Writer/Director Richard Brooks was one of the most eclectic filmmakers of the 50's, 60's and 70's. With classic dramas like "In Cold Blood" and "Elmer Gantry", westerns like "Bite the Bullet" and classics like "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof", Brooks delivered hit after hit.
One of his strangest but endearing crime thrillers was the offbeat 1971 comedy/drama $ (Dollars).
Warren Beatty is bank security specialist Joe Collins, inventor of a sophisticated audio/video surveillance system at the massive Hamburg bank run by Gert Frobe (Goldfinger).
The only problem is that Joe knows exactly how to thread the very fine hidden windows in security needed to rob the safe deposit boxes within the time-locked vault.
Brooks devises a very clever caper, with precise timing down to the second, three different sets of bad guys with dirty money ripe for the stealing and an escape route that grows very complicated.
Goldie Hawn is a lot of fun as Joe's high-price hooker girlfriend, who leads him to all of his marks. Robert Webber (10, SOB) is a Vegas business man depositing plenty of graft and Scott Brady (The Night Strangler) is a military man playing both sides of the fence.
Daniel Craig look alike Arthur Brass (Victory) is one hell of a menacing bad guy, the "Candy Man" who seems everywhere at once, always brandishing a gun and intimidation.
Beatty is at his cool best as a thief with a conscious, only taking money obtained illegally. But he's not exactly Robin Hood as he's keeping it for himself.
The first 45 minutes of the film are hard to get through, fractured into many segments that feel forced and disjointed, featuring different music that makes them feel uncomfortably cobbled together.
Only at the 45 minute mark do you start to see Brooks complicated construction as those pieces come together into a very clever caper.
Once the heist unfolds in real time, Beatty and Hawn are off and running in several directions, leading the bad guys on a chase that lasts over 30 minutes, right up to its clever conclusion that keeps you guessing.
Quincy Jones music score (like his score for Steve McQueen's "The Getaway" two years later is cool & fun.
Bathed in early 70's nonchalance toward sex, drugs and violence, $ is worth its weight in gold, or at least that one very pivotal gold bar. It gets a B.
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