It’s vacation so I watch my favorite movies!
This afternoon it was time for “Ad Ogni Costo” aka “Grand Slam” (1967) an Italian, German, Spanish coproduction starring all kind of international well known faces and (faded) stars, including the likes of Janet Leigh, Klaus Kinski, Robert Hoffmann, Riccardo Cucciolla, George Rigaud, Adolfo Celi and -surprise, surpirse- Eward G. Robinson!
It is a Heist movie and one of my favorites! Is it any good? Well, it is not a masterpiece, maybe even a B-movie, but… it also very, very entertainment and has one of the best, probably thé best heist scene ever! Also it takes place in Rio during the carnaval.
I saw it for the first time on German television somewhere in the middle of the eighties during my Christmas vacation when I stayed with my father. In hindsight, I somewhat regretted not paying closer attention to the entire film, as I only really started watching intently from the heist itself—which is a fantastic scene that has often been copied but never equaled, at least in my humble opinion and ofcourse in Riffi style it is in complete silence.
In short, the film is about an elderly teacher (Robinson) who is retiring and, after forty years, seeks out an old school friend (Celi) in New York—a man he knows to be a sort of gangster.
He shows him some footage he shot himself of his classroom. The friend watches the images with mild amusement but also a hint of boredom, until his expression turns serious upon seeing a heavily guarded bank building on the other side of the classroom.
The professor tells him that diamonds worth millions are stored there for a single day twice a year; however, this year the event falls exactly during Carnival, and since everything in Rio shuts down then, the diamonds will remain in the vault for four days. What he wants from his old friend is a team of four specialists to pull off the heist; he has already worked out all the details himself and written them down on sheets of paper, which he hands to his friend.
Together, they select the four men: Kinski is the soldier who will lead the heist like a military operation, Cucciolla the technical expert, and Giraud the safe-cracker; they also need a playboy (Hoffmann), as he will have to seduce the lady who holds the key to the safe.
Easy peasy? Ofcourse not: not everything goes as planned, for example the lady (Leigh) seems made of stone and ice, appearing completely unimpressed by Hoffmann’s attempts at seduction. That very week, the bank acquired a new vault that renders all preparatory work unnecessary and seems virtually impossible to crack. Oh! And at the end, you get a brilliant plot twist that completely blows you away—at a time when that wasn’t yet commonplace in almost every movie.
Plus a score of the great Ennio Morricone featuring a sound that was atypical for him—including sambas and even a piece of music bearing a striking resemblance to the later “Bond in Rio” from"*Moonraker".
Is it the best movie ever? Ofcourse not, but it is so much fun. If you never saw it, just try it out.
I have the blu underground dvd and later I bought the Kino Lorber blu ray, but I know it was also released in Germany on at least dvd.
