The Anderson Tapes

There's The Maltese Falcon and this. I'm not giving away too much with that. I'll just say The Anderson tapes themselves serve absolutely no purpose in this movie. Having all the surveillance (and Connery's title character Duke Anderson isn't even the intended target for the surveillance) serves only to pad out the film abd try to make it more interesting from a cinematic standpoint but it's still just a caper movie.

Without the tapes subplot and the odious Quincy Jones score, this movie would be better. It would be a fairly faithful throwback to 1940s Film Noir movies except modernized for the 70s. You sort of feel sorry for the crooks at times. That's what makes me think of John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle

Alan King is pretty good as the pseudo head of the crime family who finances the robbery at a price. Martin Balsam definitely plays against type in this as the decorator who cases the building they plan to rob. Christopher Walken makes his debut as an adult actor (used to be a child actor in the early 50s) as one of the robbers. Garrett Morris plays one of the cops. Ralph Meeker plays his superior. Character actor Val Avery plays one of the robbers and he is excellent in this but I've seen better work by Dyan Cannon, Sean Connery and Sidney Lumet elsewhere even if the score or title were better . Good to see once but not memorable.