Crook Beats Spy Gadgets but Yields to Lady Luck

By Emerson Batdorff

Some days a crook can't set by a dollar, what with all the snooping that's going on these days. TV cameras everywhere monitoring

even the elevators, and tapped phone lines in love nests and an occasional waiter with a tape recorder in his heel.

In its own way, "The Anderson Tapes" makes interesting and often humorous comments on the world today while telling the story of a high-grade criminal who persists in trying to get along.

His idea of getting along is to back a truck up to a high-class New York apartment house over the Labor Day week end and simply stel everything valuable and portable.

WE GET to see this operation from the viewpoint of detectives, both private eyes and public, who are observing various goings on either at the apartment or in other places where the crook gets taped and photographed without his knowledge.

The police, the FBI, the narcotics men, the treasury, the private eyes, none of them apparently realizes what they have. The caper eventually is fingered by

'The Anderson Tapes' police counteract properly?

Directed by Sidney Lumet, screenplay by Frank Pierson from the novel by Lawrence Sanders. Produced by Robert Weltman, 98 minutes. Columbia.

Mature.

Duke Anderson Ingrid Everleigh Tommy Haskins Pat Angelo

POD ..............................

.Sean Connery .......................... Dyan Cannon ......................... Martin Balsam .Alan. King

...Stan Gottlieb

IT ALL is artificial but nonetheless entertaining, largely because all the parts are well taken the homosexual interior decorator of

Capt. Delaney ......................... . Ralph Meeker The Kid ............Christopher Walken Martin Balsam, the arthritic penitentiary senior statesman of Stan Gottlieb, the psuedo-suave gangster of Alan King and the incredibly mouthy police captain of Ralph Meeker.

fate. If it were up to the routine to catch the criminal he woul“ die of old age.

Sear. Connery, a beguiling sort of con man in this in-

carnation, plays the crimina as a man with a heart. By rights a man that nice ought to win. But he is up against an almost unbelievable array of bad luck. Through it all he plods on.

Eventually "The Ander son Tapes" gets to be a double helping of suspense. First, will the criminals get heir complicated plans sorted out? Second, will the

Dyan Cannon as the sexsymbo: is only so so, largely because the management figured she would be best photographed in bed. Mostly

what we see of her is her pekinese face peering over the bed sheets. This is not nearly as sexy as a miniskirt, nor anywhere near as revealing.

The movie is studded with dirty words, some of them said unselfconsiously.