Million Dollar Pursuit (1951) User Reviews

A Hundred Million Pennies

[boblipton · 7/10 · 23 March 2019]

Norman Budd is a small-time crook who keeps talking about the big-time deal to singer Penny Edwards. When a ring of keys to the chief cashier of a department store falls into his hands, he sees his opportunity. Before he can execute his plans, he finds he has partners. When the heist goes off smoothly, they try hiding out. But Police Lieutenant Michael St. Angel, who is also sweet on Miss Edwards, is on the case, and the gang starts squabbling.

Budd's line readings aren't the best in the world, but there are some good actors here, including Grant Wither, Rhys Williams and Paul Hurst, as well as up-and-coming Mike Conrad and Denver Pyle. The script is fast-moving and this Republic one-hour movie is well handled by R.G. Springsteen. Springsteen was a skilled director of westerns, but he rarely got out of the genre. Even so, it's a superior movie from Republic outside their comfort zone.

Miss Edwards rarely got a major role on the big screen, outside a few Roy Rogers westerns while Dale Evans was expecting. She is just about perfect here, a bright clean beauty who shows she is a capable actress, a good singer and someone whose career needed the big break. Like so many, she never got it.

Another little Republic gem

[searchanddestroy-1 · 25 May 2008]

I will always be a great Republic pictures fan. Always. And this little flick strengthens my opinion in that idea. A pretty good time waster. Fast paced, no boredom in that story of a petty thief who is in love with a gal and commits a daring armed robbery with a gang of hoods.

Curiously, the film begins with the love affair between the gal and the cop - in this kind of picture, there is ALWAYS a cop - and the rest of the movie focuses on the petty thief preparing and committing the heist with his friends. No forget the shooting among them that follows the robbery. And we find the girl again - with the cop - only at the end.

A very good film noir, even a grade B from Republic pictures.

A successful robbery doesn't mean that the cash is easy to spend.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 21 September 2017]

This is just an o.k. crime drama about the plot to rob a busy department store and the frustrations of the gang to be able to split the money and split from each other. This shows the before, the during, the after, and what makes this interesting is the rising tensions that occur as soon as the plans are in order. It's a typical gritty Republic caper film that insinuates once again that crime doesn't pay and often kills. That it's innocent bystanders in addition to the victims and perpetrators themselves makes for intrigue in these raw and extremely violent films. Don't expect deep characterizations or believable motivations, but do expect tough dialog and gritty photography and editing.

Coming at a time when the number of TV's in households was greatly expanding, the individual filmmakers were pushing the code to the limit to get more people into theater seats, and more violence was an assured way to sell tickets. This didn't make the films any better, but in certain cases, it exposed the angry post war society that was going on all over the restless world. Grant Withers and Norman Budd are the criminal organizers with Penny Edwards a soft spoken heroine, framed for a crime she didn't commit by a suspicious, volatile boyfriend. This is the type of independent low budget film that on its own is just average, but obviously influenced film students of the time to take further risks. For that, it could be considered a classic of the later day B film, a genre that was a bit wounded but was desperately trying to pick itself up and dust itself off, fighting the enemy of television to the bitter end.