The Steel Trap is a crime/suspense thriller starring Joseph Cotton as Jim Osborne an assistant bank manager in Los Angeles who is tempted to steal a million dollars from his bank.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
Jim has become bored with the slow plodding progress in the career of a bank manager and realizes that his bank has close to a million dollars of cash in its vault every Friday at closing which will not be missed until Monday at about 8:30 am.
He quickly and uncarefully concocts a plan to steal the cash and fly to Brazil with his family before the theft is discovered. From the very beginning holes in his plan appear. The upcoming weekend is the last time the bank won’t be open on Saturday until next year so the theft has to be tomorrow. This means getting passports for himself and his wife will have to be expedited. His wife Laurie balks at bringing their young daughter so a babysitter has to be located for the “two weeks” that Jim tells Laurie he’ll need to be in Brazil on the bank’s business. He didn’t know that plane flight reservations to Rio De Janeiro are booked weeks in advance and now he’ll have to chance getting cancellation seats. And he’ll have to fly first to New Orleans and then connect to his flight.
And all the things that can go wrong do. His wife isn’t in time to get the passports while the Brazilian embassy is open so Jim has to break in after hours and is caught by a building security guard and only some luck with an embassy worker who vouches for him saves him from arrest. The one-hundred-and-fifty-pound suitcase full of cash catches the airline’s attention and they have a customs agent open it and find the cash. Jim has to tell a bunch of unlikely stories about how the bank needs cash to transact a business deal in Brazil and barely survives the calls to his boss when it turns out he’s on the golf course. But eventually all of this is for nothing when the cancellations on his flight never materialize. Now Jim is faced with catching a flight on Monday after the bank has discovered the theft.
At this point Laurie has put two and two together and figures out that Jim has stolen the cash in the suitcase and confronts him. When he admits to it, she refuses to continue with the plan and goes home to her daughter. Meanwhile back at home Jim’s work friend dropped off a present at Jim’s home and hears about Jim making an unscheduled “business trip” to Brazil. Finding this strange he tries to get in touch with Jim’s boss to get the details on the trip but has trouble reaching him. Meanwhile Laurie reaches home and finds out about Jim’s friend hearing about their trip so she calls him and makes some excuse about how it wasn’t a business trip but a story they used to disguise a surprise for their daughter.
Early Monday morning Jim calls up Laurie at home and tells her he realizes he’s made a terrible mistake and says he’s going to try to get the money back in the vault before anyone knows it’s missing. He flies home and reaches the bank right after the security guard has opened it. He manages to get the suitcase to the vault and the money back in and hide the suitcase just as the opening team reaches his position outside the vault. At this point the actual strain of the deception overcomes Jim and he sinks to the floor. His colleagues think he’s been struck with a flu and tell him to go home. In the last scene Jim reunites with Laurie at their home in an embrace that shows their relief at the end of the nightmare.
Now this must sound like a ridiculous story. And it is. It’s absurd. But it’s also enormously suspenseful. Jim Osborne has done such a poor job of anticipating the multitude of things that need to be coordinated for a successful theft of this type that he’s left himself open for an almost endless series of problems that provide suspense. His bad humor and fear grow from minute to minute and alarm his wife because they clash with his normally friendly and calm attitude. The tension is ratcheted up throughout the movie. I was surprised just how much I enjoyed it. Highly recommended.