How many '70s movies had title graphics like these? Certainly many of the futuristic dystopian ones. Mouse over: Connery not amused by the future.

WARNING: SPOILERS

We get the tropes of a heist movie—guy gets out of prison, cases a joint, gathers a team, and they pull off the job with efficiency and still come to a bad end—but there’s a distinction: The gang is watched and recorded throughout. Every step of the way. The watchers, though, are different entities who aren’t working together, don’t know from each other, and could care less about the heist. Each is after something else. It’s an in-joke from the Watergate era that speaks to ours. Everything is being recorded and no one sees what it means.

The movie is also shockingly dated: rape and “fag” jokes are peppered throughout.

“The Anderson Tapes” is significant for being the last feature film of Margaret Hamilton, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West, and the first feature film of Christopher Walken, AKA fill in the blank. Plus we get an early turn from pre-“SNL” Garrett Morris as a cop. Oh, and it’s fun. 

Accepting charges
The movie opens with John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery), James Bond to the rest of the world, equating safe-cracking with rape. “I used to blow ’em open and plunge right in,” he says in his slushy Scottish brogue. As he matured, he adds, safe-cracking became more of a seduction. There was more finesse. He seems to be enjoying his monologue.

Turns out it’s on tape. Prisoners, including him (embarrassed by his younger self), are watching it in a group therapy session facilitated by a shrink (Anthony Holland, who had a memorable early M*A*S*H role as a shrink). The footage was taken when he first arrived in prison, and now it’s 10 years later and he’s getting out. Also getting out are the young and the old: The Kid (Walken) and Pop (Stan Gottlieb). The latter reminds me of James Whitmore’s Brooks from “Shawshank Redemption,” saying he was incarcerated in “19 and 32,” and entering a world he can’t fathom nor handle. The former reminds me of no one, since Christopher Walken is already very Christopher Walken—just thinner and fuller-lipped. More jungle cat. When they step out of the bus station (which is being recorded by cops), he shouts, in that Walken manner, “America, man, you know it’s so beautiful I want to eat it!”

Anderson, being Sean Connery, wants to eat something else, and shows up at the swanky pad of the swankier Ingrid Everly (Dyan Cannon). “I haven’t been laid in over 10 years,” he greets her, and she moves her hair aside so he can unzip her dress. Oof. 1970s-era Dyan Cannon does something to me. Post-coital is when Anderson gets the heist idea: Why not rob the entire upper-class apartment complex? Go room to room? Just take? They’re being recorded, too, but by a private detective hired by Werner (Richard Shull) to keep an eye on his mistress. He worries more about the heist of her than of the place.

And so Anderson gathers his team, including The Kid and Pop, as well as Spencer (Dick Anthony Williams), a Black Power activist being watched by the FBI, and Tommy Haskins (Martin Balsam), a fun, swishy antique dealer. It leads to a lot of “fag” jokes but Tommy remains himself and sympathetic throughout. I loved Balsam in this. The operation is being bankrolled by mob boss Pat Angelo (Alan King), who is being watched by the IRS. He owes Anderson a favor but demands one in return: take along Rocco “Socks” Parelli (Val Avery) and kill him. He’s a liability to the mob and becomes one for Anderson.

The apartment complex is fill of characters: a spinster couple, one afraid, one gungho; a fussy shrink (Conrad Bain); an upper-class “I want to speak to the manager” couple. It’s that couple’s son, Jerry (Scott Jacoby of “Bad Ronald” fame), that undoes the gang. An asthmatic paraplegic, they don’t bother to tie him up but leave him alone in his room. Behind cupboards he has an extensive ham radio setup and calls for help. I like the circuitous way it arrives. Someone in the Midwest, like in Kansas, hears him, and phones NYPD to let them know about the robbery in progress, but nobody at NYPD wants to accept the charges. The Kansas dude winds up picking them up. Basically every enforcement outfit is doing the minimum—recording everything and seeing nothing—while the crooks are pros but still lose. They all wind up dead.

Would’ve been great if the only one who survived was “Socks,” but Anderson takes him out. The survivor is Pop, who is more than grateful to return to prison. It’s a world he understands.

And introducing...

Prefiguring
“The Anderson Tapes” was filmed on location in New York City in August 1970 and opened the following June—a year before the Watergate break-in. So all this stuff, bugging, etc., was in the zeitgeist then. It was known. We didn’t need G. Gordon Liddy to show us the way. One imagines movies like this helped the public understand Watergate once it broke.

Based on a 1970 novel by Lawrence Sanders, it was written by Frank Pierson and directed by Sidney Lumet just before his his great run: “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” (with Pierson), and “Network.” Lumet is known for the Pacino movies but actually had a longer affiliation with Connery. Five films in all: “The Hill” (1964), this, “The Offence” (1973), “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and, last but last, “Family Business” (1989).

This one is short: 99 minutes. It did the show biz thing of leaving me wanting more. It’s got a great early ’70s vibe: the city, the culture, filmmaking—including yes, the problematic parts. Despite stars, it’s gritty and chaotic and unfolds like life. It’s New York, man, so beautiful you want to eat it.

Just realized that the overall message of the film—government agencies spying and not connecting the dots—prefigured 9/11 by 30 years. So the movie prefigures both Watergate and 9/11. All the national tragedies. I should watch it again to see how it prefigures Trump.

Oof.