Bank Shot is a 1974 film directed by Gower Champion and written by Wendell Mayes. It was loosely based upon Donald E. Westlake's novel of the same name, which was the second book of his "Dortmunder" series. The film stars George C. Scott, Joanna Cassidy, Sorrell Booke, and G. Wood.
Plot
A bank, temporarily housed in a mobile home while a new building is built, looks like an easy target to break into. On the other hand, why not steal the whole bank, and rob it in a safer location? That is what Al Karp, the former partner of jailed criminal planner Walter Ballantine, thinks, so Karp arranges for Ballantine to escape from the Streiger Institute and convinces him to mastermind the heist. The film is narrated by Warden Streiger.
of The New York Times was mildly amused: "It's not a great movie. It's not worth taking a taxi to see. Yet there are many less invigorating ways to waste one's time.... The intensity of Scott's performance is highly comic. His Walter Ballantine has the discipline, self-assurance and narrow vision of the true fanatic. So, too, do most of the other characters in the film... Gower Champion, who has had more success as a Broadway director than as a maker of films, seems to have had a great deal of fun with first-rate actors doing Bank Shot — grace of a work by someone who knows exactly what he's doing." Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called it "an innocuous little trifle" and "formula caper material, hyped by humor that is variously silly, forced and strident." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two stars out of four and dismissed it as "a trivial, television-caliber, bank heist comedy." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "While 'The Bank Shot,' adapted by Wendell Mayes from a Donald Westlake novel, is at best a lightly amusing and never very suspenseful caper film, it is lit with moments of plain wonderful and imaginative silliness." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post stated, "Despite its rather too effective air of inconsequence, 'The Bank Shot' is a reasonably good time," adding that "Champion demonstrates a wonderful talent for staging and shooting wide-screen sight gags." Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin remarked that the film "definitely looks as if it belongs to a bygone age, to the days of Kramer'sMad, Mad World," with much of its sense of fun coming off as "decidedly strenuous and heavily mugged."
