I love this movie so much

How sad is this?

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Apart from an unpleasant whiff of homophobia, exemplified largely by Martin Balsam's appallingly stereotypical gay character, "The Anderson Tapes" is a mostly excellent heist movie from Sidney Lumet, the heist here being that of a fancy New York apartment building and it's organized by Sean Connery's recently released jailbird. The twist, for want of a better word, is that Connery's every move is being filmed or recorded by someone. The robbery itself, which takes up most of the film, is very well handled and there is a good supporting cast that includes a young Christopher Walken in one of his early roles. Ultimately, though, this is minor Lumet, entertaining certainly but hardly memorable.

This was the last film Sean Connery made during the hiatus between swearing that he would "never again" star in a James Bond movie and his brief return to the franchise in "Diamonds Are Forever". As Bond he perhaps played the ultimate goodie, the man who specialised in saving the world and was quite capable of doing so several times before breakfast. Here he gets to play a baddie, as his character John "Duke" Anderson is a hardened criminal. It is also noticeable that in this film Connery was permitted to show his balding head to the world; in the Bonds he was obliged to keep it hidden under a toupee. The film opens with Anderson being released after ten years in prison. His lengthy sentence, however, has not taught him the error of his crooked ways, because he almost instantly starts planning his next heist, a daring daylight robbery of an entire high-class New York apartment block. The block is familiar to him because one of the occupants is his old mistress Ingrid, with whom he has renewed his relationship despite the fact that she now has a new boyfriend. The film then relates how Anderson and his accomplices go about executing their scheme. The title refers to the fact that Anderson is being kept under surveillance by various people using hidden bugs and cameras. One of those carrying out the surveillance is a private detective hired by Ingrid's boyfriend, who suspects with good reason that she might be cheating on him; the others are all working for various government agencies who have various reasons for doing so. Yet none of the agents involved this pervasive spying are able to put together the pieces to realise just what Anderson is planning. Despite this blatant failure of government intelligence, however, the raid is eventually thwarted by the police. The official censorship imposed by of the Production Code had ended by 1971, but it had been replaced by the unofficial censorship of the television networks who disliked films in which crime was seen to go unpunished. Columbia Pictures therefore agreed to rewrite the original ending which showed Anderson escaping. The whole "tapes" aspect of "The Anderson Tapes" is little more than a pointless, and confusing, gimmick. There are four ways in which the subject could have been treated. One way was to make a civil liberties "issue movie" about the whole question of illegal and underhand government surveillance, as was done in a more recent (and much better) film, "Enemy of the State". Such a film, however, would be open to the objection that Anderson and his gang are exactly the sort of people whom the government should be keeping an eye on. Another way would have been to make a "law and order" issue movie about bungling government agents who, despite all their hi-tech apparatus, fail to realise that a major crime is being plotted under their noses. A third would have been to make a comedy about bungling government agents who, despite all their hi-tech apparatus, fail to realise that a major crime is being plotted under their noses. For the film to have worked as an indictment of bureaucratic incompetence, however, the plot would have needed substantial rewriting to concentrate more on the government agents and less on the criminals, and to have worked as a comedy it would have needed to be a lot lighter in tone. The fourth, and probably best, option would have been to drop all the "surveillance" aspects and make a simple heist movie, something like a latter-day "The Concrete Jungle", telling the story from the point of view of the criminals and concentrating on their motivation and psychology. Such a film might also have allowed more scope for exploration of a potentially interesting theme; the dilemma facing a gang leader who is required to kill one of his own gang in order to ensure the success of the operation. Logistical and financial support for Anderson's operation is being provided by a local Mafia boss- but at a price. The Mafia insist that Anderson should take one of their "heavies" along on the raid- and that Anderson should kill him during it. (The reason is that the man's dangerously unpredictable behaviour has made him a liability to the Mob). The sixties probably marked a low point in the history of the American crime movie. The "golden age" of film noir had ended in the fifties, and the "new wave" of ground-breaking films like "The Godfather", "Dirty Harry", "Chinatown" and "Taxi Driver" which were to revitalise the genre in the seventies still lay in the future. The few crime flicks which were made tended to be dull and derivative. Even something like "The Thomas Crown Affair", one of the better ones, was really more style than substance. "The Anderson Tapes" may have been made after the turn of the decade, but it is really more sixties than seventies. Sidney Lumet was later to make one of the great "new wave" crime dramas, "Serpico", but this film is not in the same class. "The Anderson Tapes" lacks interest, relies too much on a gimmick, and the plot is difficult to follow. It is both the weakest Lumet film and the weakest Connery film that I have seen. 4/10

I found out about this film in reference to the latest scandal about government wiretapping. Indeed, it has a pertinent subject: a heist, its planning caught on tape by a bunch of government agencies, none of them authorized to have them.However, while the subject is interesting its realization into film is not so good. A lot of the heist details, the personal life of Anderson and so on were superfluous, while why those agencies had wiretaps there in the first place was not explained. The fact is, if you remove the very few scenes related to the tapping you get a rather bland, even bad, heist movie.OK, Sean Connery is in it, an incredibly young Christopher Walken, Martin Balsam, which no one remembers nowadays. They do their job and they do it well, but even with their charm the film remains ordinary. That is why I will rate it under average, but I consider that the idea had a lot of potential and has again very much today. Perhaps a well done remake would be a good idea!

"The Anderson Tapes" is a somewhat ahead-of-its-time film by Sidney Lumet. A precursor to modern heist films and a successor of early noirs, the film stars Sean Connery as an ex con who resolves to rob an entire apartment complex. "It's a dog eat dog world," he says, "and I want first bite." Much of the film lingers on surveillance tapes, electronic devices, hidden microphones and cameras. It turns out that every ex con whom Connery assembles for his team is being monitored and observed by different law enforcement departments. But because these departments are illegally wire-taping/spying and are acting entirely outside of their fields of operation, they're information isn't admissible in court. So though they all inadvertently detect or map Connery's crime, they're unable to act on their intel. The film's big irony is that all this surveillance proves useless, yet a kid with a simple two way radio is able to thwart Connery. So observation fails but two way communication takes him down.The film predates "The Conversation", predates even Nixon's nefarious wire tap dancing, and features a genre defining score by Quincy Jones. Lumet's camera-work - usually stiff and static - is also unconventionally fluid. His location work would prove influential on later crime and gangster flicks, and some of his shots here would be lifted by other directors for later heist movies. The film's sudden climax homages early Warner crime films and early noirs, but will let down modern audiences raised on cleverer endings. A young Christopher Walken co-stars.7.9/10 - This was released the same year as "The French Connection", both films updating noir, crime and heist tropes for a new era. These "updates" are more decorative than genuinely substantial. Worth one viewing.