5 Against the House
TMC was running a day full of films about heists. I love those films, and we caught a couple I hadn’t seen. Here a group of four students at “Midwestern College” are on a toot in Reno. Back on campus one of them comes up with a scheme to rob Harold’s Club. (When my family went west when I was 14, there was a sign for Harold’s Club roughly every three miles, or so it seemed.) They are the usual motley group: the nerdy, skinny dude with no chin (Alvy Moore) whose every line is a wisecrack; the “brain” (Kerwin Matthews), a rich kid who doesn’t actually want the money from the robbery and thinks they’re going to give it back; the skirt chaser and crazy dude (Brian Keith) who has no intention of giving the money back; and the square-jawed heartthrob and decent guy (Guy Madison) who isn’t even aware the others are plotting a robbery when they head west in a tiny trailer with a cart custom-made to look like the cash carts in Harold’s Club, along with his nightclub singer girlfriend (Kim Novak). That’s five.
The plan is way beyond stupid, and of course we all knew it would fail, no spoiler warning needed here. Keith basically kidnaps the whole group and forces them to do the robbery. He and his asshole buddy Guy are Korean War vets, and Keith got a head injury that makes him homicidal when he gets angry. The ending did have a little surprise which I will not reveal, but you’ll know it when you see it, because it’s not what you expected. Everything else is exactly what you expected.
The main attraction here is, surprisingly, Harold’s Club. I just don’t think a production like this had the budget to construct a truly huge set of the interior, so I’m pretty sure it was actually filmed there. That was damn rare until lately. Casinos didn’t want to allow filming inside because of possible embarrassment to patrons, and of course since they are 24/7/365 operations they would have to shut down for a while and fill the gambling floor with extras. It’s a nice look at a much simpler era in Nevada, when casinos were not such mega-monster operations. They also filmed in a huge 6-story parking structure that featured a moving forklift thing that picked up your car and slotted it into a berth high up in the air.
Lastly … boy, do these folks look too old for college! Only Kim Novak was college age, 22. When I realized that two of them were ex-GIs I cut them a little slack, but what about the other two? Their actual ages ranged between 29 and 34. Really slow students.