The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery, 1959 starring Steve McQueen

The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (also called The St. Louis Bank Robbery, the film title in the opening credits) is a 1959 heist film. The film stars Steve McQueen as a college dropout hired to be the getaway driver in a bank robbery. The film is based on a 1953 bank robbery attempt of Southwest Bank in St. Louis. The film was shot on location in St. Louis in 1958 with some of the men and women from the St. Louis Police Department, as well as local residents and bank employees, playing the same parts they did in the actual robbery attempt. Steve McQueen was quite unknown when filming began, because he would get the role of Josh Randall in the famous TV series Wanted Dead or Alive only some months later.

Plot:
George Fowler (Steve McQueen), a diffident former collegiate football star, is recruited for a bank robbery gang by Gino, the cold hearted and unstable ex-convict brother of George’s estranged flame, Ann. George, initially insisting the limit of his involvement is strictly as get-away driver, is coerced deeper into the plot by John Eagen, the calculating plot leader. Gino also succeeds in pressuring the reluctant George (George being burdened with responsibility for the expulsion of both Ann and himself from college) to reconnect with Ann to beg for a subsistence stake to tide them over pending the anticipated robbery booty. Tensions of dislike and distrust seethe within the gang.