Harry in Your Pocket (1973)

Sandy (Trish Van Devere) and Ray (Michael Sarrazin) meet cute at a train station when he awkwardly steals her watch, and her bags are stolen by somebody else when she’s politely going after him to get it back. Ray’s got a bit of bad conscience about the whole thing, and they hit it off as well, so he offers to give Sandy a couple hundred dollars once he’s sold off his other ill gotten gains.

They don’t only land in bed but sort of team up, following the small time crime grapevine to a job opportunity. Harry (James Coburn) the suave yet cold boss of a wire gang (a small team of dedicated pickpockets) is looking for new partners, seeing as he’s only working with aged pickpocket – and his sole friend - Casey (Walter Pidgeon) right now. Thanks to Sandy – who’d be convincing even if Harry didn’t take a shine to her – Harry takes them on despite Ray’s dubious talent and lack of a knack for his chosen criminal enterprise. It’s going to be a learning experience.

Various factors – among them a developing love triangle, Ray’s overambition and Casey’s love for cocaine – just might end up ruining a good thing.

Harry in Your Pocket’s director Bruce Geller is best known as creator/writer/producer of TV shows like Mission Impossible and Mannix and less for his only cinematic film as a director (he’s also responsible for TV movie The Savage Bees but nobody’s perfect). It is an unfairly overlooked little film, though I’m not exactly surprised by how comparatively little seen Harry is, for the film’s copious charms aren’t exactly on the obvious side.

This is a film, after all, you’ll compliment with adjectives like “quiet”, “unassuming”, or “consciously small-scale and dramatically inconspicuous” which is not an approach to filmmaking that will help many people notice a film. It certainly doesn’t help the film either that Geller’s direction is not at all on the flashy side – in fact, two or three scenes show his TV roots rather clearly. There is, in particular, a pretty damn tacky scene of slow motion seagull feeding to ignore, but if you do ignore these few moments of tosh, you realize Geller is usually just stepping back to make room for his actors and their characters, doing exactly as much as he needs to help them while otherwise getting out of their way.

Which is obviously the right decision for a film this disinterested in heightened drama or rather, one this interested in the small drama of human interactions and the musical qualities of pickpocketing. The quartet of main characters (the film not really features anyone else as more than objects for the characters to work on) earns Geller’s trust well: Coburn is letting go of a lot of his typical acting tics (I’ve never seen the man acting less with his teeth), while Van Devere manages to effortlessly sell Sandy as an independent woman despite her part in the love triangle (where the film to my surprise and approval still doesn’t treat her as an object for the men to fight over but as an active participant) so much that she dominates the audience’s sympathy for much of the film. Sarrazin’s believably inexperienced, and Pigeon shows all the dignities and indignities of age in a profession not made for old people (I mean pickpocketing, not acting).

While the film slowly meanders through not much of a plot in which only a handful of small scale dramatic things happen, it does so in the full knowledge that actual people like you and me live and die on this small scale. The film clearly wants its audience to let go of the crutches of melodrama without going all arthouse on it. It works beautifully too for most of the time. I, at least, found myself quietly enraptured by the proceedings, in sympathy with the characters and actually touched by a quietly sad ending that even shows one of the characters committing a quietly heroic act – on a human scale.

Crackerjack 2 (1997)

Okay, remember what happened in Crackerjack? You don’t have to, because in this curious sequel to Jack Wild’s (now Judge Reinhold) – called “Crackerjack” by exactly no one – misadventures, it didn’t happen. So Wild’s still a wild card (sorry) with spurts of violence, he’s still an asshole cop, and he’s lost his wife – though no children this time around - to an exploding car. Unlike that other Jack Wild, Jack MKII has somehow acquired attractive investment whatever girlfriend Dana Townsend (Carol Alt).

Of course, Jack’s still trying to apprehend the guy who killed this version of his wife, one Hans Becker (a Karel Roden looking barely able to contain his giggles). As luck will have it, Becker reappears exploding a warehouse and inadvertently provoking a fall-out between Jack and his much-hated boss.

As luck will have it, Becker is now working as the second fiddle to evil mastermind Mister Smith (Michael Sarrazin). Smith has a great plan, you see – catching a whole train full of rich investor-type people, trapping them in a combined railroad tunnel/bunker complex and using a computer wizard and brute force to get a their accounts while the police still think the bad guys have simply hijacked the still rolling train. It’s a plan brilliant in its simplicity, I’m sure.

Guess whose girlfriend just happens to be on that train? And guess who soon finds himself playing “Die Hard in a railroad tunnel/bunker complex”?

My mind, it boggles a bit at Robert Lee’s Crackerjack 2. Not just at a plot that seems to be based on something a producer’s five year old nephew came up with (because that sort of thing is par for the course in direct to video action cinema), for Crackerjack 2 contains a baker’s dozen of strangenesses much stranger than its mere plot. Like, why retcon the first movie out of existence in this way when you might surely have found another way to make Jack crack again (or just pretend he never got better)? Why make Becker the killer of Jack’s wife when you’re not going to milk that for all it is worth (and it would in fact have been better to make Mister Smith the wife killer)? Usually, I’d answer that with the idea the producers had a script with a different hero (such as he is) around somewhere and  only changed a few character names to attach themselves to the success of the first film. But then, can Crackerjack have been actually so successful it’s worth that kind of effort? As I said, the mind, it boggles.

It boggles even more at the producers’ decision of casting Judge Reinhold of all actors willing to do everything for a pay check in the world as the new Jack. Reinhold surely is one of the thespians least fit to play a cop on the edge role, leading to a performance that fluctuates between awkward, just plain ridiculous (though it’s clearly not supposed to), and what the hell is that man doing there!? One can’t blame Reinhold for lacking in enthusiasm for the role though, and if you give actors points for relish – which I do – Reinhold certainly wins the movie, even compared with a scenery chewing Sarrazin who loves to be evil and an absolutely outrageous (just look at all the grinning SMG air shooting she does at the slightest provocation!) performance by Katerina Brozová as Sarrazin’s (evil) girlfriend.

Also not good for one’s mental health while watching are the script’s regular attempts at call-backs to the first movie (yes, the movie that can’t have happened in the world this one takes place in), with the marine attack from the first film replaced by a less creative airborne attack on the empty train that is at least realized in miniature effects of equal adorableness, and certain scenes virtual mirrors of ones in the first film without need or reason.

If all this sounds as if Crackerjack 2 were a giant mess of a movie that makes the writing in the first one look like Shakespeare (well, more like Zschokke), and has the creative independence and intelligence of a PR shill, that’s exactly what it is. It’s also a great big heap of fun to inflict this thing on one’s brain. If one’s brain can take it, of course.

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