Very Cool!!!

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

That's what we were supposed to notice, right? To be fair there's lots of cheesy fun when viewing this movie 50 years later: Lockwood's Mustang and all the other beautiful rides. The Strip at night. That long shot of the desert when Lockwood is scouting. Jack Palance and Lee J. Cobb simply being in the movie. The Skype-like devices the characters use to call each other. Horrible dubbing. The prototype of the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle popularized in Stripes. The man-made sand dunes that bring the EM-50 to a complete halt instead of just driving around them on the perfectly flat desert. The punch cards when Elke is doing data entry. And the magnetic tape storage. Did I mention Elke's rack?I actually enjoyed the '60s music. Reminded me of my childhood when elevators played Muzak. But by far my favorite part is the way the actors ''die.'' They throw themselves into dying fits like we did as kids when we played with toy guns. Not a great film by any stretch. But plenty of cheese to fill a couple of hours.

After his aging mentor gets killed in a holdup, a youthful criminal protégé named Tony (Gary Lockwood) and his girlfriend Ann (Elke Sommer) plot an armored car heist in the desert southwest of Las Vegas. But things get complicated as Ann works for the armored car owner named Skorsky (Lee J. Cobb) who has ties to the Mafia. And the Feds are trying to nail Skorsky. Still, Tony thinks he can pull it off because, unlike his mentor, Tony has a more modern outlook. When Ann says to Tony: "Nobody can get into a Skorsky truck", Tony replies: " ... it can be done, just a question of information, like where's the key ... see, it's all so simple; information".The plot starts out okay but bogs down in the middle; the film could probably have been shortened by at least twenty minutes. But I have to say that Tony's solution to hiding the armored car is ingenious; and the film is worth watching if for no other reason.This is a European production, and it shows. Dialogue is dubbed; some of the actors are Italian or French. And the score sounds like what one would hear in a Spaghetti Western, cold and haunting. But it's the production design and costumes that render this film locked into a cinematic time capsule.Blonde bimbos wear mini-skirts. Vehicles include Olds Toronados, Pontiac GTOs, Vokswagon bugs, station wagons, and Corvairs. In desert scenes, men use walkie-talkies. And the casting of Elke Sommer adds to the time capsule feel, with her ten-inch long false eyelashes. Computers are big clunky stand-alone machines that use cardboard punch cards and reel-to-reel tapes. And the dialogue doesn't help either; at one point Ann is referred to as a "broad".Acting is borderline acceptable, except for Elke Sommer, whose robotic movements and emotionless expressions make her seem like some kind of futuristic mannequin. Cinematography is dark, and there are lots of close-up and extreme close-up shots. At one point in the second half there's a physical fight. Because of the photography or maybe because of the Direction, I couldn't tell who was doing what to whom. Rear-screen projection in some scenes also dates the production. And there are a lot of scenes shot along the Sunset Strip in Vegas, which may have been stock footage.Undeniably different, especially in the way the armored truck is concealed, this gritty film is worth watching once. But the viewer needs to have high tolerance for dated elements, which make the film time-bound, to the point of unintentional humor at times.

There's little I can say about this violently bloody action thriller that seems to have slipped out for release and quickly slipped into obscurity except "skip it". Other than the opening shots of a van of criminals riding through San Francisco (obviously an attempt to take on some of the notoriety of the much better "Bullit") and a shot of a bank van disappearing into the desert sands near Vegas, there's little to remember. That is unless you don't count the obviously bad dubbing, the constant shots of Elke Sommer in bed (playing a character obviously playing both ends against the middle), the inappropriate musical score that just never shuts up or the seemingly gay man involved in the attempted heist of the bank van who wears flesh colored pants to make it appear he's naked from the waste down (I later discovered the pants to confirm he wasn't), or the presence of veteran actors such as Lee J. Cobb and Jack Palance. The action is violent and pointless, the plot ridiculous and attempts at comedy boring. There's only brief shots of Las Vegas (with obvious stock footage of many of the famous entertainers of the day appearing there with their names on casino marquees) and the plot doesn't really involve the casinos at all. I can give this one credit for one other thing; It actually made me consider 1982's really bad "Lookin' to Get Out" a bit better, although not by much.

Lee J. Cobb, Jack Palance, Elke Sommer and Gary Lockwood (2001) in caper film set in Las Vegas. Some wonderful actors who don't really have the chance to interact. Elke is fabulous as usual, but we don't see enough of her, and her dalliances with Cobb and Lockwood to create any real excitement. Palance and Cobb growl their best but are let down by the ponderous pace. Some great scenes and ideas (hiding the armored car in the middle of the Nevada desert), and some truncated interplay between Palance and Sommer that suggests that a lot was left on the cutting room floor. But great fun to watch just to see a great looking classic sixties cast. Whatever happened to Gary Lockwood?