I don’t think you will either.
June 5th, 2016 at 3:19 pm
I always wanted to read the book, now more so than ever. Everything I have read by Catto (THE DEVIL AT 4 O’CLOCK) was at least good and usually better than just that. Hollywood visited his work several times and he was successful, but never as much as I thought he deserved.
The film works well both as caper and character study, and Steiger, as Dan points out, does well in an unlikely lead role. He seems relaxed in this, which is something I can seldom say about him in a film. The relationship with Collins is at least believable.
As caper films go this may not rank with RIFIFI or BOB LE FLAMBEUR, but it is smart, suspenseful, well acted, and more than worth the effort to catch.
I’m not sure if this is the first of the fey aging criminal mastermind with one last chance for greatness roles Robinson would play, but it’s close and a role that he would repeat with variations for the rest of his career. As usual he is so good it is almost possible to overlook how much he brings to the production.
June 5th, 2016 at 3:43 pm
I don’t think Edward G. Robinson ever gave a bad performance, and he’s really in fine form in this one. To me Steiger seemed a bit out of place among the others in the gang, but his performance grew on me and he’s quite effective, and as you say, David, quietly so.
It goes without saying that Joan Collins was also in fine form, and here I’m speaking physically as well as playing her part well. She’s brunette, beautiful, slim, slender and lissome, not to mention a few other appropriate adjectives. The heist itself is complicated, as I recall, but not as spectacular as it might have been, I guess, for me to remember any of the details. For me, it was the cast that makes this one work as well as it does.
June 5th, 2016 at 4:01 pm
At the time, when she was still trying, Collins could be quite good as well as attractive. She has a number of fairly strong roles in the fifties in films like this where she shows some ability as well as leg and other parts.
June 6th, 2016 at 5:02 am
I don’t think Edward G. Robinson ever gave a bad performance, and he’s really in fine form in this one.
I would cite his ludicrously over-the-top performance as the slimy Dathan in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
June 6th, 2016 at 7:08 am
I’ll have to take your word for it, Jeff, but only if you’ve actually seen the movie. I haven’t, so maybe it doesn’t count, but I really ought to know better than to make blanket statements like that.
June 6th, 2016 at 7:22 am
You pretty much have to go “over the top” in a DeMille epic.
June 6th, 2016 at 7:24 am
Had a nice talk at CINEVENT with John Hegenberger, author of the “Stan Wade” mysteries set in Hollywood 1959 (STARFALL, SPYFALL etc.) about Edward G. Robinson as portrayed in TRUMBO and the events recounted in his autobiography.
June 6th, 2016 at 3:39 pm
Robinson is well in line with Heston, Brynner, Vincent Price, and Anne Baxter in going over the top in COMMANDMENTS. Yvonne de Carlo and Debra Paget and maybe John Carradine are the only actors in the film not totally over the top in every possible scene. Even Cedric Hardwicke is straining at the bit.
June 6th, 2016 at 3:45 pm
Could not disagree with you more
David re The Ten Commandments and Yul Brynner. He was wonderful and had me rooting for success. Not to be, unfortunately in a film so lousy and boring as to make a boy scream and squirm. As for Seven Thieves, one beautiful woman and a bunch of short fat, soft, ugly guys. You can imagine my conclusion.
June 6th, 2016 at 6:08 pm
As Dan says, we talked a lot about Eddie and I was amazed that he’d had such a long dry spell due to the black listing. It seemed to me that he was always around being EGR from the early ’30s until Soylent Green. Dan filled me in with lots of great insight, so now I have to go back and watch a bunch of movies all over again. And isn’t it nice that that’s possible these days? BTW, I thought Seven Thieves was an OK flick, but in this day and age, you could see every twist and twitch.
June 6th, 2016 at 7:34 pm
Robinson was not blacklisted, although he did fall from grace, partly his former political leaning and partly he had been around, a long, long time. But, there was never a year in pictures that he wanted work, that he lacked it.
June 6th, 2016 at 11:28 pm
I would like to take a moment to give some blacklist perspective, for Robinson and anyone else. Things changed in 1948 with the Supreme Court decision requiring major producers, MGM, Fox, etc, to divest themselves of their theatre chains, thereby complying with anti-trust legislation. The companies did that, and by the early fifties changes were felt in the conduct of business, not only for that reason, but changing tastes as well. People like John Wayne and Clark Gable did pretty well, and so too did James Stewart, but Cary Grant, arguably their equal, or superior, appeared in a single film during the years 1953 – 1957. By the early sixties, John Ford, teamed with James Stewart and Richard Widmark made Two Rode Together, which did not receive a first run release, hard as that may be to accept. Life happened.
Louis Hayward said that Noel Coward offered him this advice: Always read carefully all the scripts offered, and then after due consideration, accept the one that pays the most. Personally I believe this is how career errors are created, but Noel and Louis were not the only people who thought in these terms.
June 7th, 2016 at 3:05 pm
Barry,
In his autobiography, EGR speaks very movingly about not being able to get work due to the HUAC hearings….
Of course, maybe he wasn’t remembering it right; where did you get your information?
June 7th, 2016 at 4:21 pm
I know that Robinson wrote about his career decline, and indeed that was so. I simply followed his films made after 1950, dates of production and distribution, and I interpreted that to mean he did not accept gladly his reduced position in the industry, but that reduction is clearly related only to the ‘importance’ of his projects, and my comment above was designed to illustrate that politics aside, careers fluctuate in show business.