The first thing Duke (Sean Connery) does after finishing his decade-long prison sentence is visit his old girlfriend, a sunny blonde named Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) who now makes money acting as the kept woman of a rich creep who looks like Walter Matthau drawn from memory. The second thing he does is start plotting the kind of thing that had gotten him in trouble in the first place — robbery — because what else can a natural-born thief do when his paramour is living in a paid-for apartment in this upscale of a building in Manhattan?

So angry at the straight world that he won’t even momentarily humor ideas of acclimating back into it, Duke decides that he’s going to clear every apartment in the building with only a small team and a Mayflower moving truck. It isn’t the improbability of success that sets The Anderson Tapes (1971) apart from its heist-comedy peers, though. The movie, directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Frank Pierson, ponders what it would be like if the law was hip to what Duke was plotting almost as soon as the idea crops into his head, not because they’re simply on his tail the moment he steps on the sidewalk as a freeman, but because of a still-novel technology: electronic surveillance.

The Anderson Tapes’ claim to fame is that it was the first mainstream American movie to explore the technology in a notable capacity. But it can’t decide how seriously it wants to take it. It ultimately comes closest to playing it for laughs, a series of different men in suits out-nosying each other in an effort that originates from the secretly planted recording devices that deck out Ingrid’s living room. (That living room’s owner, played by the always-effervescent Cannon, is used disappointingly and sparsely, hardly in enough scenes and little more than a self-aware object — whether it relates to men like Duke or the wealthy guy who keeps her like a caged canary — when she is around.)

Sean Connery and Christopher Walken in The Anderson Tapes.

The moral complexities of surveillance were much more effectively explored three years later in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), a movie that would deservedly come to be the film to pop in most people’s minds when “1970s” and “surveillance” and “movies” were brought up in the same sentence. Without the surveillance angle, The Anderson Tapes doesn’t have much of anything interesting to do or say. Its characters are cloistered by the stock types they’re supposed to fulfill. The idiosyncrasies of performers like a cherub-faced Christopher Walken (in his film debut) and a playing-gay Martin Balsam are mistaken as something closer to substance. 

The heist is edited in a way that’s initially intriguing. It toggles between Duke and his ragtag crew, disguised by janitor uniforms and brown cloth masks, proceeding with the job, and the victims in the aftermath describing what they went through to the police. But it eventually proves more bug than feature, depleting enough tension and momentum to make you antsy for the heist to end rather than be compulsively mesmerized with your eyes behind your hands. The sequence is at least responsible for some memorable character-actor flourishes: Norman Rose as a greedy purple-bathrobed businessman unhesitant about risking his wife’s (Meg Myles) safety if it means protecting the easily replaceable cash in his safe; Margaret Hamilton and Judith Lowry as a pair of old maids who don’t treat the occasion as something to be frightened of but an exhilarating break from the monotony of their lives.  

There’s another character actor likely to become the part of The Anderson Tapes I’ll have the hardest time shaking off: Stan Gottlieb as Pop, a man Duke befriended in prison who’s enlisted to join the heist mostly out of pity. The movie didn’t make me feel anything except for when Pop, a man who was originally incarcerated in 1931 and last heard from a relative in 1948, is in a scene. The Anderson Tapes wants you to most of all leave with the pernicious rise of surveillance on the brain. Maybe it’s because I’m so numb to living with the latter more than 50 years after the film’s release, but the time-stealing evils of incarceration ended up lingering most.