In Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock, the great Robert Redford plays John Dortmunder with only a very slight hint of comedic tilt. Half-deadpan and half buried angst.
Dortmunder, a hard-luck career criminal with a dryly sardonic attitude, was introduced in Donald Westlake’s same-titled 1970 pulp novel. (It began as a hard-boiled Parker book under his Richard Stark pseudonym, but it kept leaning into humor.)
William Goldman’s first serving of substantial dialogue slips right into the Dortmunder aesthetic, but with an understated allusion to soul and emotionality.
When Graham Jarvis‘s prison warden gently chides Dortmunder by asking “you couldn’t really go straight?”, Dortmunder answers with absolute honesty, retreating into pained solemnity as he half-mutters a confession: “My heart wouldn’t be in it, Frank.” He addresses the warden by his first name! Which implies a hint of affection, a bond of mutual respect.
And he means it about the heart component. Dortmunder, re-imagined by Goldman as a kind of counterculture guy, an urban Sundance Kid without the moustache, is into larceny for the bolt and the buzz…the juice is what sends his heart soaring.
Plus I adore Dortmunder’s look of nihilist self-recognition or resignation…a look that says “what do you want me to do….change?…this is who I am.”
The Hot Rock mixes this fatalistic mindset with low-key humor, but the story is all about a team of thieves never quite succeeding…repeated frustrations, failures, misfortunes, trying again and again…a story, at root, about noiresque doldrums.
But the ending is perhaps the happiest…indeed, the most ecstatically joyful finale in the history of heist flicks.
A 2026 remake couldn’t accommodate a handsome white-guy protagonist with a German last name, but then you knew that. Dortmunder would have to be ethnically reimagined (Riz Ahmed?), be given an annoying wardrobe, made to wear whitesides, etc.
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