Tribeca - This is Not a Robbery
In the director Q&A after The Zen of Bobby V, the filmmakers mentioned that they had shot over 500 hours of footage with Valentine. The lack of focus in the film was probably a result of trying to reduce all that to less than two hours. The directors of This is Not a Robbery were faced with the opposite dilemma. Their film, about the oldest bank robber in American history, had its genesis when they read his obituary in the LA Times. That made it fairly impossible to get any direct footage of their subject. Some small amounts existed from TV coverage of his multiple arrests (all after the age of 83) and a little bit of FBI footage, but for the most part their subject could not appear in the film.
This minor inconvenience did not stop them from putting together an amazing film. They were blessed with a fantastic character, one that Hollywood would be hard pressed to invent. Red spent fifty years as an upstanding moral man, although one plagued by the death of his stepson and the failure of his business in later years. Despite that, he continued to persevere until the death of his wife. Her death started a downward spiral, during which he started frequenting strip clubs, took up with a drug-addicted stripper, and then finally starting doing hard drugs himself. Remember the guy is in his late seventies, early eighties by this point. When he finally kicked the drug habit, he needed to get a rush from something so he started robbing banks.
The first time he was arrested, no one really thought he was serious. He was let off with a warning to stay out of Alabama for the rest of his life. The second time, he was sent to jail for 3 years, which the judge thought was fair given he didn’t expect Red to survive to get out. The final time he was arrested, he was put away for life.
To tell his story, the directors mixed together the small amount of archival footage they had of him with interviews, photo montages, a pictorial time line of his life, animated recreations of his life and robberies, as well as footage of the places he robbed and was incarcerated. They also got extremely lucky that the GQ author who had interviewed Red before his death allowed them to use his recordings, letting Red posthumously narrate a large portion of the film. The result transcends the pieces that make it up, mostly because of the incredible effect that Red had on everyone he came into touch with. It gets a full five out of five.