Siegel: Charley Varrick (1973)

Seeing a great director paired with the perfect actor can always be something of a revelation. Over the course of his career, Don Siegel worked particularly well with Clint Eastwood – they shared a certain clipped lyricism, an ability to cloak brutality in the most delicate poise. In Charley Varrick, his first and only film with Walter Matthau, there’s something of the same synergy, except that Matthau’s infinitely relaxed screen presence perhaps brings out an even suppler Siegel. On paper, it’s a brutal, unrelenting story of a heist gone wrong – Matthau plays Varrick, a small-time criminal who robs a sleepy New Mexico bank, only to find out that it’s a hotspot for Mafia drops. However, it doesn’t play out quite as kinetically as that might suggest, partly because Varrick quickly realises that the best way to deal with stolen Mafia money is to do nothing – don’t spend it, don’t try and get rid of it, don’t confess to having stolen it. Unfortunately, his partner, Harman (Andy Sullivan), doesn’t see things that way, leading to a chilling Mafia hitman, played by Joe Don Wilson, coming after the two of them. Still, you never really escape the sense that Varrick would rather be doing nothing, or that doing nothing is what he does best, and that couches all but the most brutal moments in an ambient, Southwestern haze, aided by Siegel’s exquisite taste for atmosphere and place. At times, it’s hard not to believe that Siegel personally curated the locations as well as the location shots – there’s a contagious relish for street names, signage and other minutiae, while the film could almost play as a sequence of location shots, a photographic record of small-town, Southwestern Americana. Almost, but not quite, since it’s clear that Siegel is a master of dynamic composition – as perfectly constructed as his mise-en-scenes might be, there’s also something infinitely elastic, supple and flexible about them; they’re peculiarly open to unexpected bursts of wind, unchoreographed cars in the distance. And that’s the nature of Varrick himself – like Siegel’s camera, he’s dynamic, buoyant, equally dexterous on land or in air, having worked as a stunt pilot and cropduster before becoming a bank robber. By the extraordinary final car-plane chase, there’s no real distinction between what is airborne and what is grounded – every composition and decision feels architectural and provisional all at once, in one of the most elusive, mercurial masterpieces of the 70s.