With a title like "Guns, Girls, and Gangsters", the movie could be headed in only one direction— the local drive-in. Add top-heavy van Doren to the head of the marquee, and you've got a real teenage winner. So what if the result comes off like a 3rd-rate rip-off of Kubrick's classic The Killing of two years before, replete with time-ticking narration. True, there's some imagination that went into the details of the armored car heist here; too bad, however, that the imagination didn't carry over to the lame climax. It's like they were running out of film and had to wrap right away.
The movie does have two of B-movies' more underrated tough guys—Mohr and van Cleef. Between them they charge the 80-minutes with some needed authority. Too bad van Cleef makes a late arrival, because their rivalry sets off sparks and could easily have replaced the awkward van Doren's screen time, which is also taken up by two of the most forgettable songs on record. A better script and more imaginative direction minus van Doren could have turned this uneven exercise into a no-nonsense Plunder Road (1958) type, which was also a cheap, but very well executed heist film.
(In passing—I wonder if someone in Sinatra's so-called Rat Pack caught this obscure production since the premise looks a lot like Sinatra's Ocean's Eleven {1960}.)
The movie does have two of B-movies' more underrated tough guys—Mohr and van Cleef. Between them they charge the 80-minutes with some needed authority. Too bad van Cleef makes a late arrival, because their rivalry sets off sparks and could easily have replaced the awkward van Doren's screen time, which is also taken up by two of the most forgettable songs on record. A better script and more imaginative direction minus van Doren could have turned this uneven exercise into a no-nonsense Plunder Road (1958) type, which was also a cheap, but very well executed heist film.
(In passing—I wonder if someone in Sinatra's so-called Rat Pack caught this obscure production since the premise looks a lot like Sinatra's Ocean's Eleven {1960}.)