With Charley Varrick, the critics joined the cultists in their praise of Don Siegel (“It proves that there's nothing wrong with an auteur director that a good script can't cure” --New Republic). Charley Varrick (Walter Matthau) has a small business as an operator of small planes, and sidelines as a small-time bank robber, until he accidentally comes into the big money, which gets him into some big trouble with the big M. Deciding he must make the Mafia think they've hit their target before they hit him, Charley, an ex-stunt flyer, embarks on a fast-paced, suspenseful caper that is not without its violence (Pauline Kael found it “gruesome,” “sordid” and “insulting”), but is “clean” in a Siegel sense: “Siegel's classical editing of movement and milieu, character and conveyances...(is) the closest thing I've seen to a Hawksian caper movie.... (T)he narrative line is clean and direct...and the triumph of intelligence gloriously satisfying.” --Andrew Sarris.
A host of oddball characters surround Charley, but the key to the casting has to be Matthau: “To make a bank robber and killer of the epitome of wry, undemonstrative, middle-class respectability, the king of second mortgages and six-packs, was a very sly move on Siegel's part....” --Walter Kaufman