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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery | |
|---|---|
 Lobby card | |
| Directed by | Charles Guggenheim John Stix |
| Written by | Richard T. Heffron |
| Produced by | Charles Guggenheim |
| Starring | Steve McQueen David Clarke Crahan Denton |
| Cinematography | Victor Duncan |
| Edited by | Warren Adams |
| Music by | Bernardo Segall |
Production companies | Charles Guggenheim & Associates |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
Release date |
|
Running time | 89 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (also called The St. Louis Bank Robbery, the film title in the opening credits) is a 1959 American heist film directed by Charles Guggenheim and starring Steve McQueen as a college dropout hired to be the getaway driver in a bank robbery.
Based on a 1953 bank robbery attempt of Southwest Bank in St. Louis, the film was shot on location in 1958. It features some of the men and women from the St. Louis Police Department, as well as local residents and bank employees, reenacting their roles during the actual robbery attempt.[2] Between filming and the film's release, Steve McQueen gained national recognition with his breakout role as Josh Randall in the TV series Wanted Dead or Alive.[citation needed]
Aging criminal mastermind John Egan decides to rob St. Louis' Southwest Bank, then use the loot to retire to Mexico with his longtime minion Willy. Their accomplice, Gino, is an ex-convict terrified of returning to prison, and wants money to pay for his defense in an upcoming criminal trial. The gang needs a driver for the getaway car. Gino recruits his sister Ann's old boyfriend, George Fowler, a former collegiate football star with no criminal history. Egan takes a liking to George, much to Willy's displeasure.
The gang meticulously gathers information on the bank to help Egan draw up his plans. In order to pay for a hotel room, Gino convinces George to borrow money from Ann. The transaction is the first meeting between the young couple since an unspecified action by George got them both expelled from college. George and Gino keep the incident hidden from Egan, who refuses to have women even tangentially involved in his work; he drunkenly confesses to George that his misogyny comes from experiences with his abusive mother, whom he eventually murdered by pushing her down a flight of stairs.
Ann sees George and Gino watching the bank, and deduces that they are planning a robbery. She confronts George, who claims that he will use the money to return to school and straighten out his life. Ann still feels too much affection for George to notify the police, but she goes to the Southwest Bank at night and writes a warning about the impending robbery on its window. Willy saw George and Ann together, enabling Egan to trace the source of the message. The gang invades Ann's apartment, with Egan demanding that she leave town until the heist has been completed. Both Gino and George fail to stand up for Ann, letting Egan and Willy carry her away. As the three leave the apartment building, Egan has a flashback to his mother's murder and throws Ann to her death off the fire escape.
Feeling personally betrayed by George, Egan orders him to participate directly in the robbery while Willy drives the car. They neglected to bring a police-frequency scanner and are unaware that the bank had relocated a switchboard from the lobby, elements that foil key aspects of their plan. An employee triggers the silent alarm, and police swarm the bank exterior. Willy flees in the car, leaving the other robbers stranded. As the gang try to work out their next move, Egan inadvertently reveals that he killed Ann. He forces his way out of the bank, using a teller as a human shield, but is shot down by the police. Gino dies by suicide in the basement vault.
George, wounded by a shot in the leg, takes a young woman hostage. Her husband tries to intervene, and the woman warns him that George is a vicious criminal who will show them no mercy. Already shaken by Ann's death, George breaks down and begins protesting that he is not really a criminal. He releases the woman and lets himself be captured by the police. Driven away in a paddy wagon, he sees the world receding behind metal bars.
The New York Post reviewer wrote: “Just about every TV hero takes a flier at a theater-size movie. Now it is Steve McQueen…in ‘The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery,’ with dramatic plot to offset the documentary format....It is a fairly lucid film, purportedly factual with the St. Louis police department drafted for the actual stickup scenes; co-directed with some skill by Charles Guggenheim and John Stix from a well-padded script....The low-budgeted thriller boasts an effective musical background score...which does much to enliven the dragged-out action....The script reiterates that crime does not pay. Performances are adequate, but not outstanding, although McQueen is a handsome blond looker who likely would catch on in more big-size movies.”[3]
The Los Angeles Citizen-News found the film “a garbled attempt at arty realism…rehashes the old story of plotting the bank holdup that fails.”[4]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (also called The St. Louis Bank Robbery, the film title in the opening credits) is a 1959 American heist film directed by Charles Guggenheim and starring Steve McQueen as a college dropout hired to be the getaway driver in a bank robbery. Based on a 1953 bank robbery attempt of Southwest Bank in St. Louis, the film was shot on location in 1958. It features some of the men and women from the St. Louis Police Department, as well as local residents and bank employees, reenacting their roles during the actual robbery attempt. Between filming and the film's release, Steve McQueen gained national recognition with his breakout role as Josh Randall in the TV series Wanted Dead or Alive.
Fred William Bowerman (January 8, 1893 – May 1, 1953) was an American bank robber and Depression-era outlaw. A veteran holdup man whose criminal career lasted more than 30 years, Bowerman was placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list in 1953. Later that year, he led the disastrous Southwest Bank holdup in St. Louis, Missouri, in which he and his three partners wound up in a standoff with more than 100 officers of the St. Louis Police Department. Bowerman died a week later of gunshot wounds sustained during the robbery. The events were later made into a film, The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959), starring Crahan Denton and Steve McQueen.
Enjoy Movies was a Russian production company, founded in 2010 by an Armenian director Sarik Andreasyan, his brother the producer Gevond Andreasyan and producer Georgy Malkov. The company is based in Moscow, Russia. The company's first movie release was in September 2011, under the title of The Pregnant. In 2012, Enjoy Movies released 5 successful feature films, which allowed the company to gain 25% of the market share. In the process, Enjoy Movies gained on average around $27.9M, which was 10 times more than they had initially spent on movie production and placed 1st on Filmpro.ru's top 10 list of most successful Russian production companies in 2012. In May 2013, during the annual Cannes film festival, Enjoy Movies announced the formation of their alliance company Glacier Films in cooperation with Hayden Christensen and his older brother Tove. During a 3-year term, Glacier Films intended to produce 11 micro-budget movies worth $1.5M each. Glacier's first movie, American Heist, starring Hayden Christensen himself, is based on the 1959 film The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery, directed by Charles Guggenheim and John Stix. In July 2017, Enjoy Movies initially announced that it was declaring bankruptcy, but shortly afterwards in September 2017 stated that they went out of bankruptcy. As of November 2021, Enjoy Movies did not produce newer films after they successfully went out of bankruptcy as well as their website was shut down.
Steve McQueen (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980) was an American actor who had an extensive career in film and television. Popularly known as the "King of Cool", McQueen's screen persona was that of portraying cool, reticent antihero roles, which appealed strongly to the masses. This led him to cement his status as one of the most famous celebrities in Hollywood during the counterculture of the 1960s. McQueen made his film debut appearing in an uncredited role in the crime drama Girl on the Run (1953), He played the uncredited role of Fidel, a member of the protagonist's gang, in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). In 1958, he appeared in the science fiction film The Blob, which was his first film as the lead actor. It proved to be commercially successful at the box office, grossing $4 million ($45,000,000 in 2022) against a budget of $110,000 ($1,000,000 in 2022). McQueen became known for portraying bounty hunter Josh Randall in the CBS television series Wanted Dead or Alive (1958–1961). He continued to act in films, playing the lead in The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959), and in a supporting role as a corporal in Never So Few (1959), his first of three films with John Sturges. In 1960, McQueen achieved stardom when he co-starred alongside Yul Brynner in Sturges' Western, The Magnificent Seven, which was based on Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai. After a series of unsuccessful films over the next two years, McQueen teamed up with Sturges again in the war drama The Great Escape (1963), in which he played Virgil Hilts, a World War II prisoner of war who, along with fellow Allied POWs, makes an escape from a high security prisoner-of-war camp. It emerged as one of the highest-grossing films of the year, winning McQueen the award for Best Actor at the Moscow International Film Festival. In The Great Escape, a shot of Hilts riding a motorcycle and jumping a series of barbed-wire fences (performed by stuntman Bud Ekins) to escape from German soldiers is considered one of the most memorial motorcycle stunts. McQueen received his first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor nomination for his role of a musician in Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), in which he was paired opposite Natalie Wood. He achieved critical and commercial success with The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and The Sand Pebbles (1966), the latter garnering him the only Academy Award for Best Actor nomination of his career. In 1968, McQueen appeared as millionaire Thomas Crown in the crime film The Thomas Crown Affair, and in the thriller Bullitt as the eponymous police detective Frank Bullitt. These films fared well at the box office, the latter garnering acclaim for its stunt sequences, particularly the car chase. For his performance in The Reivers (1969), McQueen earned a third Golden Globe Award nomination. McQueen began the 1970s with the sports drama Le Mans (1971), a fictional take on the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance races. The film was a critical and commercial disappointment, leaving him almost bankrupt. He followed it by starring in two back-to-back films under Sam Peckinpah: the Western Junior Bonner (1972), in which he featured as the titular character, a rodeo rider, and the action film The Getaway (1972), in which he appears as an ex-conman who flees to Mexico with his wife after being double-crossed by his partners-in-crime. In the latter, he was paired opposite his second wife, Ali MacGraw. Both films were critically acclaimed. While Junior Bonner did not enjoy box office success, The Getaway went on to become one of the highest-grossing films of the year, marking a comeback for McQueen. In 1973, he featured alongside Dustin Hoffman in the prison film Papillon playing Henri Charrière, a prisoner convicted of murder who makes an escape attempt with fellow convict Louis Dega (Hoffman). McQueen's performance earned him his fourth and final Golden Globe Award nomination in the Best Actor category. He then starred alongside Paul Newman as a SFFD chief in the disaster drama The Towering Inferno (1974). McQueen received $12 million for acting in the film, making him the highest-paid actor in the world up to that point. The film was commercially successful, grossing $139 million ($907,000,000 in 2022) against a $14 million ($91,000,000 in 2022) budget. After a four-year hiatus during which he focused on his motorcycle racing career, McQueen returned to acting when he was cast against type as a scientist in An Enemy of the People. He completed two more films before his death: Tom Horn and The Hunter (both released in 1980).
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Mae Jemison, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.