They Came to Rob Las Vegas

An EEC production and an audacious thriller, mainly due to the consistency of Isasi's direction (overriding the usual hybrid problems) and to the casting of Cobb and Palance. The opening is tremendous: Jean Servais breaks out of jail, fails to persuade brother Lockwood to help out on a robbery of Cobb's security business, and is gunned down. Then Lockwood goes out for revenge, insinuating his way inside Cobb's mistress (Sommer) and his IBM systems. Palance is the T-Man who smells a rat. Shot mainly in Almeria, it's a thriller equivalent to Leone's Westerns, reworking old formulas and paying tribute to them at the same time. But the parallel with Leone goes only so far: Isasi, rather than swirl his camera about, adopts the static, Zen-like posture of Ozu. Not flawless by any means, but well worth a look.