The Hot Rock: 1972, dir. Peter Yates. Seen on DVD (Oct. 27).
This was another fun movie in a week surprisingly full of fun films. The Hot Rock isn’t a well-known film, despite its having starred Robert Redford, adapted by William Goldman (from a Donald Westlake novel) and directed by Peter Yates, who also directed Bullitt and Breaking Away (one of my favorite movies). Somehow this movie has been forgotten, which is a shame.
A couple of years ago, I went through a phase where I watched a lot of caper movies, heist movies, and con movies, and I don’t know why I stopped. (I don’t know why I started, either—it might have been Ocean’s Eleven or maybe my finding a copy of The Thief Who Came to Dinner.)
The Hot Rock is a very good standard caper film, with a few nice twists here and there to keep you on your toes. Robert Redford’s character is released from jail, where apparently he spends a lot of time, and he doesn’t want to go back. He wants to be a plumber. But his brother-in-law, played by George Segal, drags him into a plan to steal the Sahara Diamond, a jewel that has great symbolic significance for ambassador Moses Gunn’s small country.
However, plans go awry and the first heist leads to a prison break-in and then another job and then another.
Redford doesn’t quite do it for me, I admit. He’s fine, he does a good job in the role of the master heist planner who is fighting an ulcer and a streak of bad luck, but I believe I have been spoiled by Steve McQueen and George Clooney. It is probably very wrong of me to say that I prefer George Clooney to Robert Redford, but here I am saying it.
Redford’s presence alerted me to the fact that this is a caper film, not a darker heist film. You know Redford’s character isn’t going to die, although he might end up back in jail in a humorous way (as in Out of Sight) or in the hospital for stomach problems. After the first heist, I was pretty sure no one else was going to die, either. The tone was a little too light-hearted. Mind you, I am very happy with no one dying and the movie was able to maintain a pleasant level of suspense without that possibility.
I admit to having a certain fondness for George Segal, although there aren’t many movies he’s in that I like. I think this goes back to my being a little girl and watching a perfectly dreadful movie with my dad, The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, in which Segal plays a very charming crook trying to recover his loot from Goldie Hawn, a former dance-hall girl currently posing as a Mormon governess. It was fun to watch the movie with my dad when I was little, but in recent years I saw the movie again and it’s not nearly as fun as my plot description might make it sound.
I always felt a bit sorry for George Segal, who had rotten luck with movies and failed TV series and so forth, going on late-night talk shows to play his banjo and promote yet another project that was likely to bomb. I was pleased to see him finally involved in a definite success with the TV show Just Shoot Me, which I watched for awhile just to see Segal and Laura San Giacomo.
The Hot Rock also has Zero Mostel in it, stealing nearly every scene he is in and doing it beautifully. I saw him earlier this month in The Front, and of course he is in one of my favorite movies, The Producers (another one I liked watching with my dad when I was younger, but which is still wonderful today).
The credits show that Christopher Guest is in this movie as a policeman, but I couldn’t figure out which one he was, even though I watched part of This is Spinal Tap over the weekend and should have been able to spot him. I guess he was too young and appeared too briefly.
Anyway, The Hot Rock is a good DVD rental. The DVD doesn’t have any extras on it, and the sound quality wasn’t very good, but it was still better than VHS quality. I suppose we should be grateful the movie is available on DVD at all.