Charley Varrick
1973 film by Don Siegel
Charley Varrick (a.k.a.The Last of the Independents and Kill Charley Varrick) is a 1973 American neo-noir crime film directed by Don Siegel and starring Walter Matthau, Andrew Robinson, Joe Don Baker and John Vernon. Charley Varrick is based on the novel The Looters by John H. Reese, and is the first of four consecutive films in which Matthau appeared that were not comedies (although his role in Earthquake is comedic).
Plot
Charley Varrick is a crop-duster and former stunt pilot, down on his luck. So he, his wife, and two accomplices, Al and Harman, rob a bank in rural New Mexico. Though the heist results in a big haul, it also claims the lives of Al and Charley's wife. After making their way to a distant trailer park, Charley and Harman discover their take from the bank totals over three-quarters of a million dollars. Later, when a local TV newscast reports that less than $2,000 was stolen, Charley concludes that the bank's cover-up of the actual amount can only mean it was a drop point for laundered Mafia cash. Moreover, since they have tapped into that large underworld cash-flow, whether by accident or not, Charley and Harman will soon wind up on a gangland hit list.
Though Charley is in mourning over his wife's death, he wastes no time in taking action. First, he breaks into his dentist's office, swapping his x-rays with Harman's.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Charley Varrick” as 1973 film by Don Siegel. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1973 film by Don Siegel. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q860287. 16 of 16 selected statements include explicit references; 16 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charley Varrick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.