Competent and exciting b/w crime drama by the talented Swedish director Hasse Ekman. "Stöten" ( The Heist) is an unusually fierce and extensive film for Swedish standards. The city of Stockholm adds interesting environments to the action. Excellent cast and cinematography. Gunnar Hellström delivers a versatile portray of the fugitive criminal Erik. A lost, lovelorn and sensitive nature. His fugitive partner Janne (Tor Isedal) is an alcoholic and sadistic desperado. Maude Adelson interpret an interesting and vivid portrait of a young women, dreaming of a life together with Erik. Apart from these three, the film is stuffed with exciting characters. The film is burdened by the typical jazz score which so often filled the soundtrack in European criminal cinema in the sixties.
3 Reviews
Not the Swedish Killing I expected.
searchanddestroy-114 March 2021
When I first read the topic, of course I thought about Stan Kubrick's THE KILLING, a heist taking place on a horse race facility. But the result is far from that. It is however interesting to watch a film noir from Sweden, and heavily influenced by the American or European features too, with a nearly always present jazzy score. Not a bad movie, but not action packed enough. I don't regret to have seen it, and I am still astonished to have caught it on Netflix
Anyway, I am glad to have seen it.
Fresh variation on an old theme
tony-70-6679208 August 2022
Warning: Spoilers
Erik and Janne break out of prison, and to effect their getaway threaten to shoot a guard's wife and baby, and even kidnap the baby. They meet up with two other crooks, Esse and Bergefrag, and the quartet pull off two heists planned by Esse, the first in a casino Esse frequents, the second and bigger one at a racetrack. The latter obviously reminds one of Kubrick's "The Killing", but this job is carried out very differently, and most ingeniously. Our "heroes" then double-cross the other two, leaving them to be captured by the police.
It's hard to sympathise with such low-life characters, but the direction and script ensure that we are gripped throughout. Janne's only love is for the bottle, but when Erik meets a girl called Mona, a loser like himself, and the two dream of a better life together sympathy creeps in (Mona is played by a lovely young Maud Adelson, who was only 35 when she died of cancer.) Although crooks breaking out of prison and then carrying out robberies sounds a cliché, it's handled freshly here, and this is one of the best such films I've seen. I confess I'd never heard of any of the actors, but they're all very good, .
It's hard to sympathise with such low-life characters, but the direction and script ensure that we are gripped throughout. Janne's only love is for the bottle, but when Erik meets a girl called Mona, a loser like himself, and the two dream of a better life together sympathy creeps in (Mona is played by a lovely young Maud Adelson, who was only 35 when she died of cancer.) Although crooks breaking out of prison and then carrying out robberies sounds a cliché, it's handled freshly here, and this is one of the best such films I've seen. I confess I'd never heard of any of the actors, but they're all very good, .
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