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‘Armored Car Robbery is just one in a series of violent crime dramas directed with crisp efficiency by Richard Fleischer during his early years at RKO. An important first expression of the heist film genre held at bay by the crumbling Hays Code—which had long prohibited overly detailed depictions of criminal acts—Armored Car Robbery came out the same year as John Huston’s seminal expression of the genre, The Asphalt Jungle, yet stands in stark, stripped-down contrast to Huston’s soulful peon to the defeated underdog. Fleischer instead delivers a swift and coldblooded illustration of ruthlessly efficient police and criminal apparatuses set into contrapuntal motion, with William Talman’s harder-than-hardboiled mastermind pitted against indelible character actors only possible in the feverish trenches of B-film production. Making great use of Los Angeles-area locations, the film bears affinities with the popular cycle of low-budget semi-documentary crime films that flourished in the late 1940s and early 1950s.’ Harvard Film Archive

Ages 15+