Cinema: A Devalued $

Take a coke-snorting smuggler, a crooked Army quartermaster, a deceptively dippy hooker and a smooth-talking expert in alarm systems. Add a bank, ultramodern European and defiantly burglarproof. The hooker is greedy, the alarms expert larcenous and the bank eminently susceptible to a shrewd variation on the Trojan-horse tactic.

To make the setup sweeter, the loot is dirty money, the kind of quarter-million-dollar nest egg socked away by people with the same ethics as the coke-snorter and the quartermaster. “Crooks,” as the alarms expert points out, “are the only ones who can’t holler cop.”

The fatal flaw in the scheme is Writer-Director Richard Brooks, whose previous films (The Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, In Cold Blood) were notable for a kind of insistent pretension unembellished by visual style or intellectual depth. In $ (yes, that’s the title), Brooks is not content to make a straight caper movie, which his script might have supported. Instead, he guns for philosophical commentary.

“Every big crime’s supposed to prove something about the times we live in,” announces the alarms expert (Warren Beatty). What this crime proves is never revealed. There are, however, never-ending references to money, proceeding in both dialogue and image to a last scene that will come as a surprise only to those who slept through the first seven reels.

Beatty’s nervous, sardonic energy gives $ some much needed momentum and at least a modicum of charm. As the hooker, Goldie Hawn displays her familiar Laugh-In mannerisms with witless bravado. She is suffering from a terminal case of the cutes.