Grand Slam (1967 film)
1967 film by Giuliano Montaldo
Grand Slam (Italian: Ad ogni costo, lit. 'At any cost') is a 1967 heist film directed by Giuliano Montaldo and starring Janet Leigh, Robert Hoffmann, Klaus Kinski, Riccardo Cucciolla, George Rigaud, Adolfo Celi and Edward G. Robinson. The musical score was composed by Ennio Morricone.
The film is an Italian, Spanish, and West German co-production. It premiered on September 28, 1967.
Plot
A seemingly mild-mannered teacher, Professor James Anders, is an American working in Rio de Janeiro. Bored with years of teaching, Anders retires and sets about putting together a team to pull off a diamond heist during the Rio Carnival in Brazil.
With the help of Mark Milford, a youthhood friend and now successful criminal, Anders recruits a team of four international experts to carry out the robbery: Gregg, an English safecracking specialist; Agostino Rossi, an Italian mechanical and electronics genius; Jean-Paul Audry, a French playboy (whose job it is to seduce the only woman with a key to the building holding the diamonds, the lovely Mary Ann); and Erich, a German ex-military man.
The team develops a series of mechanical devices to defeat the layers of protection built within the building in which the diamonds are stored, mainly photocells which crisscross the entry corridor, and the new "Grand Slam 70" safe system: an alarm triggered by any sound detected near the safe room by means of a sensitive microphone that listens for sounds while the safe and its environs are secured. Although the presence of the latter system is found by the team only one day in advance and at first this seems to impose a stop to the entire action, Agostino is able to find a genial solution to overcome the problem, so that the action can start.
The team successfully enters the safe using a pneumatic trestle to bypass the photocell beams by crawling over them, accesses the safe room with Mary Ann's key stolen by Jean-Paul, moves the safe to the corridor using shaving cream to dampen their sounds, and finally opens the safe with specific nitroglycerin charges.
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