Random film of the day served up "Charley Varrick" from 1973: Don Siegel, Walter Matthau, TMDB rating a modest 7.4, popularity 2.17 out of ten. The numbers themselves are a mystery: a film the director considered one of his career's best, and critics a decade later called one of the era's finest, has audience popularity lower than half the shows out there. That doesn't happen by accident.
Dug deeper — and the hook only got tastier. The role of Charley Varrick was written for Clint Eastwood, and Eastwood turned it down. Matthau played it so well he won a BAFTA for Best Actor — while publicly calling the film incomprehensible. The picture bombed at the box office, and half a century later an academic paper comes out titled "Charley Varrick and the Incorporation of America in the 1970s." The film Siegel made right after "Dirty Harry" turned out to be a hidden response to "Dirty Harry" — a polemic with his own formula. This is one of those cases where the story of a single "failed" film unfolds into the story of an entire genre's breaking point.
By 1973 Siegel is "the man who made Eastwood a star": "Coogan's Bluff," "Two Mules for Sister Sara," "The Beguiled," "Dirty Harry." Eisenstein has nothing to do with it — Siegel just knew: montage starts with the letter. His formula is simple and powerful: a lone man outside the system who solves problems with violence, and the audience is on his side. "Charley Varrick" begins as an execution of the same formula and immediately flips it. Charley is also a loner outside the system, even has a fitting slogan: his crop-dusting company overalls read "Last of the Independents." But he's not a cop, he's a thief. He doesn't protect anyone — he runs off with bags of cash.
The polemic is sewn into the film's fabric. Harry Callahan takes down criminals because the law is powerless; Charley methodically destroys his opponents because criminals are powerless against him. In the finale the hero doesn't lecture the mobster about "do you feel lucky" — he calculates probabilities and sells the mobster his own death. Siegel biographer Judith Kass formulated it surgically back in 1975: the "normal" world in Siegel's cinema is just as false and evil as the criminal world, except criminals are at least honest in their lawlessness. "Dirty Harry" asserts: the system is rotten, we need a righteous avenger. "Charley Varrick" responds: the system is rotten through and through, and the only way to survive is to be smarter than it, not more righteous.
There's a personal jab in this mirror too. Eastwood rejected the role because he found nothing "redeeming" in Charley. Siegel took offense and got elegant revenge: there's a scene where a photographer, looking at the thug hitman Molly, cracks: "I didn't take you for Clint Eastwood." This isn't just a joke — it's a director stitching his own argument with his former star into the film.
By 1973 Matthau is a comedian with capital from "The Odd Couple," "How to Steal a Million," an Oscar-winning character actor in supporting roles. Casting him as a cold-blooded thief was something like casting Uri Geller as a dive bomber — yeah, he's a magician, but not that kind. The director didn't need a superman: as one Cinema Scope roundtable participant put it, had Eastwood or Bronson been on screen, the little man's victory over the empire would read as superheroics. But with "Uncle Matthau" — one of us, a bit clumsy, with dog-like devotion in his eyes — victory reads as a miracle of calculation: one of us turned out smarter than all of us.
Matthau plays against everything that made him famous. Not a single funny line. His Charley never raises his voice — and that makes him scarier than any shouter. The scene that defined the film: dead wife in the car, Charley kisses her, removes the wedding ring from her finger, puts it on his own, covers the body with explosives. No hysterics — "it's a matter of probabilities": the body can't be identified because identification leads to him. A critic later wrote that the viewer senses a well of rage beneath the surface, but Charley will never let it rise — it's "impractical."
The irony is the actor himself rejected the film. He sent Siegel a tape trashing the script and a letter that entered history: "I have looked at it three times and have an above average intelligence (IQ 120) but I still don't quite understand what's going on. Maybe we can find a device to explain to the audience what they are seeing?" He would have made an excellent insurance producer: suggest a fictional narrator at a psychoanalyst's in Argentina. Siegel refused — and turned out right: what irritated Matthau, the "refusal to explain," became the picture's main virtue. The viewer here doesn't get a ready-made map — he becomes an accomplice to the surveillance himself.
Now the most counterintuitive part. "Charley Varrick" is listed as a box office disappointment — but try finding the numbers. Box Office Mojo gives emptiness for the American run, The Numbers database has no domestic grosses at all — only $198 from a one-theater New Zealand re-release in 2023. For a 1973 Universal Pictures film this is telling in itself: the picture's theatrical fate was so unnoticed that even accounting doesn't remember it. "Disappointment" is an assessment from memoirs and interviews, not from reports.
Why didn't audiences find the film? All the factors came together at once. Universal under Lew Wasserman killed the title "Last of the Independents" — and without it the picture on the poster turned into an ordinary crime action film. Matthau, the main box office asset, publicly said he didn't understand the script — and Siegel directly blamed those statements for the studio's cooling. And most importantly: the film didn't fit the genre formula. America in 1973 wanted either "The French Connection" or "The Godfather" — and got rural noir in daylight, where the most terrifying murder happens against a peaceful barn, and the main chase is car versus biplane, which is also a parody of "The French Connection."
Yet critics noticed the film immediately. Vincent Canby in the New York Times called it "an intelligent action melodrama," John Simon — one of the most accomplished specimens of the gangster genre. On Rotten Tomatoes it has 82% — in half a century no one has dropped it below "fresh." Matthau won the 1974 BAFTA for Best Actor — an award for a role in a film he himself trashed. This is the rarest kind of irony: an actor who didn't understand his own best work.
Here I have to be an honest documentarian, because many beautiful legends have grown around this film about "the first Coen Brothers film, shot twenty years before the Coens." I found no documented direct influence on "Fargo" — only persistent echo. Comparisons live in reviews for decades: provincial crooks, irony at the cinematographer's level rather than the gag level, violence arising from petty deception. But echo is already something: Cinema Scope's critic directly separates Siegel and the Coens as two methods — with the Coens the eccentricity is emphasized, with Siegel the viewer notices it himself, as one notices in life. If "Fargo" is kin to "Charley Varrick," it's through a common grandmother — noir in daylight, whose progenitor is Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."
But there are documented traces of the afterlife, and they're precise. In 1978 Rory Gallagher recorded the song "Last of the Independents" — according to his bassist Gerry McAvoy's memoirs, the inspiration was precisely the phrase from Charley's overalls. In 2013 the studio released "2 Guns," which critics described as "not a remake, but a film that pulled many elements from 'Charley Varrick.'" In 2025 Film Criticism journal published an article about the film as a text of "incorporation of America" — researchers read the picture as a chronicle of the declassing of small business: "The Outfit" (what the syndicate is called in the film) squeezed Charley out of the aviation business just as Walmart later mowed down small towns — and robbing the bank becomes not a crime but the business plan of the last free entrepreneur.
There's also a third trace — the most pleasant. Joe Don Baker, playing the thug Molly, gave the genre an archetype: if it seems to you that the troublemaker from "Fargo" and Tarantino's madmen owe something to the cowboy psychopath behind the wheel of a red car — this line goes back here. But the film's main legacy is subtler. "Charley Varrick" legitimized for the mainstream the professional hero without moralizing and irony without winking — that very tone the Coens would use two decades later, and after them — the entire "smart crime film" genre. Formally no one quotes the film. In fact everyone speaks its language.
The finale of "Charley Varrick" is one of those stunts they unlearned how to shoot after CGI appeared. Charley lures Molly to the airfield, takes his biplane up for takeoff, and when the thug's car tucks in behind — deliberately flips the plane and hangs upside down in the cockpit. Molly is certain the pilot is trapped in the wreckage and promises life in exchange for the money — Charley hands over the keys to the "stashed loot," the guy opens the trunk and goes airborne together with Charley's dead partner. The ring from his dead wife's hand turns up on the dead accomplice's finger, the dental records swapped — and the mob buries the wrong person they were looking for. The police get a body, the insurance gets a version, the mob gets a dead end. Charley drives off into the sunset with seven hundred and fifty thousand in someone else's dollars and not a single shot fired in the finale.
Hitchcock in "North by Northwest" scared the hero with a crop duster — here the hero is the crop duster, and the car chasing the plane inverts the Hitchcock scene in pure form. Both maneuvers were done for real: behind the controls of the inverted Stearman sat Hollywood stunt pilot Frank Tallman, one of the best aerial operators of the era. The film also had a dark afterlife: that very plane, tail number N53039, survived until December 31, 1976 and crashed in California when the wing clipped a power line during actual crop dusting. The pilot died. Hollywood props sometimes cost more than the death played in them.
The source is John Reese's 1968 novel "The Looters," about a regular small-bank robber in the Southwest. Screenwriters Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman performed a key operation: added the mob and made the money "hot." In the novel the hero simply conflicts with the law; in the film — with a system that has two hands: official (bank, police, FBI) and shadow (syndicate, killer), and both hands belong to one body. Hence the film's central metaphor, which critics decoded later: the bank in a backwater town is not a building but a node. The official report says two thousand dollars were stolen, because the rest can't be shown in reports. Charley cracks the system from one number on the TV news — the only person on screen who reads the criminal world's financial statements.
Filming added another layer of strange to the story. The action takes place in New Mexico, but they shot the film in Nevada: the town of Genoa pretending to be Tres Cruces, a trailer park in Dayton, the bank interior in Minden. In the episode where the killer spent the night at a brothel, Joe Conforte himself played — the real owner of the real Mustang Ranch, Nevada's legal brothel. The irony is that the film's most complex scene — the conversation by the barn, where the money-laundering banker and crushed manager talk about the power that owns them — Siegel shot for several days, chasing the needed shadow falling on the field. A scene of two people and one shadow — and the director called it one of the hardest in his career. That's Siegel all over: the epic finale with the biplane — just work, but a believable conversation between two bureaucrats of evil — now that's the real stunt work.
I think "Charley Varrick" is the perfect illustration of how film history chooses its heroes not by box office or awards, but by the ability to hit a nerve that audiences haven't yet recognized. In 1973 the film seemed "wrong": the hero not heroic enough, the humor not loud enough, the morality not moral enough. Twenty years later it turned out it simply came before the viewer was ready: the tone of "smart crime cinema" we consider invented by the Coens and Tarantino is already worked out here — with the difference that Siegel doesn't like to show his characters, he just shoots them.
The second thought is about acting risk. Matthau played an "incomprehensible" film, for which he received his best award, and honestly said he didn't understand it. There's something disarming in this: even professionals don't always recognize the masterpiece they're participating in. Directorial faith in this sense turned out to be the only voice that was right — and, note, this faith was directed not against the system but against his own previous work. The best films are often made not "despite the studio" but "despite yesterday's self."
And the third — engineering. The film's most precise metaphor is not the chase or the robbery, but a line in the news: "less than two thousand dollars stolen." You can crack the entire system from one wrong number in official reporting if you know how to read. Charley Varrick is a detective who tracks not people but numbers. In a world where all crime is built on careful accounting, the first real investigator is the one who opened the ledger.