One might categorize Don Siegel’s 1973 film Charley Varrick as a heist film, but one that spends unusually little time on the preparations for the crime, the better to focus on its consequences. The title character is the head of a quartet of bank robbers (one of whom is his wife) who hit small banks in out-of-the-way locations. This modus operandi Charley (Walter Matthau) characterizes at one point with the phrase “No trouble,” implying both that these banks are easier to rob and that law enforcement pursues less energetically the modest sums these robberies net. After two of their group, including Charley’s wife, are killed in the course of the job they pull in the film’s opening sequence, Charley and his one remaining accomplice discover that they have come into an enormous haul, many times what they had expected from a branch bank in rural New Mexico. Charley realizes that they have stumbled onto mafia money, and spends the rest of the film scheming to hold onto the cash and evade the vicious mob enforcer sent to recover it.

I will consider the film through Immanuel Wallerstein’s distinction between core and periphery.¹ These terms were originally formulated to describe the relationship between first and third world economies. Against the prevailing theory of “comparative advantage,” the idea that nations would flourish through specialization and the international division of labor, core/periphery analysis posits that the “core” economic activities of the first world are more susceptible to monopolization, and thus more profitable, than the economic activities of the peripheral zones; compare the difference in the possibilities of profit in manufacturing jet planes or MRI machines (not to mention speculating in derivatives or collateralized debt obligations) as opposed to growing crops, or making clothing or furniture. This monopoly power enables the core zones to extract surplus value from the peripheral economies. The core forces free trade onto the peripheral areas while maintaining highly integrated, monopolistic economies for itself; the peripheral economies of the global South are forced to trade low-value-added commodities for the high-tech, high-profit products of the global North.

The difference between core and periphery is often mapped onto geographical areas or nations; as Wallerstein remarks, “one could use a shorthand language by talking of core and peripheral zones (or even core and peripheral states),” but he cautions that it is “the production processes and not the states that . . . [are] corelike and peripheral.”² Even within the countries that house the core processes (we might use the term industries where Wallerstein refers to “processes”), peripheral processes remain. The relationship between core and peripheral regions within a nation resembles that between core and peripheral states; significant zones of a nation may persist in low-value added activities even as other parts of the nation have moved on to new core processes. In the United States, for instance, substantial parts of the nation remain largely agricultural, even as other areas have cycled through successive waves of high-value-added activities, from manufacturing to software to finance; much of the nation remains peripheral, in economic terms, zones largely focused on earthbound industries such as agriculture, ranching, or mining, as opposed to the financial speculation and “creative class” pursuits of the core. Depending on one’s perspective, these regions could be described as isolated or insulated, both physically and economically, from the cutting-edge, highly monopolized, high value-added economic activities of the core.

These categorizations limit the imagination and enforce stereotypes, of course, but they also produce what one might term geographic legibility, a way of organizing and understanding the vast, amorphous spaces of a continent-spanning nation. Ambitious young people know to depart for the metropoles to live out the bildungsroman aspirations with which novels or films have inspired them, while those who seek modest contentment understand that rustication away from the coastal whirligig is the place to find it. As A.O. Scott remarks in a review of the 2021 film Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues, dir. Xavier Giannoli), adapted from Balzac’s great bildungsroman:

A young person from the provinces sets out for the big city, seeking fortune and fame… It’s a story that never gets old . . . and variations pop up in the literature of nearly every nation and era.³

At the same time, there exists a counter-tradition of narratives devoted to staying put, or to a rustic retreat from urban alienation, a tradition that frequently celebrates, whether implicitly or explicitly, the values associated with residual (in Raymond Williams’s term⁴) forms of life, forms of life connected to the peripheral economic activities that support them; Williams notes the opposition between a “residual… idea of rural community” and “industrial capitalism” (122). Those values are typically imaged in terms of the neighborly solidarity of the rural or small-town world, as opposed to the anonymity of the core city, and a slower, more humane pace of life, connected to natural cycles, in contrast to the frenetic bustle, artificiality, and ruthless competition of urban modernity; in his important article on the “flyover” concept, Anthony Harkins discusses a range of media that figure “flyover country” (a term he puts inside quotation marks) as “the place where American values of goodness, neighborliness, and personal integrity live on, in contrast to the dog-eat-dog mentality of the urbanized coasts” (108). The literary term for this long-lived mode is “pastoral,” those (apparent) celebrations of the simple life that extend from ancient Greece to Green Acres and beyond. Among innumerable cinematic examples, one could name works like Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), in which seeking “opportunity” through a move to the metropole (New York) is ultimately rejected in favor of the gemeinschaft of the Midwestern community, Klute (Alan Pakula, 1971), in which call girl Bree Daniels retreats (however implausibly) from the corruptions and dangers of big-city life to the hinterland of Tuscarora, Pennsylvania, or Doc Hollywood (Michael Caton-Jones, 1991), in which Michael J. Fox, stranded in Grady, South Carolina, on his way to take a glamorous position as a cosmetic surgeon in Beverly Hills, is captivated by the joys of small-town life.

Charley Varrick begins with an extended credit sequence montage, seemingly a celebration of the simple lives and folkways of the open spaces of the American West. Or rather, Charley Varrick’s opening montage unfolds after a few weird, disconcerting seconds, a bizarre image that perhaps warns us that the celebratory vignettes of rustic life we are about to see should not be taken at face value. The opening shot of the film shows a sky suffused with deep blues and purples behind silhouetted mountains, with no indication whether it is morning or evening; its vivid beauty is shaded with a possibly apocalyptic overtone. The next image is the film’s title card, but that title is presented as a brand logo on a set of overalls surrounded by a fire that, clearly, will soon consume the clothing and erase the name; this shot also serves as the final image of the film, but on first viewing it seems bizarre and ominous that the title of the film itself is on fire, about to vanish in smoke.

Figure 1:

The film’s title, surrounded by flames.

The montage that follows appears to offer an untroubled celebration of the slow pace and simple pleasures of rural/small-town America. Early-morning sunlight pours down on a sleeping plain, a heavenly radiance that evokes purity and calm. Charming vignettes of ordinary life in what we later learn is New Mexico (actually shot in Nevada)⁵ unfold, many of them featuring children. The prevalence of children invests the montage with a layer of sentimentality, imbuing the world these children inhabit with the stereotypes of childhood innocence. These children, in fact, are mostly the children of the filmmakers;⁶ their presence recalls an earlier stage of economic development, one in which the chief economic unit was the family rather than the corporation, and in which children were expected to contribute economically, which indeed some of these vignettes show children doing. A teenage girl (played by one of Siegel’s daughters) starts a lawn mower and begins mowing a lawn; it is not clear whether she is performing a job for money or doing chores, but according to economists, at least since Gary Becker’s enormously influential 1965 paper “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,”⁷ that distinction makes no difference; most readers who have taken Econ 101 will be aware that mowing lawns is literally a textbook example of the intersubstitutability of paid and unpaid labor.⁸ Another shot shows a boy (played by Siegel’s son) sweeping up leaves on a sidewalk. In one scene, clearly meant to charm, a boy (played by Matthau’s son) struggles to saddle a reluctant burro; the effect is comic, yet the implication is that the skills of saddling and riding an animal may well be important in the life this child will one day lead. Another shows a young girl (another one of Siegel’s daughters) in a bathing suit playing in the spray of a lawn sprinkler.

The wholesome frolics and healthy outdoor work of the children are matched by the manly outdoor labor we see performed by adults, such as a rancher attending to his herd and a worker raising the American flag at the local post office branch. One might be tempted to imagine that the creators of Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” re-election advertisement were thinking back to Charley Varrick, so closely does their work parallel the celebration of white American wholesomeness presented in the film’s montage. Both film and ad prominently feature the raising of the flag (an action thrice repeated in the Reagan ad); in both we see a boy at work along a suburban sidewalk, in Charley Varrick sweeping, in “Morning in America” flinging newspapers from his bike as he runs his paper route (another young boy helps his father carry a carpet into a newly-purchased single-family home). More likely than direct influence, I imagine, is that both montages tap into a body of stereotyped images that have come to be associated with rural, “real America” virtues, the open spaces, closeness to nature, and outdoor labor that connote the Midwest/West in opposition to the verticality, urban settings, and office work that characterize coastal America. Lauren Berlant observes that “Reagan Republicanism” disseminates “nostalgic images of a normal, familial America that would define the utopian context for citizen aspiration;”⁹ a description that perfectly fits this re-election ad. While in the ad we see a suburbanite dressed for office work being picked up by his carpool, the one image of actual labor shown is a farmer driving a tractor (note that by 1980 the percentage of American workers in the agricultural sector had dipped below 4%¹⁰); nostalgia for an agrarian past overrides the actual facts about the composition of the labor force. One further way in which the urban is erased in both the film sequence and the political spot is the uniform whiteness of the people represented in them. This is particularly striking in the case of the ad. One might explain the racial homogeneity of the film montage by the racial homogeneity of the rural West the montage is representing;¹¹ no such explanation is available for the ad, where the complete absence of people of color reads as a deliberate exclusion. Reagan and his political operatives were happy to celebrate a “morning in America” that implicitly endorsed segregationist and discriminatory practices, just at the Reagan administration pointedly abandoned any effort to pursue racial justice in the US (to the extent of Reagan’s giving a speech, during his 1980 presidential campaign, extolling “states’ rights” – the rallying cry of the Confederacy and of Southern segregationists during the civil rights era – at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from the site of the murders of three civil rights activists by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964¹²).

The whiteness of both the Charley Varrick montage and the “Morning in America” ad stands out all the more in comparison with a series of widely seen montages that form close visual analogues, and may well have been an influence on both: the “You’ve Got a Lot to Live” ads for Pepsi, which ran from 1969–1972.¹³ The Pepsi ads undertook a project in some ways similar to that of Siegel’s montage or Reagan’s ad: representing in montage form the variety and character of the people and ways of life of a place, or of the nation. In the first of these Pepsi ads, “Big Town USA,” the unnamed city being represented has substantial ethnic diversity, with Black and brown people frequently appearing. Jesse Matz describes the ad as presenting “two apparently nonwhite couples, groups of nonwhite children, a Black boy, a white woman, and (in two exceptional instances) white and Black men and boys together.”¹⁴ The ad in the series that presumably stands in the closest relation to the Reagan campaign spot, “Portrait of America,”¹⁵ encompasses both the rural and urban, as opposed to the cityscape of “Big Town USA,” but still includes numerous people of color, and closes with a freeze frame of a (highly photogenic) young Black couple. Ethnic diversity, and the presence of Black Americans, was de rigeur for shilling sugar water, while shilling a Republican presidential candidate called up an inverse strategy of ethnic erasure.

The Reagan ad was a straightforward celebration of the mythos of a rural/suburban white America safely insulated from the contamination of cities and the multi-ethnic populations they housed, a mythology that remains potent even now; writing in 2024, Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller observe that “rural whites… are routinely described as more ‘real’ than other citizens.”¹⁶ The montage in Charley Varrick at first seems to participate in the same sort of myth-making. Looking back from the end of the film, however, viewers will recognize a powerful irony subtending the sequence; what follows the opening montage aligns much more with the incendiary image of the film’s title card than with the montage’s vignettes of bucolic innocence. The transition from the credit montage to the narrative is not clearly demarcated. Following the shot of the boy raking leaves we see a close-up of a plaque bearing the name of the Tres Cruces branch of the Western Fidelity bank. The camera then cranes up to show an American flag on the bank’s flagpole, a callback to the flag-raising seen earlier in the montage; the frame then swivels to show two children swinging on a swing set right outside the bank as a car pulls up in the background, a moment which could easily be taken as an extension of the earlier scenes involving children, and a further instance of the idyllic harmony of work and play that characterizes the montage. Not long after, these children scream and run as gunfire erupts during a bank robbery. Already the montage’s representation of the idyllic serenity of rural America is shattered by violent crime; the fleeing children seem a deliberate retort to the happy frolics and wholesome labor of the children seen in the montage, an indication that the reality of America is not innocence but violence.

I discuss below the way the film puts in question the geographic divisions suggested by the montage, and by the mythos of American pastoralism more generally. I will briefly consider here its undermining of the racial exclusion that informs the montage, and by extension the Reagan ad that comes after. We might understand that exclusion as racializing the core/periphery division, implicitly constructing a hierarchy between a white “core” central to the American project and Black Americans who are peripheral to it – a hierarchy that, using the terms center/marginalized, the New York Times’s 1619 Project proposed to invert.¹⁷ Although it occupies only a single scene, the film addresses the montage’s silence on race in a sequence which reveals the racism of the key antagonist in the film: Molly (Joe Don Baker), a mob enforcer whose cowboy hat and drawl identify him with the archetypal westerner. This sequence reveals both the presence of people of color in a landscape which the opening montage had depicted as inhabited by an entirely white population, and the racism to which they are subjected, just as the bank robbery reveals retrospectively the evasions and exclusions of the montage. Molly, tasked with finding and returning the money stolen by Charley and his associates, first calls upon a Chinese-American man referred to as “Honest John” (Benson Fong), whom we find in an underground (literally) gambling den that he runs; Honest John, we learn, is connected to what he refers to as “the organization,” the mobsters who have employed Molly. He delivers an envelope of money to Molly and provides him with an address (which we later discover to be a brothel) for his accommodation in New Mexico. In response to Molly’s question about “transportation,” Honest John offers him a “maroon Chrysler Imperial,” but cautions that “it’s a repossession.”

When Honest John and Molly show up to claim the vehicle, its owner turns out to be a Black man; we first encounter him as he warily observes Molly insouciantly striding across his front lawn toward the car. Siegel limns the situation with great economy; the Black man, Randolph Percy (Albert Popwell), is interrupted by Molly’s intrusion as he tries to comfort his son, whose puppy has recently been run over on the road in front of their home. When Percy confronts Molly, asking him “in a very nice way,” as Percy puts it, “to keep your hands off that automobile,” Molly responds with a syrupy faux-politeness: “you owe six months’ payment on this car, sir.” While the details are never specified, Percy points to Honest John and angrily states, “I owe? That chink son-of-a-bitch burned me out of 25 hundred dollars and I told him when I get my money back he gets his car.” Honest John is placed at the apex of a Citizen Kane-style deep focus three-shot, between Molly on one side and Percy on the other; he is indeed the link that connects Molly and Percy, as we infer that Honest John has taken the opportunity of Molly’s need for a car to settle a score with someone he has cheated. When Percy makes his accusation of dirty dealing, Honest John breaks into a grin, confirming both that he’s guilty of whatever crookedness he’s accused of and that he is pleased rather than ashamed to be known as a swindler. Might we not, in John’s name, hear an oblique echo of the character repeatedly referred to, in Shakespeare’s Othello, as “honest Iago,” who also practices a fraud upon a Black man? When “Mr. Percy,” as Molly refers to him, tries physically to prevent Molly from taking the car, calling him a “pink-ass punk,” Molly lays him out with a punch (a quick shot shows Honest John grinning smugly at the violence he has catalyzed). Molly then quietly says, as much to himself as to Percy: “There are very few men that speak to me in that tone. Few Caucasians, and no Negroes at all.” Ironic as Molly is being, we are no doubt meant to take him at his word that, while he can accept subordination to a few white men (the mobsters who employ him), he will respond violently to a failure of deference on the part of a Black man. His referring to “Negroes” further communicates the character’s racism; an effect intensified by his pronunciation of the term, which drags it toward the phonetically similar slur, as if Molly is playing a game of edging up to voicing the insult while preserving plausible deniability. By 1973, “Black” was well established as the preferred term, a term that was associated, through formulations such as “Black Power” and “Black Pride,” with the racial self-assertion and demands for racial justice of the civil rights movement.¹⁸ Molly’s reference to “Negros” shows his rejection of the racial label preferred by Black Americans in favor of one associated with a time before the civil rights movement, when Black Americans had yet to mobilize against racialized subordination and injustice.

As Molly drives away in the repossessed car, the camera pans to the window of the house, where we see Percy’s son, crying, looking down at his father, presumably still writhing in pain on the ground. Where the white children of the montage enjoy safety and security in their work and play, the young Black child (whose home is a good deal more run-down than any of the white children’s homes seen in the montage) witnesses an act of racialized violence in his front yard. The Black child is introduced crying over the death of his puppy, a tragedy that might befall anyone, but the altercation he has just observed confirms that his family, and by extension Black Americans more generally, continue to be the victims of racialized injustice. The film makes good the omission of Black people from the montage, in a way that shows how different the world is for white and Black children, ironizing the image of rural innocence, closely identified with whiteness, that the Reagan ad a decade later offers unreflectively.

Perhaps this sympathetic vignette of a Black father is intended as an expiation of sorts for the barely veiled racist undertone of what historian Joe Street calls “[Harry] Callahan’s most iconic moment,”¹⁹ in which, in the first Dirty Harry film, Harry taunts a wounded Black bank robber first with words – “You’ve got to ask yourself ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” then by aiming his gun at the wounded man’s head and pulling the trigger (Harry knows his gun is empty, but the criminal does not). The repossession sequence in Charley Varrick repeats central elements of the Dirty Harry scenario, with the valence reversed. In both sequences, violence inflicted by a white man puts a Black man flat on his back; in both, the perpetrator of the violence adds insult to injury. Casting extends the connection between the sequences; the same actor, Albert Popwell, plays the Black man in both films. The Dirty Harry sequence aligns our sympathies with Harry; the victim of violence is a bank robber, one who has grazed Harry with a blast from his shotgun. Harry’s preternatural calm through the exchange of gunfire elicits our admiration and marks him as a descendant of the western hero, cool under fire and master of violence, while Black men are depicted as violent thugs with faulty grammar. In Charley Varrick, the Black man is a concerned father and the white man a criminal enforcer; we experience the white man’s violence as brutal and unjust. Perhaps Siegel felt, whether consciously or unconsciously, compelled to revisit the situation first presented in Dirty Harry and reverse its nasty racial politics, the earlier film’s invitation to an illicit glee at the prospect of seeing a disarmed, wounded Black man’s head “blow[n]… clean off.” Whatever the adequacy of Siegel’s expiation in artistic terms, in cultural terms it can hardly be counted an effective counterbalance. Charley Varrick remains little seen and discussed, while Dirty Harry’s line quoted above landed at number 51 on the American Film Institute’s list of “Iconic Movie Quotes,” and the fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), directed by Clint Eastwood himself, recreates the Dirty Harry dynamic. In a now iconic moment Callahan invites a Black criminal to give him a pretext to shoot him in the head with the line “Go ahead, make my day,” a moment that ranks #6 on the AFI list²⁰ and brings us back full circle to Ronald Reagan, who famously appropriated it in 1985 as he promised to veto any proposed tax increase.²¹ Harry’s pleasure in violent threats against Black men has had a cultural resonance vastly in excess of Charley Varrick’s one sequence of humanizing sympathy.

Charley’s voluntary rustication in pursuit of “No trouble” bank jobs accords with the pastoral values typically ascribed to the rural/agricultural parts of the country: a desire to live a simple life, a rejection of lofty ambitions in favor of modest contentment, and an attachment to independence. The motto of Charley’s crop-dusting business, blazoned on the overalls he and his assistant wear, is “The Last of the Independents.” But Charley’s advertised independence, we learn, is more fantasy than lived reality. Charley describes his decision to go into crop dusting as motivated by “a chance to fly, be independent.” But the crop-dusting business proved unsustainable, as Charley found that he “couldn’t compete with…” Harman (Andrew Robinson), his fellow bank robber, finishes his sentence: “the big combines.” It is noteworthy that it is Harman, not otherwise depicted as particularly sharp or worldly-wise, who completes Charley’s thought; this implies that the story Charley is telling, of the small proprietor driven out of business by competition from large corporations, is a well-known narrative, even in the far peripheries. The crushing of Charley’s aspirations for a modest but dignified and independent living was already a familiar pattern in 1973, and of course has only gained resonance as waves of consolidation in the last five decades have led to the near-extinction of small, locally owned and oriented businesses.²² Core and periphery, then, are not so easily separated; the monopolistic practices associated with the core are capable of reaching into and transforming even the most remote areas of the periphery. Geographic isolation no longer entails economic insulation.

This penetration of the periphery by the operations of the core underlies the film’s inciting incident, the discovery that, instead of the roughly $20,000 Charley was expecting (about $130,000 in today’s money), their take is over $750,000 (around 5 million dollars in current value). Harman is exultant, but Charley is dismayed; he realizes that a small bank “a million miles from nowhere,” as another character puts it, should not be holding such an enormous pile of cash, and concludes, correctly as it turns out, that the bank was a drop for mob money. He explains to Harman:

• Charley: It’s ten-to-one this stuff belongs to the Mafia. This is gambling money, skimmed off the top, whore money, dope money.

• Harman: What’s the difference?

• Charley: The difference is that the Mafia kills you. No trial, no judge. They’ll never stop looking for you. Not ’till you’re dead. I’d rather have ten FBIs after me…

Charley laments: “All I wanted was a small take, in and out quick. No big deal.” Bizarre as the concept may seem, Charley is a pastoralist bank robber. But the penetration of financialized capital and its many corruptions into the peripheral zones, the ongoing incorporation of the American economy, means that one may encounter the utter ruthlessness of “the big combines” anywhere in America (note that the crime syndicate in Joseph Lewis’s classic noir of 1955 is termed The Big Combo). Even if only in the form of the money it generates, the corruption of the metropole, “gambling… whore[s]… dope,” invades the pristine spaces of the wide open west. Far from offering a haven from the brutal economic logic of the core, the rural world has become integrated into the core invisibly, but nonetheless fully. The entire nation has, in effect, been rigged with mines, traps for the unwary who might at any moment stumble upon a node of corruption that unleashes terrible violence. And this system does not stop even at the nation’s boundaries. Charley explains that the mob money they have blundered upon was headed out of the country for laundering: “ . . . you know what dirty money is. That’s the kind of money you can’t declare on your income tax. Now when certain people get that kind of money what they do is send it out of the country to invest. And when it comes back it’s clean.” Tiny Tres Cruces, New Mexico, participates in a globalized network of exchange, one that blurs the boundaries between home and abroad in order to efface the lines between dirty and clean, illegal and legal.

It isn’t only mom-and-pop bank robbers like Charley who find themselves imperiled by the erasure of boundaries between core and periphery. At one point the principal of the bank, Maynard Boyle (John Vernon), drives Harold Young (Woodrow Parfrey), the manager of the branch that has been robbed, to a spot well outside town. They stop at a corral holding a small herd of cattle; late afternoon sun sheds a golden glow on the scene, a callback to and inversion of the radiant sunrise that opens the credit montage. Boyle has brought Young here, away from possible surveillance, to warn him that they will both be under suspicion of collusion with the robbers who hit the bank. In response Young insists that he would have no motive for pulling an inside job. Against a backdrop of bovine tranquility, Young offers an eloquent celebration of the pastoral ideal, extolling the values of solidarity and belonging typically associated with rural, agricultural locales:

I’m not an ambitious man. I don’t need very much. I’ve been very happy here in Tres Cruces. I’ve become a part of the community. And people appreciate not just the day-to-day business of banking but... the way I’ve restored the bank. I’ve made it a part of the living historical heritage of the community. For the first time in my life I found a place that I love. Why would I jeopardize that?

Figure 2:

A discussion of torture in a pastoral setting.

This harmonious integration of banking and community, which might bring to mind the support small-town banker George Bailey (James Stewart) receives from his Bedford Falls neighbors in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), is shattered by the imperatives of distant overlords, which entirely override local knowledge and local control. Surely more than a few Americans still imagine that the mechanics of banking align with George Bailey’s description; facing down a bank run, George tells a worried depositor that his money is not in the bank’s vaults, but dispersed through the community: “Your money’s in Joe’s house… right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others.” As an account of how banking works this is, of course, complete nonsense; it nevertheless expresses a powerfully attractive fantasy of neighborly connection, in which the bank is merely a conduit for the neighbors’ mutual aid and a central force in tying together the community. Like George Bailey, Harold Young is a small-time, small-town banker considering suicide as he faces a crisis, but unlike Bailey’s situation, Young’s problem cannot be salvaged by the resources of the local community.

Harold Young and Charley are, in effect, parallel figures, both trying to make a modest living in the banking business, though on different sides, both of whom, purely by chance, fall afoul of metropolitan criminality. Charley considers returning the money to the mob, only to conclude: “Wouldn’t do any good to give it back. Nobody takes the Mafia for this kind of money and lives to tell about it. They would have to set an example.” Boyle similarly tells Harold Young that his actual innocence is immaterial. It takes all of Charley’s courage, cleverness, and imagination for him to come through his ordeal (not what happens in the book on which the film is based),²³ while Harold Young ends up shooting himself in his bank office. In Capra’s fantastical universe, supernatural aid is on hand to thwart George Bailey’s suicide attempt; in Siegel’s disenchanted world, a bank officer in crisis ends up eating a bullet, though I would ascribe this difference as much to the difference between America in 1946 and America in 1973 as to the auteur signatures of the two directors. The film implies that Charley, who manages to save himself, is the exception here, that the dominance of the core over the periphery materialized in Young’s suicide is a far more likely outcome of conflict between local communities and “the big combines” than Charley’s triumph. Finance capital, and the extremes of corruption entailed by it, dissolve the geographic insulation of the agricultural heartland and spread the ruthlessness of unchecked self-interest to every corner of the nation.

In his meeting with Honest John, Molly voices suspicions about the possibility of the robbery’s being an inside job; Honest John gives Molly “carte blanche” to investigate the possibility of “a leak.” Molly is presumably the agent who would, in Boyle’s dire warning to Harold Young, “go to work on you with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers;” everything we see of Molly in the novel suggests that he would see torturing the branch manager as more a pleasure than an obligation. Reese’s novel enjoys detailing Molly’s perversions and sadism; the character created by Joe Don Baker, though somewhat tamer, is plenty sick and strange. He contrasts strikingly with the mild-mannered, well-spoken Maynard Boyle, who seems genuinely sympathetic to Young’s plight, and sorry to tell him that he has no choice but to run from the torture that awaits him at the hands of the mob. Molly on the other hand revels in dealing out insult and inflicting pain. He clearly enjoys insulting the working girls of the mob-run brothel where he bunks; offered a turn with one of the prostitutes, he replies, “I don’t sleep with whores… not knowingly.” Here he combines a direct insult to the two brothel workers he is addressing with a more general insult to womanhood, in the implication that any woman might be a “whore,” that one can never be entirely sure. He does sleep with the attractive woman who forges ID papers, Jewell Everett (Sheree North), but he initiates sex by giving her a hard slap, entirely unexpectedly. Jewell seems neither surprised nor put off by this abrupt act of violence; the suggestion is that, before he can have sex, Molly needs to establish his dominance through violent means. And when he tracks down Harman, he gleefully brutalizes him as he attempts to extract information from him.

Molly’s swaggering sadism suggests the viciousness and the predilection for violence of what Harold Young at one point refers to as “the Las Vegas people.” The Las Vegas people make no appearance in the film, endowing them with an inhuman remoteness that makes all the more disquieting the extension of their power into Tres Cruces. Perhaps we might map a further core/peripheral relation onto the counterpoint between Molly’s contemptuous treatment of the women he encounters and Charley’s love for the wife he loses at the beginning of the film; before he torches the getaway car that contains her lifeless body, he takes the wedding ring off her finger and puts it on his own hand, where it remains to the end. Women are central to Charley’s life and values, peripheral in Molly’s. Late in the film Charley muscles his way into the apartment of Boyle’s assistant, Sybil Fort (Felicia Farr), but then apologizes for scaring her. She is sufficiently charmed by Charley first to warn him not to trust Boyle (suggesting that she intuits both Charley’s regard for women and her boss’s viciousness), then to take him to bed – an act that might have played more plausibly had Siegel been able to cast the leading man of the previous four films he had directed under his own name, Clint Eastwood (Coogan’s Bluff, 1968; Two Mules for Sister Sara, 1970; The Beguiled and Dirty Harry, 1971). Charley is a sympathetic protagonist because we have a sense of his general decency, his cleverness, which emerges both in the brilliance of his machinations and in the form of wry humor, his commitment to using the minimum of violence necessary to achieve his ends, and his situation as a little guy up against a brutal, inhuman system. The contrast to the brutality and nastiness of Molly are evident.

And yet Charley’s values may not be so completely opposed to those of his vicious antagonist. In a 2014 article, Janet McCracken places Charley Varrick in a category she terms “Non-Western[s] of the New West,” along with Electra Glide in Blue (1973, James William Guercio), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974, Michael Cimino), and Rancho Deluxe (1975, Frank Perry). She reads these films as centrally concerned with masculinity, as embodying “a nostalgia or longing for masculinity as it was depicted in Hollywood Westerns” (84).²⁴ McCracken focuses particularly on male friendship and bonding within the films; in her account “the films are all, more or less, buddy pictures” (84). McCracken reads the buddy motif as an index of the troubled status of traditional masculinity; where the westerner had once been a proud loner, the imperiled status of the western mythos means that the hero now “requires the reassurance of another man in order to keep the myth alive” (85). The buddy-bond, in McCracken’s account, remains a crucial element of the western masculinity whose disappearance these films ambivalently represent: their protagonists “‘find’ their courage in the admiring friendship of a young initiate with whose protection they are entrusted” (97). Male friendship and mentoring to some extent compensate for the diminishment of heroic possibility in the disillusioned modern west.

Or, in Charley Varrick, not quite. McCracken’s fidelity to her schema leads her to misread the dynamic at work in Siegel’s film, a misreading that glosses over the ways in which Charley, though he retains our sympathetic engagement, violates what we might think of as traditional codes of masculinity, and operates more in accordance with the individualist ethics against which the westerner ostensibly stands. McCracken’s assertion that “[t]hroughout most of the movie Charley is Harman’s protector and friend,” entirely distorts Charley’s actual role. Charley certainly attempts, as McCracken puts it, to “outwit the mob,” but rather than “attempting to protect Harman,” Charley uses Harman as the fall guy in his scheme. Significant tension between Charley and Harman emerges in the immediate aftermath of the robbery, when Charley is unable to make Harman understand the peril to which their inadvertent theft of mob money has exposed them. When Charley fails to share Harman’s glee at their big score, Harman is immediately suspicious, and threatens Charley: “don’t you run a game out on me or I’ll hang you out to dry.” When Charley later tells Harman that he’s thinking of returning the money, Harman scornfully remarks: “You haven’t got the balls of a bull canary bird.” Harman manifests little commitment to his relationship with Charley, and Charley, though guarded as he always is, seems to return the favor. Harman contemptuously rejects Charley’s mandate that they lay low with the money for three or four years: “I ain’t waiting… I’m gonna wail… I’m talking about chicks, cars, clothes. A box at the races and beef steak three times a day and no washed-up, chickenshit son of a bitch had better try and stop me!” When he responds to Harman’s insults by saying, “OK, kid, you’re callin’ it,” we understand that Charley is merely pretending to go along with Harman; we have the same sense as he accedes to Harman’s plan that Charley fly them to safety over the police dragnet laid out to capture them. Charley leaves to burgle the dentist’s office where Nadine’s dental records are stored, with the goal of preventing the authorities from identifying her burned corpse. In response to Harman’s question about when “they” will stop looking for them, Charley morosely replies: “The fuzz’ll quit pretty soon, the others [the Mafia] never stop, not unless they think you’re dead.” This offhand remark comes back in the sequence that follows, in the dentist’s office. Charley enters the dentist’s office with only one goal, removing Nadine’s dental records. After securing them, Charley turns out the light in the office and is about to leave, but a further thought occurs to him; he returns to the file cabinet and replaces his own records with Harman’s. While we don’t at this moment know precisely what Charley is planning (he may not know yet himself), it seems clear that he has already hatched the idea of using Harman’s corpse to make the Mafia think he’s dead. Later Charley deliberately leaves clues that lead Molly to Harman, knowing that Molly will likely torture or even kill Harman as he seeks the missing money. Charley further arranges things to persuade Molly that Harman remains Charley’s associate even after Charley has effectively abandoned him. Charley has a passport made for Harman, a passport we later learn he never intended Harman to be able to use; Molly takes this as a key piece of evidence against Harman’s assertion that Charley “left [him] to take the heat.” One could justify Charley’s consigning Harman to his fate, given that Harman’s dimwittedness and inability to strategize endanger not just himself but Charley. This betrayal, though, measures a significant distance between the ethos of solidarity expressed in the dictum “never leave a man behind,” which informs traditional masculinity, and the “every man for himself” world that Charley inhabits. Setting Harman up as a fall guy seems a long way away from “honor among thieves,” and suggests that survival in the world of “the big combines” will necessitate the abandonment of the ethos of mutual aid associated with rural/pastoral spaces.

I read Charley Varrick, then, as a representation, through the vehicle of a heist film, of transformations in the American economy already ominously apparent by 1973, and which would gain momentum in the ensuing decades: the incorporation and monopolization of the economy, the blurring of the core/periphery distinction as financialization liberates the core processes from geographic mooring, and the subjection of regional economies, which had once possessed some degree of autonomy, to the brutal imperatives of national, or international, capital. In Charley’s listing of various “dirty” sources of money, one might read the future of the deindustrialized, financialized nation the US has since become: “gambling money,” as financial manipulation has increasingly displaced productive activity, to the point where huge sums are devoted to pure speculation, as with cryptocurrencies or NFTs, “whore money,” as pornography has played a central role in the adoption of new communication technologies, first home video (the VCR and cable television), then the internet and broadband streaming, and “drug money,” as pharmaceutical companies have seeded an epidemic of opioid abuse and pushed ineffective and often dangerous drugs through TV advertisements and kickbacks to doctors. Even as we cheer Charley on, we recognize the limits of his victory. The extraordinary ingenuity Charley must deploy, and the extraordinary risks he runs, in the course of the narrative show that his aspiration for a quiet life doing small-time bank jobs is no longer viable in the new America shaped by the “big combines.” At the end of the film, Charley throws his overalls, with their logo line “The Last of the Independents,” into the flames. It seems an apt finish for the dreams of the independent small businessman, the quintessentially American ideal of being your own boss. Charley has survived, but the independence to which he aspired has gone up in smoke.

Vernon Shetley teaches literature and film at Wellesley College. He is the author of After the Death of Poetry (Duke University Press, 1993). His essays on film and media topics such as Chinatown, Blade Runner, the Olsen Twins, Saving Private Ryan, Scarlett Johansson’s science-fiction films, and Orange Is the New Black have appeared in journals, edited collections, and online. His book on neo-noir filmmaking, Dark Film, Blood Money: The Economic Unconscious of American Neo-Noir Cinema, will be published in 2026 by Intellect Books.

Notes

1. See Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Wallerstein adopts the terms from Raúl Prebisch, who formulated the concepts as part of the United Nations’ Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean. Note that Prebisch uses the term “centre” rather than “core.” See Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (Lake Success, NY: United Nations, 1950). ⮭
2. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 17. ⮭
3. A.O. Scott, “How Wrong Can a Little Rakishness Go?” New York Times, June 10, 2022, C5. ⮭
4. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 121–127. ⮭
5. Don Siegel, A Siegel Film: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1993): 376. ⮭
6. Siegel, A Siegel Film, 378. ⮭
7. Gary Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time.” The Economic Journal 75, no. 299 (September 1965): 493–517. ⮭
8. Paul Samuelson and Anthony Scott, Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1968) 218; Gregory N. Mankiw, Principles of Economics (9th ed., Boston: Cengage, 2021): 54; Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Economics (3rd ed., New York: Worth Publishers, 2015): B-1. ⮭
9. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 3. ⮭
10. “[A]gricultural employment accounts for less than 4 percent of all jobs,” Patricia Daly, “Agricultural Employment: Has the Decline Ended?” Monthly Labor Review (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1 November 1981): 1. ⮭
11. In the 1970 census the population of New Mexico was 1.9% Black; see U.S. Department of Commerce: Bureau of the Census, Population Estimates by Race, for States: July 1, 1973 and 1975 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978): 15. ⮭
12. See Bob Herbert, “Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?” New York Times (November 13, 2007): A29 (note that Herbert erroneously states that the speech was “the first stop in [Reagan’s] general election campaign”). ⮭
13. See Jesse Matz’s illuminating article, “Montage Diversity,” Representations 161 (Winter 2023): 41–69. ⮭
14. Matz, “Montage Diversity,” Representations 161 (Winter 2023): 52–53. ⮭
15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URZtoetS5wE. ⮭
16. Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller, “An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue,” The New Republic online, https://newrepublic.com/article/180570/trump-rural-white-resentment-honest-assessment. ⮭
17. The New York Times, “The 1619 Project”: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html. ⮭
18. See Tom W. Smith, “Changing Racial Labels: From ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ to ‘African-American,’” Public Opinion Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 496–514. ⮭
19. Joe Street, Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2016): 2. ⮭
20. American Film Institute, “AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes,” https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movie-quotes/. ⮭
21. Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, “Remarks at a White House Meeting With Members of the American Business Conference” (March 13, 1985): https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/remarks-at-a-white-house-meeting-with-members-of-the-american-business-conference/. ⮭
22. See Spencer Yongwook Kwon, Yueran Ma, and Kaspar Zimmermann, 100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration (February 7, 2023). SAFE Working Paper No. #359, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3936799. Kwon and his co-authors conclude that “corporate concentration… has increased persistently over the past century." ⮭
23. John Reese, The Looters (New York: Random House, 1968). ⮭
24. Janet McCracken, “The Non-Western of the New West, 1973–75,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 44, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 82–97. ⮭