Touching on both the film noir style of the 1940s and the "just the facts, ma'am" approach popular in the early television era, and incorporating both shadowy alleys and bright, almost flat sunlit street scenes, Richard Fleischer's plebeian, no-nonsense Armored Car Robbery remains the quintessential low-budget heist melodrama. Starring tight-lipped Charles McGraw as the tough, unyielding police detective, the potboiler also benefited from a downright vicious performance by an unredeemable William Talman as the brains behind the ill-fated caper, as well as the presence of luscious B-movie icon Adele Jergens as one of those hardboiled dames seemingly born to destroy gullible dime-store gangsters like Benny McBride (Douglas Fowley). "What is a dame like her doing with a two-bit mug like Benny?" McGraw's junior colleague Don McGuire asks at one point. Filmed at Los Angeles' Wrigley Field and amid the spooky oil derrick landscape of Long Beach, CA, Armored Car Robbery is almost shocking in its in-your-face violence with a climax that is downright gruesome.