A male and female team up with a twist on the old badger game. After learning about various store owners with relatives who work for them, the woman goes in pretending to be a customer. While the owner waits on her, she slips an envelope into something while he's not looking. Then she goes near the window and slyly signals her partner, who comes in a minute later, pretending to arrest her for being a drug pusher. He "finds" an envelope in her purse with heroin, then asks where the second one that he knows about is.
She tells him where she stashed it. The owner is stunned, even more so when she tells him it was his nephew/son-in-law-whoever else minds the store sometimes, who is her accomplice. She convinces the owner to bribe the cop to not arrest the loved relative and they skate away with thousands, each driving away their own cars.
At the first place we see them play their game, Ma Davis foolishly tries to phone the highway patrol when she is supposed to be getting the money. So the guy, Fred, shoots her-before she had a chance to open her safe to get his money. They take off with nothing-don't even tap the till.
The crooked couple decide to pull two more jobs today and then leave the area. The second one goes off smoothly, but the victim notifies the highway patrol. Now that they know what's going on, the cops begin to phone all the business owners with a large sum of money on hand for today's pay day, and one place they call they talk to the owner while the two crooks are at his store. He plays it smart on the phone but after they leave with $5000 of his money, he sees the man's car complete with his license number and alerts the cops.
The couple ditch the man's car, and come up with this weird idea, while parked next to an orange grove, that he will go through the grove and meet her on the other side, then hide in her trunk and hope she can get through roadblocks without anyone looking in the trunk. Of course, Dan and Co. Arrive in time to foil their plans.
Overall, we saw 3 depictions of a crime, cleverly done for the most part, making for a pretty good show. The flaws: 1) Why Fred didn't just grab the phone and hang up in the first store, and then force Ma to open her safe before he conked her, or shot her then, is a mystery to me. She was an old lady who wasn't going to physically stop him. No need to shoot her, and dumb to do so before the safe was opened.
2) They were supposed to be getting huge sums of money from stores about to pay their employees in cash. Now that still happened in the 50s, but we were seeing little stores that normally had one employee working at a time. How many folks did, say, the jewelry store have that he would have $5,000 in cash to pay out? Remember that a clerk in a store then would likely not make much more than $75 a week if that much.
3) Fred was so quick to off the old lady, why did he just tell the one owner to lie down on the floor while they made their escape, giving him the easy opportunity to get up when they left and spot his car-which led to them being found-instead of at least buffaloing (clobbering the man with the butt of his revolver) him?
4) The couple are plotting their escape alone in a grove. Their cars are right next to each other and nobody is around. Why should Fred wander through the grove for 5-10 minutes to then hide in the trunk, when he could hide in it right then and she could then go through the road blocks as planned?
A bit of fixing in the script could have made this a 9, but these flaws make me drop it to a 7.
She tells him where she stashed it. The owner is stunned, even more so when she tells him it was his nephew/son-in-law-whoever else minds the store sometimes, who is her accomplice. She convinces the owner to bribe the cop to not arrest the loved relative and they skate away with thousands, each driving away their own cars.
At the first place we see them play their game, Ma Davis foolishly tries to phone the highway patrol when she is supposed to be getting the money. So the guy, Fred, shoots her-before she had a chance to open her safe to get his money. They take off with nothing-don't even tap the till.
The crooked couple decide to pull two more jobs today and then leave the area. The second one goes off smoothly, but the victim notifies the highway patrol. Now that they know what's going on, the cops begin to phone all the business owners with a large sum of money on hand for today's pay day, and one place they call they talk to the owner while the two crooks are at his store. He plays it smart on the phone but after they leave with $5000 of his money, he sees the man's car complete with his license number and alerts the cops.
The couple ditch the man's car, and come up with this weird idea, while parked next to an orange grove, that he will go through the grove and meet her on the other side, then hide in her trunk and hope she can get through roadblocks without anyone looking in the trunk. Of course, Dan and Co. Arrive in time to foil their plans.
Overall, we saw 3 depictions of a crime, cleverly done for the most part, making for a pretty good show. The flaws: 1) Why Fred didn't just grab the phone and hang up in the first store, and then force Ma to open her safe before he conked her, or shot her then, is a mystery to me. She was an old lady who wasn't going to physically stop him. No need to shoot her, and dumb to do so before the safe was opened.
2) They were supposed to be getting huge sums of money from stores about to pay their employees in cash. Now that still happened in the 50s, but we were seeing little stores that normally had one employee working at a time. How many folks did, say, the jewelry store have that he would have $5,000 in cash to pay out? Remember that a clerk in a store then would likely not make much more than $75 a week if that much.
3) Fred was so quick to off the old lady, why did he just tell the one owner to lie down on the floor while they made their escape, giving him the easy opportunity to get up when they left and spot his car-which led to them being found-instead of at least buffaloing (clobbering the man with the butt of his revolver) him?
4) The couple are plotting their escape alone in a grove. Their cars are right next to each other and nobody is around. Why should Fred wander through the grove for 5-10 minutes to then hide in the trunk, when he could hide in it right then and she could then go through the road blocks as planned?
A bit of fixing in the script could have made this a 9, but these flaws make me drop it to a 7.
