Cinema: Mild Tale

A MAN, A WOMAN AND A BANK Directed by Noel Black Screenplay by Raynold Gideon, Bruce A. Evans and Stuart Margolin

The movie convention that all intricate schemes to abscond with large sums of cash must be perpetrated by terribly nice and attractive people and against chilly, faceless institutions is an understandable one. After all, if we are to enjoy these tales we must, for the length of the film, set aside conventional morality to root for the criminals and against their victims. But in this film the crooks are so pleasant that they practically recede to ectoplasmic levels before our eyes, while the bank they set out to heist is so anonymous that it does not provide them with a properly menacing nemesis. The result is one of the least offensive but also least memorable crime movies of the year.

This is too bad, because the picture’s premise is not a bad one. It has the would-be robbers casing a bank that is still under construction and sneaking in to build right into its sophisticated alarm system the means by which they can disarm it.

In due course, that is exactly what they do —and without any mishap to generate much suspense. Oh, there is this photographer (the winsome Brooke Adams) who mistakes one of the crooks for a construction worker and snaps his picture when, dressed like a foreman, he is making off with some blueprints he needs. But this character, played in more than usually laid-back style by Donald Sutherland, disarms whatever suspicions she may have by falling in love with her. Even when one of her pictures appears on a billboard on the bank, it does nothing to set back the robbers.

There is also some potential for suspense in a computer whiz, played by Paul Mazursky, who is better known as a director (An Unmarried Woman). The genius’ wife is deserting him, he is a hypochondriac and chicken to boot. One imagines he might crack under the add ed strain of the caper, but he never does, and Mazursky’s portrayal of a mild-mannered man is only mildly amusing.

Such suspense — and such full-throated comedy — as the picture offers derives mainly from Allan Magicovsky as Adams’ wildly jealous lover. He takes to following Sutherland around in a men acing way, and he might, in the process, discover just what game is afoot. But he doesn’t, and neither does a cop who stops the escaping Sutherland because the van carrying the swag to the airport has a malfunctioning taillight. Magicovsky was our last hope for some real excitement, but only modest suspense is generated by the encounter. Like everything else in this movie, it is underplayed and underwritten. Noel Black, who once did a curiously perverse little movie called Pretty Poison, is capable of stronger work, and so are these performers. Mere agreeability is just not enough to sustain a movie that has crime as well as comedy on its mind .