Discovering this film is tantamount to feeling like an archaeologist coming across an extraordinary fossil of unknown origin: directed by a treasured old friend of Martin Scorsese, produced by the acclaimed editor of Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker" and several Woody Allen comedy classics, starring a then newly re-discovered Burgess Meredith after 1976's "Rocky" had brought him back into the public eye, with Ned Beatty of "Network" and "Deliverance" fame and the venerable Richard Basehart, Micheal Murphy, the forgotten Paul Sand, and beautiful Constance Forslund and lovely Charlene Dallas rounding out the cast. But this alone does not begin to describe the particularly strange and noteworthy qualities of "The Great Bank Hoax", for it appears to be a movie existing in an alternate and twilight-set universe of it's very own. Shot on location in the small town of Madison, Georgia, there is a sense of almost vivid suffocation and claustrophobia pervading every square inch of the film's atmosphere, most specifically it's prison cell-like spaces with actors crammed into tiny curtained backrooms, teller's cages, and dimly-lit storage closets, it's empty and economically depressed Jimmy Carter-era Main Street with it's sad and bored high school orchestra and threadbare Fourth of July parade, it's rotting and isolated clapboard church ministered by a corrupt priest and surrounded by overgrown trees and forlorn stained glass windows, it's black-walled bingo parlor, lonely rooming houses, cracked country backroads, and dingy old motels, and most specifically it's melancholic and very off-kilter comic tone fueling it's allegorical Watergate satire, neither slapstick or laugh-out loud funny, but more of an aching and ill-defined humorous desperation, representing both the film's November 1978 release date and the waning days of that decade's diminishing faith in any sense of institutional post-Nixonian reform or improvement, a snapshot in time before the rise of a neo-conservative revolution that would sweep a fundamentalist Republican into the White House a mere 24 months later, leading directly towards our own present-day drama of 21st-century global malaise. Beneath it's surface of scheming females, bumbling bankers, and phony Christians lies one of the last remaining anti-establishment comedies that would quickly flourish and then disappear in the aftermath of the classic "Animal House", so it behooves any dedicated film historian to unearth and appreciate it's unique and singularly eccentric charms.
