Afghanistand Banana Stand

             Yesterday I was in the bookstore (one of the few left) and saw a fat volume that purported to list the thousand movies I have to see before I die. I scanned the index to see if one of my top ten favorite movies of all time, “The Hot Rock,” was there. 

            It wasn't. 

            No big surprise there. And it doesn't really bother me, because regardless of its exclusion, I get the same amount of enjoyment out of that film each time I watch it—and I must be going on a dozen times now since I first saw it at the Jerry Lewis Cinema on Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadow, on Long Island. I was in high school at the time. Now I have grandchildren. One day I’ll make them watch it with me. Maybe they’ll fall in love with it, too. Now, that would be a surprise!

I say that simply because the only thing I don’t enjoy about my “Hot Rock” experience is the fact that not too many people seem to share my enthusiasm. Not even the people who made it. Maybe they know something I don’t. Maybe someone brainwashed me into liking it so much, just like the poor little guy in the movie who ends up doing whatever mastermind John Dortmunder asks him to do when he hears the words Afghanistand Banana Stand spoken to him in the elevator.

“The Hot Rock,” released in 1973, stars Redford Redford (as Dortmunder), George Segal, Ron Leibman, Paul Sand, Zero Mostel and Moses Gunn. Based on the book of the same name by Donald Westlake (to which the movie bears only a passing resemblance), the story concerns a group of engaging thieves hired by an African diplomat (Gunn) to steal a diamond from the Brooklyn Museum that the diplomat’s country claims as its own. But the stone has a way of slipping out of the kooky crooks’ claws time after time.

The screenplay was written by William Goldman, who three years earlier penned “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and four years later would write the script for “All the President’s Men,” both of which make it into my top twenty. It was directed by Peter Yates, who a half decade later would helm another one of my personal favorites, “Breaking Away.”

“The Hot Rock” won no awards. It is on no one’s list of the hundred (or even the thousand) movies you have to see once before you die. It is not mentioned in any books on motion picture history. Clips are never shown to publicize new projects from anyone involved. It’s not considered an important enough movie.  

I don’t care. I still love it.

            It happens to be one of those movies in which you root for the crooks. But that’s not a crime. Millions of us did that for “Butch Cassidy,” “The Sting,” “Ocean’s Eleven” and hundreds of other films. In the case of “The Hot Rock,” the outlaws are stealing something that apparently was stolen from someone else first so that they can return it to its rightful owner. What’s more, the grown men doing the stealing seem as if they deserve a bit of a break. They’re all damaged in one way or another. One is on a clear path to ulcer-hood. Another has confidence issues. A third has a reprehensible father. A fourth still lives with his mother.

The filmmakers wisely depended on realistic situational humor rather than dumb jokes and disgusting sight gags to give “The Hot Rock” an overall sense of amusement. When bomb expert Allan Greenberg (Sand), disguised as a doctor, explains to the museum guards why they should stay outside tending to the faux-injured transportation expert, Stan Murch (Leibman), instead of going back into the empty museum (where Redford and Segal are stealing the diamond), the result is hilarious: “His lungs are scraping his heart!” Greenberg shouts in ridiculous sincerity. That’s much more effective than actually seeing someone’s lungs scraping their heart or making a joke about it. In the hands of Sand and Leibman, their earnestness is the joke.

Similarly, it is infinitely funnier to see locksmith Andrew Kelp (Segal) inadvertently trapped inside the bulletproof glass enclosure that holds the diamond rather than to hear someone try to describe his dilemma or to see Kelp attempt an improbable slapstick maneuver to get out. His incredulous, voiceless helplessness is hysterically funny.

            Despite the fact that Dortmunder is an incorrigible thug (albeit a droll and harmless thug with a stomach abscess), I felt a kinship with the character when he reaches a certain existential point in his criminal career. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like the film so much; I reach existential points in my own (non-criminal) career every few hours. “I’m not superstitious, and I don’t believe in jinxes,” Dortmunder says staunchly. “But that stone’s jinxed me, and it won’t let go. I’ve been near bitten, shot at, peed on, and robbed. And worse is gonna happen before it’s done. So I’m taking my stand. I’m going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me.” That’s how I feel about the pursuit of some of my own professional goals. Regrettably, though, I’ve never stated it as eloquently as Mr. Dortmunder nor made a do-or-die stand quite the way he does. Maybe he knows something that I don’t.

            The great thing about watching a favorite movie over and over is that you eventually catch onto great little pieces of business or dialogue you may have missed the first seven or eight times—and that makes you eat it up even more. Four viewings ago I noticed a little morsel that fits that bill. It’s in the scene where Murch looks over the helicopter that he’ll be flying to land on top of the police station where, at one point, the hot rock is hidden. Murch argues with Dortmunder about his ability to fly the chopper. When Murch flips a few switches on the roof of the cockpit, his confidence never wavers—except for that split second when he’s not entirely certain which of two switches to flip in order to successfully lift the bird. If you blink you’ll miss it, and it may not even have been in the script. But when you finally see it, you know you’re in the hands of consummate professionals.

The movie is also blessed with a craftily jazzy score by Quincy Jones (featuring the sax work of Gerry Mulligan), and several rich cameos. Without our unsung character actors, movies would be empty. “The Hot Rock” is full. William Redfield, whose stationhouse is briefly commandeered by our nervy heroes, is a gem as a beleaguered and befuddled police captain who at first has no clue what’s going on and then wraps up the situation with misplaced heroism when the intruders fly away in their chopper. “We did it, men!” the captain shouts with glee, even though he and his men did nothing at all. Seth Allen, billed as The Happy Hippy, provides one of the funniest bits in a role that lasts about sixty seconds. Passing by on the street, he admires Dortmunder’s fancy wristwatch. Dortmunder tells him to go to church and pray for a similar watch. “I didn’t say I wanted a watch like that,” the Happy Hippie says. “I said I want that watch.” Like the hot rock itself, Allen’s expression is priceless.

It must also be noted that the World Trade Center towers, which weren’t quite complete at the time, can be viewed during the helicopter scene, and this adds an extra dimension of longing for a world that no longer exists. The movie was shot in 1972, when New York City was anything but a Garden of Eden. In fact, it was in terrible shape. Yet the city scenes somehow reflect a vibrant, storied Manhattan that I fell in love with—in my mind, at least—as I was growing up and hoping to live and work there one day. Perhaps that’s another reason, along with the laughs, the existential unity, the surprises and the cameos—why I love “The Hot Rock” so much.

            Or maybe it’s a reason I’ll never be able to identity with certainty. I believe that people like movies for all different reasons, much of which can never be explained with ease or even logic. Sometimes it depends on the kind of person you were when you first saw it, what was on your mind, how you felt about life, who you were with at the time. It could be a lousy movie, but because of some imperceptible factor related to that first viewing, the movie can lodge itself in your mind and memory and refuse to let go forever.

In the case of “The Hot Rock,” maybe it wasn’t even the story or the acting or the messages or anything else like that. Maybe it was simply because I never heard my father laugh so loud as when I sat in the theater with him when he took me to see it the first time, and I felt I was on an equal companionable level with him really for the first time. Maybe it was because the second time I saw it, weeks later, I was with the first true group of close friends I ever had. Maybe it was because the jail where Dortmunder and Kelp have to spring Greenberg was just two blocks away from my house.

            Earlier in my life, when I was hoping for a career in motion pictures as a writer, director or actor, I asked William Goldman, during a brief mail correspondence, how he enjoyed writing the screenplay and what he liked most about the finished product. I no longer have his letter, but I remember his short response word for word: “There was nothing I learned on that film that I didn’t learn better on every other film I did.” Then I took two books out of the library about Robert Redford and scanned the indexes for anything on “The Hot Rock.” Both had only a single line about it, relating how it was the only movie Redford made simply to earn a paycheck. Redford offered no quotes or opinions at all. He didn’t seem to have any.

            Hearing what Goldman and Redford said was a tremendous blow to me. It bothered me for years. How can something I enjoy so much be so inconsequential to its writer and its star?
            But then I realized something: maybe I know something they don’t know.