Going in Style (1979)

The cops just called us a bunch of amateurs. I suppose we gotta knock off a bank every other week to get some respect from those jerks.

Old age is a terrible thing. Physical deterioration in the most undignified manner, the accumulated trauma of watching your peers drop like flies, the gradual realisation that a youth-obsessed society wants nothing to do with you; worse, that they actively shun you, because you represent an unwelcome, wheezing reminder of their own mortality. And so what do you do? Waste away in social isolation, your only company your regrets, your could-have-beens, and the mind-numbing boredom that comes with infirmity and a purposeless existence. Death become an escape rather than a tragedy. Because really, what is there to live for anyway?

Such is the predicament of Joe (George Burns), Al (Art Carney) and Willie (Lee Strasberg) in Going in Style. We meet the trio living and stagnating together in a small New York apartment. Their days are spent drinking Maxwell House with a dash of evaporated milk out of their special cups, griping about who’s using the most electricity, eagerly awaiting their Social Security cheques, and sitting in the park, where they feed pigeons and suffer the hyperactive, jelly-mouthed children. Al and Willie seem relatively content to drift, but Joe is bored out of his mind, so he comes up with the bold idea to stick up a bank. The way he reckons it, it would be a win-win situation: if they pull it off, they’re in the money; if they don’t, they’ll get free room and board courtesy of the penal system while their Social Security cheques mount up.¹ After Al half-inches some antique pistols from his nephew Pete (Charles Hallahan²) and they buy some Groucho disguises, the boys are good to go. The stick-up is successful - once the bank staff take them seriously - and suddenly our pensioners are thirty-five grand richer. But their new wealth brings nothing but the promise of comfort; there’s still the spectre of Death waiting in the wings, and no amount of money can combat that.

If this all sounds a bit grim, rest assured that Going in Style is actually a comedy. It might not be the kind of broad, knockabout farce promised by the poster (complete with caricatures of the trio in Groucho glasses), but it’s still a comedy, and a funny one at that. Even better, Going in Style is one of those rare comedies that is actually about something, a movie that manages to be both funny and moving in equal measure, with an ending that could be described as feel-good with a dash of the bittersweet.

With a different cast, Going in Style could have been insufferably cute or relentlessly maudlin. Luckily, it stars three veterans who were in something of a career resurgence. George Burns had returned to the screen after thirty-six years to co-star with Walter Matthau in The Sunshine Boys (1975), for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award at the age of eighty³. He followed that up with a turn as God in the hit Oh, God! (1977) and the disappointing comedy Just You and Me, Kid (1979). Art Carney had won Best Actor for his turn in Harry and Tonto (1974) and enjoyed a starring role in the PI comic-drama The Late Show (1977). And Lee Strasberg, co-founder of the Group Theater and Method guru, had recently been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in his pivotal role as Hyman Roth in The Godfather: Part II. All three manage to avoid the usual traps of either sitcom grumpy old men or cutesy pensioners.

Burns is ostensibly the standout, combining his standard “funny straight man” schtick with moments of genuine sorrow - the scene where he sifts through old photographs (including one of Gracie Allen) is deeply affecting - when he’s not gently seething at his advancing age. Carney was always a gifted comic actor thanks to his sitcom career⁴ - his “check this guy out” look when Willie suggests they should have raided the vault is an all-timer - and, as the baby of the trio, his is the lightest touch. But there’s a sad quality to a character who’s the most obviously hedonistic, but also the least experienced: he’s never been on a plane, he can’t hold his liquor, he flirts with a woman who is clearly a prostitute, and a craps game leaves him energised, but baffled. The main dramatic weight, however, lies with Strasberg, and he is more than up to the task. Willie doesn’t say much (and doesn’t last long), but he’s the heart of the trio, and Strasberg is a compelling watch even when he’s doing nothing, his dazed expression speaking volumes. When he is given room to act - his moving monologue about spanking his son, for example - he’s extraordinary.⁵

Martin Brest only had a couple of student movies under his belt by the time he wrote and directed Going in Style at the tender age of twenty-seven⁶, and yet he handles the movie like an old pro. Never one for flashy camera moves - a bird’s-eye view of the bank at the end of the stick-up is the closest he gets - Brest has always preferred to focus on character, even when he’s in action movie mode in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Midnight Run (1988), and there’s a genuine love and warmth for the characters (and actors) that comes across in every meticulously planned frame. You get the feeling that there’s an alternate universe in which Going in Style is just these three guys kvetching on a park bench, and it would be riveting viewing. He would make a career out of character pieces as a director, but wouldn’t write again until the ill-fated (and sabotaged) Gigli (2003), which sent him into exile and lost Hollywood one of their most interesting commercial directors.

To bang an old drum, Going in Style is exactly the kind of movie that “they wouldn’t make today”, even though they did. A toothless remake popped up in 2017 with Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin as the trio of oldsters, which used the premise but little else. These old fellas are decidedly more sprightly than Burns and Co. even though the actors are mostly significantly older. They also have a righteous reason to commit a felony and - spoiler alert - make it out of the film alive. This was a purposeful decision on screenwriter Theodore Melfi’s part: “I don’t want to see a movie where my heroes whom I’ve been fighting for and rooting for for two hours die or go to jail. I want to see them get ahead, and it’s perfect for them to get ahead these days because everyone hates banks now. So let’s have them put the perfect heist together, rob a bank, get away with it, and go off into the sunset.”

It’s a basic misunderstanding of the original. The boys aren’t committing a crime for financial gain, or pay for a kidney operation, or to right a perceived wrong; they’re doing it to feel something again. Ironically, the state-of-the-nation subtext in the remake is more powerful in the original: these are guys who have been left behind, only spoken to when there’s a politician doing the rounds. There is something sadder than being ripped off by corporate interests, and that’s being forgotten entirely. If that doesn’t scream crowd-pleaser, it’s because it ends up questioning the audience rather than playing to it. We can’t have that in a comedy of all things. And yet, with Going in Style, we do. And it’s an absolute cracker because of it.

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Next Up: “Juggle the books. Set fire to the factory. Supply women for the clients. Harry Stoner will do anything to get one more season.”

1. This might seem weird, but it’s true: in 1979, it would be perfectly plausible for them to collect Social Security while incarcerated. Restrictions on benefits for incarcerated individuals wouldn’t come into force until 1980.

2. If, like me, you spend the movie staring at Hallahan, wondering where you’ve seen him before, it’s because his face is one of the most memorable horror moments of the ‘80s. “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” indeed.

3. “This is all so exciting, I’ve decided to keep making one move every thirty-six years,” he said in his acceptance speech.

4. For the whippersnappers among you, Carney rose to fame as Ed Norton, the sewage worker stooge of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners. The sitcom was a major early influence on writer/director Martin Brest.

5. His heart attack in the park is one of the rawest, saddest things I’ve ever seen. No bug-eyed clutching of the left arm here - this is a man panicking to death in long shot.

6. George Burns: “I’ve got neckties older than you.”