THE BRINK'S JOB: Blu-ray (Universal, 1978) Kino Lorber

Just in time for Christmas 1978, William Friedkin's dark comedy, The Brink's Job hit theaters with an unapologetic departure from Friedkin’s usual fare, and, much to everyone’s dismay, making a real splat on most critic’s lists. The picture has since all but vanished from view, and, for better or worse, remains something of a challenged masterwork by Friedkin, who is better known today as the director of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). The Brink’s Job immensely benefits from Dean Tavoularis’ production design, a masterful regression to mid-thirties’ grit, grime and glamour, typified by A. Norman Leigh’s cool-leaning cinematography, and, capped off with a sublime score by Richard Rodney Bennett, who blends original stuff with pop-tune homages to the period.  At 103 minutes, The Brink’s Job certainly takes its time getting to the point of the piece – the robbery…or is it? Like much of Friedkin’s work, The Brink’s Job is far more interested in the back stories of this ‘goombah’ squad of unlikely robbers who somehow – and rather miraculously – come together to carry off the perfect heist – a real ‘crime of the century’ that not even seasoned thieves of their generation would have dared to tackle, much less carry off. Crime does pay in Friedkin’s understated – and sadly underrated antithesis to all those serialized ‘crime dramas’ from the fifties that always lionized the FBI, Dudley Do-rights, Dragnets, and, Elliot Nesses at the expense of presenting the criminal element as monolithic, crude and stupid. Ah, but then came the 1970’s – the era of the anti-hero, the exultation of sin, moral turpitude and human degradation. Friedkin’s film isn’t so much interested in the shady aspects of his motley crew, but in creating a real bond between these disparate two-bit hoods and happy-go-lucky strategists who conspire to out-fox the forces for good and, even more ironically, succeed beyond even their wildest dreams.

Hooray for crime, then, and the jolly jesters that commit it; the merriest of the lot, Peter Falk, as Puck-ish plotter, Tony Pino – ringmaster of a shadowy brood that includes, his wife, Mary (Gena Rowlands), and cohorts, Joe McGinnis (Peter Boyle), Vinnie Costa (Allen Garfield – Alan Goorwitz in the credits), Specs O’Keefe (Warren Oates), Stanley Gusciora (Kevin O’Connor) and Jazz Maffie (Paul Sorvino).  Tony may have been ‘the brains’ behind ‘the job’, but he was also fairly flippant about committing the crime. By the time he pulled off the seemingly impossible heist, half of South Boston knew he was behind it. The Brink’s Job is based on Noel Behn's The Big Stick-Up at Brinks, and Walon Green’s screenplay takes great pains to punctuate the notion that these guys are hardly criminal masterminds, but rather, common hoods who just happen to stumble upon and bumble their way through the greatest criminal venture of their time. The story kicks into gear around 1938. We learn that Vinnie’s ineptitude has led to Tony’s incarceration for petty thievery. Now, fresh out of prison, though on a very short leash, Tony’s gearing up for bigger and better things, using the Egleston Diner as his base of operations. Excluding Joe – the bitter and bombastic brute who runs a bar kitty-corner to the diner, and, is actually in possession of the necessary street smarts to unravel a crime of this magnitude, and, perhaps, Jazz – who, at least knows how to ‘cook the books’ as a bookie of some ill-repute, virtually all of the cohorts culled together for ‘this Brink’s Job’ are as socially ham-fisted and mentally challenged as our Tony. The plan of action is simple but effective. Taking notice of the Brink’s trucks running up and down the streets of Boston, Tony’s plan is to ‘knock off’ the depot where all of the money is stored. Despite the fact none of his crew has any experience to handle such a gig, they nevertheless manage to do just that, walking away with a half-million in cold cash. Too bad, Stanley and Specs get themselves arrested on an unrelated charge and Spec’s, possessing the wherewithal and scruples of a slug, idiotically decides the best recourse is to confess to the ‘bigger’ crime and frame his friends, just days before the statute of limitations runs out on the heist. What a cad – and a moron!

The story of the Brink’s job had already been told by director, Joseph Pivney in 6 Bridges to Cross (1955); albeit, with a more serious undertone and the visual pinning of a vintage film noir. But Friedkin’s take on the story is something quite unique, and sadly, as passed over in his own time. Indeed, the critical consensus of the day was that like Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977), judged as an inferior interpretation of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s French/Italian classic, The Wages of Fear (1953), The Brink’s Job is still oft seen as Friedkin trying much too hard to break from the mold of cynicism and darkness that otherwise enveloped his topical matter and all but cemented his métier in the cinema arts. As Hitchcock once quipped that if he had made Cinderella the critics would have been waiting for a corpse to tumble forth from the carriage, for Friedkin, the good-natured froth of The Brink’s Job may just be a little too much of an anathema to his other movies for most expectations to swallow. But forget for a moment that this is a movie made by Billy Friedkin and guess what? It proves modestly enjoyable. In hindsight, it is the ambiguity with which Friedkin paints his characters that unsettles our viewing experience the most. Do Tony and Mary get props for their street savvy in concocting this implausibly effective heist? Is Jazz the noblest of these knobs? Is Specs the plotter’s Achilles heel? Does any of this matter? Well – yes, sort of, as the only character to emerge clear-cut is Sheldon Leonard’s J. Edgar Hoover – portrayed here as an arrogant prig who frames the boys as a bunch of would-be Commies he has to blow a cool $25 million of the taxpayer’s money on in his own vain dragnet-inspired endeavor, just to save face.  Casting Leonard as the semi-repugnant Hoover is, of course, a rather transparent ‘inside joke’ as Leonard spent most of his professional movie career chronically cast as the hood in Hollywood crime stories. But now, he is working for the other side and gives the performance of his life.

Friedkin’s flick is very good in spots; more than that – it cohesively clings together in unanticipated whimsical and wonderful ways, with a boatload of good humor to buoy – and undermine – the darker criminal elements. This is, I suspect, the real reason the critics hopped all over The Brink’s Job as an inferior effort from Friedkin: this, and the misfortune of bad timing – released immediately on the heels of the aforementioned, and much-maligned Sorcerer; the critics, with their hatchets out, eager to see Friedkin fail again. Aside: artistically, Friedkin did not fail with Sorcerer, nor does he fumble the ball – except perhaps at the fifty-yard line – on The Brink’s Job – the movie’s finale neither as grand or grandly satisfying as one might expect. That said, The Brink’s Job is a very funny movie, if never to attain widespread critical praise or, even more crucially, box office success.  Friedkin’s light touch is unexpected – or conversely, his ability to surprise us from our limited expectations of his prowess as a director enlightening his scope of accomplishment in ways that – regrettably – remain undervalued. And on The Brink’s Job Friedkin is blessed with a cast for whom the Casablanc-ian line, “round up the usual suspects” might otherwise have been coined.  Peter Falk’s soft-touch/tough guy is agreeably off-center – part crook/part Columbo and all heart and hustler to boot. Everything about Falk’s leader of the pack clicks as it should; his Tony, fitted neatly into a milieu of fifties pastiche with lines of dialogue that sound just right and/or never rehearsed (though, undoubtedly, they must be). And Falk, plays the heist-hungry wolf, looking for his next big score, to perfection.

The other great joy of the picture is the almost effortless way Friedkin has worked out the mechanics of ‘the job’ beforehand, revealing virtually all of its secrets to the audience well in advance of the actual robbery. In any other picture, this would have nurtured a distinct ennui for the penultimate break-in.  But in Friedkin’s case, it only enriches our appreciation for the machinations of committing this not-so-perfect crime once the real deal is underway. We can chart the progress of Tony and his accomplices by the passing of each marker in its already well-devised structure, breathing bated signs of relief as the crew achieve what they set out to do. From scouted locations to rooftop spying with binoculars, and beyond, to the hold-up at gunpoint, the moments that tick-tick-tick together to make up this successful ambush take on a voracious verisimilitude for which Friedkin exhibits a rigidly satisfying rheostat of all its variables. With fun-filled ferociousness, Friedkin unfurls the crime-of-the-century as a slickly satisfying piece of entertainment whose ‘thrill-seeking’ roller coaster never simply coasts on the time-honored tricks of his trade. This sort of unobtrusive directing style appears so effortless on the screen, calling virtually no attention to itself, that it is easy to overlook it for its skillfulness, which is, after all, quite monumental and humbling. We cannot, or perhaps, ought not overlook Walon Green’s contribution herein either; concocting dialogue and situations that attain an almost lyrical cadence and hark back to a sort of picture-making style unseen in movies since the mid-1950’s. Most certainly, it was out-of-step with what was then rather laughingly referred to as ‘realism’ in the movies.  Green’s dialogue gives the picture its satisfying stichomythia. Perhaps best of all, Friedkin’s cast, a veritable who’s who of insanely competent actors, many of whom have long since proven their ever-lasting appeal and ability to satisfy us in many other films and television series, are up to this challenge. So, to go back and savor their seasoned turns, the smarting of each other with one-upsmanship in The Brink’s Job, adds yet another patina to each performance that, at least in 1978, was, as yet, lacking.

The Brink’s Job celebrates a crowning achievement in the art of crime, destined to be followed by one prolonged hangover and a myriad of ‘looking over the shoulder’ moments of regret. Yet, Friedkin’s interests here are not with the crime itself. This, he undeniably illustrates to perfection, but almost as an afterthought. Rather, it is the pursuit of Tony’s life-long dream - to screw over the system that sent him to the big house for a petty infraction unworthy of either his time or incarceration - that fuels this narrative with a splendidly strategized back story leading up to the big heist. Too many critics have overlooked this subtlety, judging the characters as one-dimensional and the story as lop-sided and skewed to what came before – rather than ‘during’ or ‘after’ this big moment.  Yet, this approach to analyzing The Brink’s Job deliberately undermines the many virtues to be gleaned from its impressively executed telling of the tale. It also makes rather embarrassing short-shrift of the cast, particularly, Peter Falk’s nostalgically flawed ringleader, Allan Garfield’s terminally inept brother-in-law, Peter Boyle’s short-fused and vial Irish pub owner, and, Paul Sorvino’s teddy-bear-ish bookie. And then, there is Warren Oates’ beleaguered bomb-maker, suffering from PTS, who bluntly stumbles and falls when it matters the most; arguably, the most empathetic performance of the lot.

The Brink’s Job excels when it plays its moments as live-action scenarios carried out by characters plucked from the ink well of Max Fleischer, seemingly, to have dug the trench much too deep to crawl from successfully. Case in point: the moment when Falk’s Tony, wearing clothes at least two sizes too big for him, attempts to make off with the valuables of a highfalutin fop, stuffed down his pants and into every pocket otherwise known to him. Silly – yes, but carried off with such finesse by Falk that it easily becomes an affecting moment with which the audience can identify. Bolder still is the combining of realistic settings with situations otherwise broad-minded in their use of slapstick, unseen since the era of The Three Stooges.  Undeniably, Friedkin’s fable favors the fallen over the usually valiant purveyors of the moral good. The Brink’s guards, as example, are heavy-handedly white-washed as a homogenized group of not terribly prepossessing protectors. And – yes, the movie makes it seem as though to break into their storehouse and make off with a veritable treasury is as easy as holding up the corner 7-11 convenience store. But otherwise, The Brink’s Job comes off as a favorably fun and fantastic falsehood – sincere enough to make us forget we are rooting for the wrong side to win.  

As a relic of seventies cinema, The Brink’s Job is decidedly a departure from the norm. That alone makes it refreshing and rife for rediscovery on Blu-ray – an opportunity had by all with Kino Lorber’s newly minted offering. It’s imperfect, just like the movie, but satisfying nonetheless. Chief among the assets in this new 1080p transfer are color saturation, which is completely satisfying, and the lack of age-related artifacts, resulting in a generally smooth visual presentation with a light smattering of grain, appropriately placed. Contrast is excellent and fine details abound, especially in close-up. The negatives boil down to a slight hint of edge enhancement that nagging – if intermittently – crops up and is rather distracting. By now, untoward digital manipulations of this sort in video mastering should have been as antiquated as the horse and buggy is to cross-country travel. But there it is – again and again – leading me to think this is likely a slightly older transfer, cribbing from digital files made some time earlier in the ‘art of home video mastering’. So too, will the DTS mono audio not win any awards, with a very slight background hiss detected during quiescent moments and Richard Rodney Bennett’s score sounding quite unexpectedly tinny. One of the best reasons to buy this disc is for Nathaniel Thompson’s comprehensive audio commentary, complimented with input from historians, Howard S. Berger and Steve Mitchell, who have obviously done their homework and love this movie to a fault. We also get a theatrical trailer that is badly worn.  Bottom line: The Brink’s Job is not William Friedkin’s finest moment, nor is it his worst movie. In fact, it is fairly engrossing and has some very good stuff to be unearthed upon renewed viewings. The Blu-ray is better than adequate, but not great. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

1