The Day of the Wolves
This low budget crime film from 1971, shot on location in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, reminded me of another film, Reservoir Dogs, and a novel, The Score by Richard Stark (alias Donald Westlake). Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) has a criminal mastermind assembling a group of lesser criminals to do a job that doesn't come off as planned. The mastermind allows no actual names to be used, assigning instead colors to each participant; hence, Mr. Brown, Mr. Pink, etc. In The Score (1964), fifth of the Parker series of crime novels, career criminal Parker assembles a gang of accomplices to help him rob an entire small town. The Day of the Wolves, written and directed by Ferde Grofé, Jr., seems inspired by Stark's novel, while Tarantino seems to have borrowed from The Day of the Wolves.
Jan Murray, an actor with a long career also as a standup comedian, plays Number 1, leader of the gang. He and the six other men he assembles train at a remote desert location known only to the leader. He's the only one who knows the identities of the six, each of them wearing blue fatigues with numbers sewn on, heavy beards, gloves, sunglasses, and caps, giving them the appearance of Latin American revolutionaries.
In the town targeted by Number 1, Police Chief Pete Anderson (Richard Egan) is about to retire after the City Council, for political reasons, gives him the boot, leaving the Chief's job to an amiable but ineffectual second-in-command who doesn't know what to do when the seven bearded men start their work systematically robbing the town.
Pete, his son and wife (Martha Hyer in her last movie) are set to move away from the town when the shit hits the fan. The entire small police department gets locked up by two of the gang. Number 1 drives around town in a stolen white station wagon acting as a collection bin for the money bags heisted from the various locations hit. The power station has been deactivated, the populace doesn't know what's going on. Mrs. Anderson, witnessing the beginning of the grocery store robbery, drives home to warn her husband who takes a shotgun and a bunch of ammunition, heading out to deal with the problem in spite of his wife's pleas.
The fifteen or twenty minute long action scene showing Pete stalking and neutralizing some of the gang is well done and exciting, playing out in sun-drenched Arizona mid-day light. Since the setting is a real town, with citizens as extras, the feel of this set piece has a realism to it not seen in those movies or TV shows where action scenes play out on backlots.
As with a typical Western, once Pete Anderson has done his protective work, the City Council wants him to keep his job as Chief. He doesn't say, "Take this job and shove it," as the Johnny Paycheck song goes, but he makes it clear he wants nothing to do with the duplicitous cretins who deprived him of his job.
The theme of the lone outnumbered lawman going after a group of troublemakers figures most famously in High Noon (1952), a film of perfect temporal construction in which the time unfolding matches the time it takes to view it. The Day of the Wolves lacks such brilliance and execution as Fred Zinnemann's classic with Gary Cooper, but it does possess a sense of hard realities--two of the numbered gang get away with their promised cuts of the loot. One of them is captured while Number 1 is most likely going to be caught, leaving three dead by Pete Anderson's shotgun.
Vic Neptune
This low budget crime film from 1971, shot on location in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, reminded me of another film, Reservoir Dogs, and a novel, The Score by Richard Stark (alias Donald Westlake). Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) has a criminal mastermind assembling a group of lesser criminals to do a job that doesn't come off as planned. The mastermind allows no actual names to be used, assigning instead colors to each participant; hence, Mr. Brown, Mr. Pink, etc. In The Score (1964), fifth of the Parker series of crime novels, career criminal Parker assembles a gang of accomplices to help him rob an entire small town. The Day of the Wolves, written and directed by Ferde Grofé, Jr., seems inspired by Stark's novel, while Tarantino seems to have borrowed from The Day of the Wolves.
Jan Murray, an actor with a long career also as a standup comedian, plays Number 1, leader of the gang. He and the six other men he assembles train at a remote desert location known only to the leader. He's the only one who knows the identities of the six, each of them wearing blue fatigues with numbers sewn on, heavy beards, gloves, sunglasses, and caps, giving them the appearance of Latin American revolutionaries.
In the town targeted by Number 1, Police Chief Pete Anderson (Richard Egan) is about to retire after the City Council, for political reasons, gives him the boot, leaving the Chief's job to an amiable but ineffectual second-in-command who doesn't know what to do when the seven bearded men start their work systematically robbing the town.
Pete, his son and wife (Martha Hyer in her last movie) are set to move away from the town when the shit hits the fan. The entire small police department gets locked up by two of the gang. Number 1 drives around town in a stolen white station wagon acting as a collection bin for the money bags heisted from the various locations hit. The power station has been deactivated, the populace doesn't know what's going on. Mrs. Anderson, witnessing the beginning of the grocery store robbery, drives home to warn her husband who takes a shotgun and a bunch of ammunition, heading out to deal with the problem in spite of his wife's pleas.
The fifteen or twenty minute long action scene showing Pete stalking and neutralizing some of the gang is well done and exciting, playing out in sun-drenched Arizona mid-day light. Since the setting is a real town, with citizens as extras, the feel of this set piece has a realism to it not seen in those movies or TV shows where action scenes play out on backlots.
As with a typical Western, once Pete Anderson has done his protective work, the City Council wants him to keep his job as Chief. He doesn't say, "Take this job and shove it," as the Johnny Paycheck song goes, but he makes it clear he wants nothing to do with the duplicitous cretins who deprived him of his job.
The theme of the lone outnumbered lawman going after a group of troublemakers figures most famously in High Noon (1952), a film of perfect temporal construction in which the time unfolding matches the time it takes to view it. The Day of the Wolves lacks such brilliance and execution as Fred Zinnemann's classic with Gary Cooper, but it does possess a sense of hard realities--two of the numbered gang get away with their promised cuts of the loot. One of them is captured while Number 1 is most likely going to be caught, leaving three dead by Pete Anderson's shotgun.
Vic Neptune
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