The Day of the Wolves (1971)

A very secretive criminal mastermind (Jan Murray) summons various independent criminals for a mysterious plan he’ll only disclose when everyone involved is shacked up in a ghost town in the desert. They have been brought there blindfolded, and everyone has been instructed to grow a luscious beard before arriving, to make it more difficult for them to identify each other later on, or know where they are. Because names are the enemy of secrecy and not turning in one’s partners when caught, nobody is allowed to use their names either, and gets a number instead. Of course, not appearing on a TV show would probably help there too.

Number 1’s plan is to assault a new town in the desert with a population of 7,000, and police force of three. Because this is 1971, cutting the place off from the outside world for a couple of hours of criminal work is eminently feasible.

While the self-declared “wolves” are training for their coup, Peter Anderson (Richard Egan), the town’s chief of police (which seems quite the title under the circumstances) is asked to resign by the town board. Apparently, he is a bit of a hard ass when it comes to misdemeanours, and has made himself unpopular with the town council by asking for more men and material to fend off potential actual crime when the crime statistics point towards a big fat zero. Obviously, he’s going to do the action hero bit once the gang arrives in town, because he’s a bit of an Old West lawman at heart.

Directed and produced by Filipino filmmaker Ferde Grofe Jr., The Day of the Wolves was independently produced in the hopes to sell it on to TV – which eventually happened. Because of the independent status of the film, this doesn’t really look and feel much like most in-house productions of TV movies, but has a rough, gritty structure that feels rather more like a grindhouse movie with blood and the breasts excised than the slicker stuff directors like John Llewellyn Moxey would put on the TV screen.

That’s not a complaint, at least for those of us who enjoy exploitation films of this era not just for the sex and the violence but also for the texture of their filmmaking (and film stock). There’s a certain grimy mood perfect for a crime movie that seems to naturally follow the combination of a low budget well used, the limited but creatively used possibilities for more complicated staging and camera set-ups, the sometimes very rough editing, and all the things time has done to the film stock of the inferior prints that still seem to be the only way to see the film at hand.

It is a rather straightforward film with a straightforward plot, perhaps inspired by one of Donald E. Westlake's Parker novels, “The Score”. Not inspired enough to really grumble about plagiarism, mind you. Rather, Day of the Wolves uses the same basic idea for a big crime as the novel does to then go its own way. It’s a bit of a shame that part of said “own way” is the whole plot about Egan’s stiffly played Peter Anderson. That part of the film is never complex or interesting enough to actually deserve the time spent on it, but this early in the 70s, selling a movie with gangster protagonists – some of whom get away with it to boot! - wouldn’t have passed censorship muster. However, we still get a pretty wonderful, oh so very 70s ending only a monster would want to spoil.

Despite Egan, the film flows quite well, with some surprisingly meaty action set pieces Grofe Jr directs with quite a bit of vigour. The low budget mostly seems to have gotten in the way of buying decent fake beards for our criminals, and who’d want it any other way?