“The Anderson Tapes” is a weird ass movie. Sorry to be profane, and I intend it partly as a compliment, but weird ass is simply the best way to summarize Sidney Lumet’s 1971 adaptation of a 1970 Lawrence Sanders novel that often feels like it’s two movies in one. In one movie you have safe-cracking savant John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery) released from prison after a decade and rather than even trying to go straight, or even trying to act like he’s going to go straight, just goes straight to see girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) who is being kept, in a manner of speaking, by some wealthy so and so in a luxurious apartment that Anderson immediately declares his intention to rob. No one in Anderson’s crew emerges into a character of any real substance (although young Christopher Walken’s unconventionality is already fully electric), and neither does Ingrid, for that matter, though that’s at least in part by design, with Connery deliberately funneling a deep cynicism, it not outright nihilism, through his charming exterior. “It’s dog-eat-dog,” he declares in making a pitch to an aspirant member of his crew, not realizing he’s the one on the menu as this heist film gradually becomes a comedy caper, a deadpan comedy caper, that is, as the burglary becomes a slow-moving disaster.
Though the first movie is a little abstract in how it evokes the sensation of the heist being told to us after the fact through a series of police interviews, a half-hearted device that makes a true impact, the second movie is much more abstract by essentially being a non-narrative one. When Anderson departs prison, he flips off the security camera, thinking he’s finally free from always being watched, though life on the outside features no less surveillance even if, like so many schmucks, he remains blissfully unaware. Every member of his crew, and Ingrid too, are being surveilled by different factions for various reasons, suggested in eerie squeaks and squiggles on the soundtrack and evoked in myriad shots through windows and from behind walls. Its effectiveness is limited, though, not so much in how it never converges with the main plot in the way we might be conditioned to expect but in how Lumet never quite makes clear if this surveillance state is meant to underline the futility of the heist – of anything – in the first place or if the unexpected undoing of Anderson and his crew is meant to mock it. What’s more, the concluding joke almost seems to require what would have been knowledge in 1971 of the Nixon White House tapes, only installed in the Oval Office a few months before “The Anderson Tapes” was released, which makes me wonder if the seeming contemporary critical apathy was in part related to never being able to know when the future is sending smoke signals.