Bele Torso If you are a Steve McQueen fan this is a must on your check off list. Steve's second major role before Wanted: Dead or Alive where he honed a lot of his skills on camera. Movies like this are similar to Kansas City Confidential where is has that minimalist feel, like you are revisiting time gone by. No extras and low budget give a very realistic sense of time. I would show this movie to a class to unpack what 1959 looked like. From a historical perspective, these films are worth the free YouTube experience. What I find annoying is how a bank robbery with such effort to plan and execute never mentions how easily it would be to get extra time in the bank to pull off the heist. Maybe if a screenwriter inserted this the movie would fall apart. A simple call or riot in a part of time far from the bank would pull all the small town cops to that location giving the robbers the needed extra time to secure their heist. Pay some kids to shoot a gun off, to smash a car, to harass a woman--man with a gun call--and BOOM, they're off! Yet, we never see this in a movie.Recommend this film for the noir quality and to realize CGI, big budget is not needed to entertain.

Dalbert Pringle If you were to ask me, I'd definitely say that the word "Great" really ought to be forever deleted (like, pronto!) from this shoddy film's title, 'cause once you see what a ridiculously bungled job that this "St. Louis" bank robbery was you'll clearly realize that it was anything but great.... (Unless, of course, the word "great" is used in reference to what a laughable mess the whole criminal operation was from start to finish) If you're like me, you'll quickly find this 1959 Crime/Drama so fricking amateurish (on every level) that you'll swear it was an Ed Wood production.I thought "St. Louis" story sucked, the acting stank, and the dialog puked. About the only thing in this totally lame picture that sparked any of my interest were the spiffy, vintage automobiles. Yeah. They were very cool.Had this picture's running time of 90 minutes been edited down to, say, 60 minutes, then, yes, perhaps that might have helped things somewhat by moving the story along at a much quicker and more lively pace.But, as it stood (especially with its intense focus on the super-dumb romance that took place between Steve McQueen's character, George Fowler, and Ann, a real dizzy, small-town bimbo), this film lost my interest long before the robbery actually took place (which didn't happen until the last 15 minutes of the story). And by that time I was too bored and tired to care what the hell happened to anybody or who ended up double-crossing who.Filmed in b&w, this movie was directed by Charles Guggenheim, a dude who was noted for his documentaries.

Snow Leopard The decent degree of realism plus one of Steve McQueen's earlier starring movie roles help make this crime feature worth watching. The story has some pretty interesting aspects, and it adds to the realism with the well-publicized inclusion of many of the actual police officers who were involved in the original events on which the movie is based. On the other hand, the rest of the cast does not come up to McQueen's stature as performers, and at times some potentially powerful scenes lack a little something as a result.The setup has McQueen's character hired as the getaway driver for a gang of bank robbers. Their careful planning is thrown into complications by an old girlfriend of George's (McQueen), whose brother is also part of the gang. The resulting tensions, plus the various unexpected developments as they carry out their plan, add some interest to the basic story. Many of the scenes are written and filmed rather well, although at times the movie expends some screen time on less interesting material.McQueen does a good job with an unsympathetic character, and the supporting cast is mostly solid. Molly McCarthy is believable and generally sympathetic as Ann, but she does not always give her character a lot of depth. Crahan Denton gives the gang's boss a good, solid persona at the beginning, but afterward the character remains rather one-dimensional even when there are chances to bring out some interesting characteristics.The straightforward, almost documentary style cinematography works pretty well, and makes a good combination with the downbeat story. Despite a few things that could have been better, this is not bad at all for its genre, and it is certainly worth seeing.

Tim O'Grady Let me begin by pointing out that IMDb makes a mistake when it lists Nell Roberts as "Woman in Bar Talking to George." The woman in the bar is George's girlfriend Ann, played by Molly McCarthy. Nell Roberts is the Salvation Army woman who appears in three places in the film but who speaks only at the end when she tells a cop, "Don't go in. They're robbing the bank." I speak from authority as the great-nephew of Nell Roberts, my grandmother's sister, who was active in community theater in St. Louis in the 1950s, and who also had a bit role (as an old woman who answers the door) in the film, "Hoodlum Priest" (starring Don Murray), which was also made in St. Louis. We always knew her as "Aunt Nelly," so I guess "Nell" was her stage name.In any case, "The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery" is an interesting little movie -- though there really is nothing "great" about it. The noir approach fits the story line perfectly, but the execution strikes me as stiff and amateurish, especially in the acting and the editing. McQueen was doing what he could to be Brando, but Brando he wasn't. The three other members of the gang and the girlfriend have various small strengths as actors to commend them, but they wouldn't have been enough for professional survival today. The plethora of extras and bit players must have saved the producers some dinero, and they do give the film a certain documentary and amateur-theatrical charm, but their performances (including Aunt Nelly's) are of a type to make the viewer uncomfortable in the expectation of an embarrassing gaff. The homosexual subtext (mentioned by other reviewers) is certainly not imaginary. In fact, the things that make this movie most worth watching are, first, that homosexuality is included as a theme at all -- it was not necessary to the film's integrity unless the producers were aiming at some politically incorrect social commentary or had a personal ax to grind -- and, second, that the gay relationships had to be coded to make the finished work acceptable to the public in the late 1950s.But I did enjoy the look of the cars and the streets of St. Louis (a la New York in "The Naked City") before the rapid urban disintegration that overtook it shortly afterwards, and from which it has still not recovered. The was the REAL "St. Louis Bank Robbery."