Lining Up the Buck

The scene is the Los Angeles Coliseum, packed with roaring, screaming fans watching a National Football League championship play-off game. The star is Jim Brown, once the most celebrated fullback in professional football. But is Brown bucking the line? Nope. This time he's lining up the buck. Aided by a gang of professional goons--Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Gates, Donald Sutherland--Brown is robbing the Coliseum.

This dreadful film is in the same genre as Topkapi and Rififi, but the resemblance stops there. The first half is a how-to-do-it set piece on the art of robbing a football stadium and getting away with the loot. The second half involves the problem, artificially created, of how to split that loot. As leader of the gang, Brown is allowed to take the take home to his former wife (Diahann Carroll). Enter James Whitmore, Diahann's evil landlord. He suspects what's up, but he also knows what he wants: Diahann. "Please," he pleads. "Please," she responds. When she refuses, he pulls out a machine gun and riddles her to death.

The landlord, in turn, is shot down by a crooked cop (Gene Hackman), who makes off with the money but later joins forces with Brown to shoot it out with the accomplices. Naturally, the accomplices all die, and the cop becomes a hero. As for good old Jimmy Brown, he is about to escape with his share, when he is called--symbolically--by the voice of the dead Diahann, summoning him--symbolically--to hell. And there, as they say in professional football, The Split ends.

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