The Great Bank Hoax (1977) User Reviews

these people get dumb

[SnoopyStyle · 4/10 · 11 October 2021]

Bank officers Manny Benchly (Richard Basehart), Julius Taggart (Ned Beatty), and Jack Stutz (Burgess Meredith) discover $100k is missing from their small town bank. In order to avoid any scandal, they decide to cook the books and fake a robbery. Head bank clerk Richard Smedley (Paul Sand) is being enticed. People start confessing to Reverend Manigma (Michael Murphy).

I love the premise and these three are great veteran actors. This movie has great potential. Smedley is the first problem. His confession is annoying. I'm willing to buy the pathetic loser but the rest doesn't make sense. The three men should make him their patsy right away. The easiest move is for them to go to the police with his confession. They could claim ignorance. When the money amounts don't match up, the suspicion would land squarely on Smedley. As for Smedley himself, he's already confessed. What he does afterwards makes even less sense. These people start acting dumb and the story stops being compelling. For this movie to work, these need to be smart people. This has to be a smart movie. Initially, I thought the three leads are those smart people.

A humorless comedy with wasted talents

[SimonJack · 4/10 · 16 September 2017]

The plot of "The Great Bank Hoax" should be the stuff of a good movie, yet it doesn't work very well here. A first-rate cast was assembled for this film, but it doesn't seem to have life. Some of the performances are sub-par for the talent – especially Burgess Meredith and Richard Basehart. Ned Beatty was fine in his role, but Paul Sand just seemed like a wet noodle throughout. The movie is supposed to be a comedy but there's so little in it to tickle one's funny bone. One suspects that this film was intended to be a satire. But satire requires a very good and tight script that includes clever dialog and some funny lines. Without that, this film flops as satire.

The screenplay just isn't very good – it has holes, but mostly it doesn't seem to have much life. With the clever idea for this story there should have been some witty lines in places. And, it suffers from weak direction. Some scenes just seem to drag on. If Meredith and Basehart weren't up to it physically, this is something that Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau would have done very well. Or, perhaps James Garner and someone. Arthur Godfrey has two of the best lines – about the only ones that may get a smile.

I can't recommend this film even for Meredith fans. I think they would be disappointed in the whole production. Meredith has a very good role that should have had some of the Meredith snap in it.

"You know, this bloody thing makes you feel like a crook."

[classicsoncall · 5/10 · 9 December 2023]

This film just didn't work for me. I guess I got hung up on the idea that the three bank executives were going to chalk up the missing hundred nine grand to a bank robbery, but then got involved in robbing a like amount themselves. So now they were doubling down on what could have been downplayed to an unfortunate circumstance. While Burgess Meredith was a stand out here as bank exec Jack Stutz, all the while it felt like he was channeling George Burns with the cigar and the facial expressions. His nonchalance as a crook came through while eating a ham sandwich as bank president Manny Benchley (Richard Basehart) and controller Julius Taggart (Ned Beatty) got their hands dirty with the actual theft. Notice how Meredith's character avoided anything to do that could possibly implicate him if they all got caught. I have to agree with another reviewer regarding the return of the original hundred grand via the botched getaway of gold digger Cathy (Charlene Dallas) and the crooked Reverend (Michael Murphy). Once that happened the original robbery should have been a moot point with the insurance payoff a non-event. With all that, I believe this is the only time I've ever seen Arthur Godfrey in an actual movie.

Awful

[analoguebubblebath · 18 March 2002]

I recorded this about four years ago and finally got round to watching it tonight.

It's a simplistic and boring tale of bungling and embezzlement in a sleepy bank in a non-descript town.

A struggle to watch till the end.

2/10

Don't Bother

[aramis-112-804880 · 1/10 · 26 February 2022]

It's too bad one can't give negative stars because, despite some of the professional names involved this whole shebang feels like amateur night.

The lead is Paul Sand, that so-cslled comic who never, apparently, owned a comb. He' no great shakes as an actor but his performance here is practically comatose.

The plot: who knows? It's so convoluted. Sand plays a guy who embezzles $109,000 from the bank where he works and that spurs bank executives to falsify a robbery to cover the losses . . . Or something.

Most of the movie consists of a lot of talk. And more talk. The plot is so difficult to follow they have to keep talking to try and clarify it but they do a rotten job of it.

I suppose the underlying premise is that everyone is corruptible by moola. How original (sarcasm). 2000 years ago St. Paul wrote that the Love of money is the root of all evil. But I doubt they want to make a Biblical point.

Even the music isn't that good. It sounds derivative.

Miss.

not top-notch, but worth watching

[rupie · 7/10 · 27 January 2015]

This is by no means a comedy on the level of "The Ladykillers," "Young Frankenstein," or "The Odd Couple," but it definitely has its charms. It is true that, as other viewers have said, it unwinds at a pace that could kindly be called "relaxed" but I find that to be one of its charms. It is enjoyable to see how, ever so gradually, the characters start digging their holes deeper and deeper. Interest is also maintained by the continual revelation of new interrelationships between the characters, until one is never quite sure who is hoodwinking who. Another plus is the fine cast, of which Burgess Meredith is the standout. His portrayal of the crustily beguiling Stutz almost carries the movie. Basehart plays against type as a highly nervous milquetoast type, and Ned Beatty is good as the befuddled controller. Arthur Godfrey's minimal contribution was purely for the marquee. The movie is also blessed with the presence of two highly delectable female leads whose pulchritude is generously displayed. Finally, the production values are excellent, especially regarding color (they don't use techniques like this anymore because of the expense), and the movie is a joy to watch.

slower moving bank job from the 1970s

[ksf-2 · 7/10 · 18 March 2009]

LOVE Ned Beatty! He plays one of the bigshots at a small town bank where a chunk of money is missing, and the auditors are on the way, kind of an updated "Bank Dick", but W.C. Fields is long gone. Most viewers will recognize Beatty from Deliverance, or Hopscotch. The other bank big wigs are Richard Basehart and a seventy year old Burgess Meredith (The Penguin!) In our story, the Great Bank Hoax, the bank's chief clerk (Richard) meets up with a sultry, young Patricia at bingo night, and they head off to her place, but they aren't after the same thing... she just wants a loan from the bank, and he's after something else. Meanwhile, the bank directors are coming up with a plan to keep the auditors from knowing just how much is SUPPOSED to be in the vault.... One of the bank employees has a guilty conscience, and must get advice from the town priest. The pace is quite "relaxed", and there are a couple of slapstick gags and surprises, but it all works, as long you keep your expectations in check. Directed by indie writer/director Joseph Jacoby, who only worked on five projects.

Joesph Jacoby's 1978 Watergate Allegory Is A Lost And Evocative Gem

[project717-629-119383 · 10/10 · 26 June 2019]

Discovering this film is tantamount to feeling like an archaeologist coming across an extraordinary fossil of unknown origin: directed by a treasured old friend of Martin Scorsese, produced by the acclaimed editor of Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker" and several Woody Allen comedy classics, starring a then newly re-discovered Burgess Meredith after 1976's "Rocky" had brought him back into the public eye, with Ned Beatty of "Network" and "Deliverance" fame and the venerable Richard Basehart, Micheal Murphy, the forgotten Paul Sand, and beautiful Constance Forslund and lovely Charlene Dallas rounding out the cast. But this alone does not begin to describe the particularly strange and noteworthy qualities of "The Great Bank Hoax", for it appears to be a movie existing in an alternate and twilight-set universe of it's very own. Shot on location in the small town of Madison, Georgia, there is a sense of almost vivid suffocation and claustrophobia pervading every square inch of the film's atmosphere, most specifically it's prison cell-like spaces with actors crammed into tiny curtained backrooms, teller's cages, and dimly-lit storage closets, it's empty and economically depressed Jimmy Carter-era Main Street with it's sad and bored high school orchestra and threadbare Fourth of July parade, it's rotting and isolated clapboard church ministered by a corrupt priest and surrounded by overgrown trees and forlorn stained glass windows, it's black-walled bingo parlor, lonely rooming houses, cracked country backroads, and dingy old motels, and most specifically it's melancholic and very off-kilter comic tone fueling it's allegorical Watergate satire, neither slapstick or laugh-out loud funny, but more of an aching and ill-defined humorous desperation, representing both the film's November 1978 release date and the waning days of that decade's diminishing faith in any sense of institutional post-Nixonian reform or improvement, a snapshot in time before the rise of a neo-conservative revolution that would sweep a fundamentalist Republican into the White House a mere 24 months later, leading directly towards our own present-day drama of 21st-century global malaise. Beneath it's surface of scheming females, bumbling bankers, and phony Christians lies one of the last remaining anti-establishment comedies that would quickly flourish and then disappear in the aftermath of the classic "Animal House", so it behooves any dedicated film historian to unearth and appreciate it's unique and singularly eccentric charms.

Basehart, Beatty, and Meredith are a great star trio.

[Hey_Sweden · 18 November 2011]

"The Great Bank Hoax" is an engaging comedy meant to be a Watergate-inspired "fable". It even has one of its characters utter the phrase "I'm not a crook!" more than once! The big wigs at a small town bank discover an embezzlement, which is poorly timed to say the least, as there are auditors on the way to the bank. So these gentlemen cover their tracks with a staged robbery, which only leads to other complications, especially as the embezzler, who never intended to keep the money anyway, still suffers from a guilty conscience. In fact, as has been pointed out, he's actually the most conscientious person in the story! The story does make the salient point that any person, even one of reasonable moral fibre, can yield to temptation or corruption - even the local reverend (Michael Murphy) lets his greed get the better of him! Writer / director Joseph Jacoby's movie is quite likable, and has some endearingly silly moments; it's really rather light hearted, never ever getting too serious. It starts off well, capturing the feel of small town America and getting down to business pretty quickly. The main draw of the movie is seeing a top notch cast, including old pros Richard Basehart and Burgess Meredith, at work. They, along with Ned Beatty as the controller, have a fine chemistry, with Meredith coming off the best, in a typically fun performance. Paul Sand is appealing as the guilt ridden chief clerk / embezzler, and TV and radio host Arthur Godfrey is good in a rather small role; the female co-stars, Charlene Dallas and Constance Forslund, are incredibly sexy, especially Ms. Dallas, and as we can see, their characters are absolutely no innocents, either. The pacing is relaxed, but things do still nicely lead up to a delicious resolution, and it's all enhanced by Arthur B. Rubinstein's funny comedy score. An enjoyable diversion. Seven out of 10.

Nifty comedy

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 8 September 2011]

Nebbishy bank clerk Richard Smedley (a solid and likable performance by Paul Sands) decides to test the system by embezzling over $100,000 thousand dollars from the small town Pewter Bank & Trust. A trio of corrupt bank officials -- nervous president Manny Benchley (a sturdy portrayal by Richard Basehart), reluctant book keeper Julius Taggert (a fine Ned Beatty), and cagey old coot Jack Stutz (a marvelously sly turn by Burgess Meredith) -- discover what Richard has done, but decide to cover it up by staging a fake robbery and taking an additional one hundred grand for themselves while they're at it. Writer/director Joseph Jacoby relates the amusing story at a laid-back, but steady pace, ably mines a satisfying line in pleasant low-key humor, nicely captures the sleepy nature of homey heartland America, and delivers a good deal of spot-on social commentary on how the allure of easily available money can lead even the most respectable law-biding citizens and pillars of the community astray. The sound acting from the tip-top cast helps a lot: Basehart, Beatty, and especially Meredith all excel in their roles, Sands makes for an engaging lead, plus there are praiseworthy contributions from Charlene Dallas as shrewd and sexy blackmailer Cathy Bonano, Michael Murphy as the shrewd Reverend Everett Manigma, and yummy blonde Constance Forshund as brash and on the make opportunist Patricia Allison Potter. A delightfully playful sense of cynicism and irony gives this picture an extra boost; the embezzler winds up being the only truly honest character in the whole movie and even the local priest wants a piece of the action. Walter Lassally's bright cinematography gives the film a pleasing bright look. Arthur B. Rubinstein's sprightly score likewise does the trick. An enjoyable romp.