The Anderson Tapes

The Anderson Tapes is a good little heist movie gussied up with a heavy-handed—albeit prescient—indictment of the surveillance state.

Sean Connery plays Duke Anderson, a safe-cracker fresh off a ten-year prison stint. He shacks up with his old girlfriend, played by Dyan Cannon in her posh Manhattan apartment. Connery quickly hatches a plan to rob the entire building on Memorial Day weekend, and sets about putting a team together, unaware that he’s under surveillance the entire time from various agencies, all with competing agendas.

Two things leap out from the opening scenes: Connery’s hair and Quincy Jones’s score.

Connery would wear a toupee for that year’s James Bond entry, Diamonds are Forever, but not here. The result has him look older, less virile. Fitting a man just out of prison. It complements his character’s harder edge, providing a constant reminder of his loss—ten years of his prime.

Jones’s score opens as an overbearing series of beeps, chirps, and whirs. The idea seems to be to introduce a “modern” edge and emphasizes the intrusive nature of technology. A noble intent, but when the audience is paying more attention to the score than the narrative, you know you’ve overdone it.

Fortunately, both of these initial rough spots smooth out as the film settles into the traditional heist formula. Director Sidney Lumet still points out every camera watching the characters, accompanied by a loud chirp and whir from Jones, but you get used to it, thanks in large part to Connery’s charismatic performance.

He seems to relish the hard-boiled dialogue. A highlight comes when he recruits “The Kid,” played by a young Christopher Walken. “Look, when you rob a guy who’s got insurance, you’re doing him a favor,” says Connery. “You’re giving him a little excitement in his life, a story to tell. He becomes a more interesting person because you robbed him. You boost the insurance company because the publicity gets people to buy insurance. You do the fuzz a favor because, well, you prove they’re necessary and deserving of a big pay boost.”

“You believe that?” asks the Kid.

“It’s bullshit,” says Connery with a grin. “It’s just dog-eat-dog and I want the first bite.”

And the centerpiece heist sequence shines. After Connery gets the team together which—of course—includes a last-minute addition who we know will screw up the plan, the job commences. Lumet cuts between the heist and post-mortem interviews, foreshadowing the plan’s unravelling.

During the heist, the film surprises with some unexpected black comedy as they burst into the apartment of two elderly women.

The older, white-haired woman exclaims, “It’s a robbery!” with delight, clapping her hands and grinning, thrilled at the excitement.

The crew discovers some Bell Telephone bonds. “God knows what they’re worth,” says one of the burglars.

“For God’s sake, take them. I’m tired of them,” says the white-haired woman.

“Your father gave you those,” says the other, grey-haired woman.

“My father was one first-class son of a bitch, as you well know,” says the white-haired woman with a smile.

More surprises as—midway through the heist—the film shifts the tension from the robbers to the cops as they attempt to infiltrate the building undetected.

Indeed, a better film would eschew the surveillance angle and play as a straight cops-and-robbers drama. One that gives Connery’s character more edge and fleshes out his partners’ motivations. Michael Mann would make that movie with Heat, and this film’s finale, with the robbers’ doomed escape playing out on the sunlit New York City streets, likely served as an influence on Heat’s Los Angeles-set escape sequence.

Given the film’s preoccupation with surveillance, it’s tempting to assume it was a response to the Watergate scandal, but it actually predates it by a year. While it wins points for prescience, the heavy-handed approach disappoints. Provided you can look past it, however, there’s an entertaining little heist film buried underneath.