5 Against the House (1955)

Please don't spend money on this.

A Masterpiece!

The first must-see film of the year.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Five Against the House is a 1955 flick that is really peculiar, on the one hand it wants to be an inarticulate college film, with dumb remarks and idiotic hazing, and on the other, a heist film with touches of noir.The acting is horrible and the script is no better. The ending, entirely pointless.Four college chums (played by 30 year olds), after wasting the first hour talking about girls, fights and cigarettes, decide to rob a Nevada casino, the Harold's Club.It has Brian Keith from the film noir Tight Spot (1955), which was average, and the film noir Nightfall (1957) which was a bit better. In this he just smokes and then goes nuts a few times.Kim Novak, from the good 1954 film noir Pushover, is hot, but doesn't do much. We don't even see her in a tub or anything.Kerwin Mathews (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jack the Giant Killer (1962)) is annoying, as he doesn't have any heavy gravitas here. He's horrible.Add Alvy Moore (a comic actor from Green Acres) who is probably an awful choice, as all he does is make stupid comments throughout and you wish he would get run over by a steam train.William Conrad is wasted as a casino 'money cart pusher' who gets taken in a really stupid way.For car buffs, you'll probably like the "automated parking garage" (see Bowser, Pigeon Hole and Roto Park systems). That's about it, nothing adds up much in here.

"Hornet's Nest" director Phil Karlson helmed many memorable films, including "Kansas City Confidential," "The Phenix City Story," "Walking Tall," "The Texas Rangers," "Key Witness" and "Frame Up," during his 31-year career, but his lame 1955 casino caper "5 Against the House," with Guy Madison and Kim Novak, doesn't qualify as one of those films. This 84-minute, black & white crime melodrama lacks substance, and the robbery itself is nothing to rhapsodize about in the greater scheme of heist movies. None of the usual characters that populate these dramas appears in this Columbia Pictures release. Essentially, four college age students—two Korean War veterans on the G.I. Bill and two roommates try to steal a million dollars from Harold's Club in Reno during a city-wide celebration. Indeed, they don't get away with the crime, but the initial plans that the mastermind concocted had little to do with getting away with the transgression. Karlson stages this modest crime story with his customary aplomb, but he is forced to stretch out the rather lackluster screenplay by "In the Heat of the Night" scenarist Stirling Silliphant, William Bowers of "The Gunfighter," and John Barnwell which was based on Jack Finney's magazine novel. Yes, this is the same Finney who wrote the immortal sci-fi classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The dialogue is pretty decent and there is one rather clever gag. Boredom serves as the stimulus for the crime. The heroes have just gone back to Midwestern University after spending a summer at work. Al Mercer (Guy Madison of "Till the End of Time") and Brick (Brian Keith of "Arrowhead") are attending college to obtain law degrees. Al and Brick served in the infantry in Korea, and Brick saved Al's life. Unfortunately, Brick came out of the war with a combat injury that makes him susceptible psychotic episodes. He nearly beats a younger man to death during an argument. This brief close-quarter, hand-to-hand combat scene is beautifully staged and "Women's Prison" lenser Lester White does a superb job with his pictorial compositions. Al and Brick are friends of Roy (Alvy Moore of the CBS-TV sitcom "Green Acres") and rich boy Ronnie (Kerwin Mathews of "Barquero") and they operate as a quartet. During their return journey to college, our protagonists stopover in Reno at Harold's Club and witness an attempted robbery. Actually, the authorities are on the verge of arresting Roy and Ronnie as accomplices of the anonymous thief (Frank Gerstle of "Between Heaven and Hell") because they appeared to be in on the crime. This incident gives Ronnie an idea for a 'foolproof' plan to rob the casino. He constructs a cart like those that the employees trundle into and out of the counting rooms. Essentially, he places a large but portable reel-to-reel tape player inside the cart and connects it to a concealed button in the handle so that it sounds as if there is a man hidden in the small compartment. They smuggle their cart into the casino during a celebration and coerce a casino employee, Eric Berg (William Conrad of "The Killers"), into helping them. Basically, Berg believes the heroes that there is a small man armed with a gun who will burst from the cart and start shooting if Berg doesn't comply with their orders. Complications arise from Brick's violent episode with another college student during a vicious fight and Al recommends that Brick check back into the hospital, but Brick refuses to go quietly.Meantime, Ronnie devises his plan to hold up Harold's Club, but the catch is that he will return the money. Once Brick gets wind of the crime, he has no desire to get the money back. While all of this is transpiring, Al has fallen in love with an initially reluctant Kay Greylek (sexy bombshell actress Kim Novak of "Pushover") who sings in a nightclub. Ronnie's plan requires four people and Al and Kay accompany them to Reno with no idea what is in store for them. Of course, everything works out in the end and nobody dies. Ronnie's plan works like a charm, but the police are on to them because Kay has contacted them. The heist takes place near the end of the action with about 15 minutes devoted to the actual crime. It appears that Karlson shot the action on location in Reno, and they showcase an interesting as well as elaborate car parking gantry that scoops up a vehicle with huge metal tusks, hoists it up vertically to a parking space in a high-rise garage and parks it. Motorists are not allowed to ride up in their cars. This gadget is more interesting than anything else in the film. What sets "5 Against the House" from most crime pictures of its day is the way that Karlson depicts the actual workings of the crime. Early on in the action, Ronnie buys a disposable car and trailer using cold cash so that nobody can trace the vehicles back to him. Earlier, the Production Code forbade the depiction of a crime because the censors feared that such a depiction might inspire impressionable viewers into attempting the crime. Naturally, our heroes are good kids. Brick cannot help himself and the police capture him in the garage after Al talks him down. The actual crime itself with the tape player in the cart is rather far-fetched, but even this crime seems like it foreshadows the far more elaborate crime that Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin orchestrated in director Lewis Milestone's "Ocean's Eleven." Karlson and his scenarists provide us with a glimpse of casino security; we see the guards roaming the catwalks in the gambling house and peering through slots over the gaming and cashier areas that are concealed behind mirrors. Altogether, "5 Against the House" never generates much in the way of either momentum or tension until the commission of the crime. You won't feel your palms getting sweaty or your mouth dry in anticipation of the danger involved.

This so called "film noir" isn't up to the best of them. Interesting premise that takes forever to get going. Once it does, it's an OK sit through, but forgettable as well. The heist is the basis of the movie and it's quite implausible in the way it's carried out. What were security guys in the two-way mirror looking at anyway? It was obvious what was going on. Oh well, it was just a movie with a point...I guess.Brian Keith saved the film as he was excellent as the disturbed buddy of the other three guys. Kim Novak shines in one of her early roles. Luckily she was able to snag better roles as her career bloomed. Kerwin Mathews and Guy Madison did as best they could the way their roles were written. The one annoying thing was Aly Moore as the wise-cracker buddy. Wish he would have been left out entirely or maybe bumped off before the movie got too far along. A truly atrocious performance and I can see why his career was regulated to bits as his stint in THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS in a bit trying to try a fast one on Mitzi Gaynor.

The boyish refulgence that brought him to movies over a decade earlier long since dimmed, Guy Madison has settled into William Holdenish good looks. Since Hollywood already had a Holden, and since Madison's acting skills were adequate at best, he no longer can hold the screen (this part came to him after a string of roles as Wild Bill Hickock). Luckily, Phil Karlson's 5 Against The House is an ensemble piece – an offbeat heist movie.Madison and Brian Keith are Korea veterans attending `Midwestern University' on the G.I. Bill; their buddies are wiseacre Alvy Moore and sobersides Kerwin Mathews. Mathews (whose faint accent stays a mystery) yearns to do something extraordinary to make him stand out, and dreams up a hare-brained scheme (no more than a prank, since he plans to give the money back) to rob a casino in Reno, Nevada. They're all in on the plan except Madison, who nonetheless joins them on the road west with his girl Kim Novak, to get married. When Madison tumbles to the set-up, he tries to stop it.The fly in the ointment, alas, is Keith, who spent time in the psychiatric ward for shell shock. He takes the prank dead seriously and intimidates the others to go along with him. Tricked out in Wild-West outfits and false beards, and wheeling a jerry-rigged money cart with a tape recorder inside, they hit the casino.... Phil Karlson falls short of top form here. The college hijinks are not this director's usual meat and potatoes, so he takes a long time getting any rhythm going. Then the heist itself, and the tensions among the robbers, seem oddly defanged, at least for Karlson; he seems to have fallen into a character study rather than an action movie, and unsure how to play it. Novak croons a couple of songs, and nobody gets killed. That's well and good, but a far cry from 99 River Street, or Kansas City Confidential, or The Phenix City Story, hard-core Karlson all. 5 Against The House remains in a no-man's-land between film noir and the light-hearted caper movies, like Ocean's 11, that would usher in the 1960s.