Month: April 2025

The Steel Trap (1952) – A Movie Review

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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.

Even Barabbas Couldn’t Dampen This Day

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Such a good day.  Camera Girl cooked up a storm.  Beef and pork roasts, vegetables, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, stuffed mushrooms and more.  And then the desserts. At my insistence there were five different flavors of ice cream.  That’s because I know the kids crave it (well me too).  But she also made eclairs, tiramisu, ricotta cheesecake, chocolate cake (for the kids) and pineapple upside down cake.  I never even got to the pineapple cake.  I was too stuffed.  And the coffee was hot, strong and good.

The kids were busy with all kinds of silly games and gadgets.  But they were good.  When they started to get bored, I put on the original “King Kong.”  The family Godzilla aficionado was unimpressed with King Kong’s susceptibility to fifty caliber machine gun bullets.  He informed me that a real monster is unkillable with anything up to and including a thermonuclear warhead.  What could I say?  I pointed out that he did manage to kill a T Rex and also a Manhattan elevated subway train.  But apparently Godzilla is so incomparably superior to actual dinosaurs that conquering them is as nothing in the context of what Godzilla can do.  I was made aware that if Godzilla needed to, he has a mode called “thermonuclear” whereby he can emit the equivalent of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb against his surroundings.  This I was informed would utterly consume everything within a forty-mile radius around him.  I confessed defeat and asked if we could still watch the end of the movie where Carl Denham tells the cop that “It was beauty killed the beast.”  He rolled his eyes at the screen and shook his head.  Well, anyway, I still think Fay Wray is pretty good looking.  I don’t blame old Kong for carrying her off twice.

After they went home, I watched Barabbas.  That’s an old Dino DeLaurentis swords and sandals epic from the 1960s with Anthony Quinn as the title character who in the Bible is released instead of Jesus for the Passover clemency.  I’ll say with no hesitation that this is one of the worst biblical epics hands down.  Quinn is playing the same part he plays in Zorba the Greek and many other Mediterranean dramas.  His struggles in a Jerusalem prison, a Sicilian sulfur mine and the Roman Coliseum all seem self-inflicted and by the end of the movie I had to wonder if even St Peter wasn’t ready to kick his butt up and down the Roman jail.  Because Barrabas mistook Nero’s blaming the Christians for the burning of Rome with a real Christian plan to “burn the old world” Barabbas gets caught torching an oil warehouse and claims he’s doing it because he’s a Christian.  So, because of this St Peter and the rest of the real Christians are crucified by Nero.  What a genius!

As Barabbas is hanging on a cross at the end of the movie making what seem to be fairly meaningless comments, it seemed to me that the whole movie was absolutely pointless from every perspective; artistically, religiously, even logically.  As spectacle it was borderline ridiculous.  Quinn has a showdown in the Coliseum with Jack Palance in a chariot and himself on foot.  I’ve never seen a less convincing, more boring fight sequence.  At the end of the battle even the actor playing Nero looked like he wanted to be somewhere else but just couldn’t escape.

I also watched an old film noir called “Steel Trap.”  That was much more satisfactory.  I’ll review it soon.  Well, this will have to do for today.  A good day and a busy day.

Easter Sunday 2025

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Well, it’s here.  If there is any more primal marker for spring than Easter, I don’t know what it could be.  The resurrection of God is about as on the nose as you can get.  This is our chance to embrace life.  Even old codgers like me, maybe especially old codgers like me get to see up close and personal the immortality of the human soul.  We see our children and our grandchildren do all the same things we did forty and fifty and sixty years ago.

We can see the little ones hunt easter eggs and gorge themselves on chocolate and complain about any of the specialty foods they hate and get bored sitting too long at the table and chafe at any fancy clothes their mothers made them wear and want to go outside and play and complain about the may flies and ask when the desserts are served and fight and fight and fight with each other.

As it was in the beginning, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.  But of course, it’s not us without end.  For me I can see that my part in the pageant is drawing to the close.  A decade or two should finish me off and leave my kids to ponder on the mysteries of the spring rebirth cycle without the incredible wisdom that they’ve come to expect!  Boy what a relief that’ll be for them.

And that’s alright.  I actually get a kind of kick out of thinking that after I’m gone, I might be the subject of some stories that play upon some of my idiosyncrasies.  In fact, there already are several stories among my children about the crazy things I’ve done that they remember.

Among my siblings, stories about my father’s expressions, habits and failings are our most cherished memories.  And to be totally fair he could take a joke at his own expense.  If stories of that sort about me became fixed in the family lore I would feel greatly honored.  It’s much better to be gently mocked by your descendants than loathed.  I’ve seen both cases and to have your foibles as the source of laughter is very strongly to be preferred.  As I’ve said before, being remembered and talked about after you’re gone is a form of immortality.  And who doesn’t want to be immortal, I ask you?

And along with all the traditions something new is being added.  Camera Girl tried her hand at a new dessert; tiramisu.  It’s very nice and I commend her ambition and enthusiasm to extend her range.  But what I want is the Italian cheesecake and a large portion of vanilla ice cream.  I’m on a perpetual diet so I look forward to these holidays as an excuse to indulge my sweet tooth with something worthwhile.  And ricotta cheesecake, vanilla ice cream and some nice strong coffee is exactly that.

So, for everyone out there who will be celebrating Easter or even if you just used to enjoy celebrating it in the old days I say, “Christ is risen!”