Screenhead

Newly released on DVD, Seven Thieves, from 1960, is not a bad caper film, but it is the kind of film that could have been better. The mistake was to entrust Henry Hathaway with the direction. Hathaway’s talents have never been the consistent, but Hathaway diminishes the suspense by keeping his distance from the actors and their activities. This is the kind of film that demands an occassional close-ups of faces and hands, of details. Part of the pleasure of the heist film is when the filmmaker makes the audience feel like they are participating in the crime, which is why Hathaway fails where directors like Alfred Hitchock or Jules Dassin succeed.

What pleasure is to be found in Seven Thieves is primarily in seeing Eli Wallach’s sax playing hepcat and Joan Collins’ stripper. This being a film for general audiences, Collins stage act is a clothed bump and grind. Even with Collins dancing and shaking in front of the camera, Hathaway frustratingly keeps a gentlemanly distance from the action.

The robbery of the casino will strike some as quaint by standards now set with the Ocean’s Eleven remake and its sequels. Rod Steiger and Michael Dante basically have to keep to the floor to avoid a few electric eyes, and assume no one hears their noisy power tools. Leading the gang is Edward G. Robinson, playing a former academic gone bad, although the details a deliberately left fuzzy. What can be said is that in this film, the tenderest moments do not involve Collins, but are between Robinson and Steiger. Nothing in Seven Thieves is as dramatic or as tense as it should have been. Even the final twist comes as no surprise. In a way, the film reflects the basic plot in that everything was in the plans, but no one really has the heart to try and get away with it.

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