Charley Varrick (1973)
Directed by Don Siegel
Charley Varrick robs a bank in a small town with his friends, but instead of obtaining a small amount of money, they discover they stole a very large amount of money belonging to the mob. Charley must now come up with a plan to not only evade the police but the mob as well.
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What critics compared Charley Varrick to
Drawing from the same pulp novel as John Boorman's great 1967 "Point Blank," screenwriter Brian Helgeland's intermittently diverting directorial debut is intentionally spun from the same wiry strands as the work of such unpretentious journeymen as Don Siegel (there's even a sly reference to Siegel's "Charley Varrick" in a hotel's name).
And with characters named Carter (a nod to 1971's original Get Carter) and Bronson (a nod to Charles Bronson, the star of many a '70s crime/revenge thriller), references to the Outfit (a nod to John Flynn's 1973 crime-thriller, The Outfit, which is also based on a Westlake novel) and a bar named Varrick's (a nod to Don Siegel's 1973 crime gem Charley Varrick), Payback is a tough, entertaining homage to the kind of gritty '70s crime film that long ago gave way to a slicker yet tamer form of action movie.
Only I'd be more prone to describe it as a 70s rather than 80s action film since it's storyline and violence harken back to films like "The Outfit" (1973), "Charley Varrick" (1973), and "The Long Goodbye" (1973).
Quentin Tarantino borrowed a line of dialogue, about a "pair of pliers and a blowtorch," for Pulp Fiction .
Other scenes and lines of dialogue were lifted from Don Siegel's Charley Varrick…