Interesting tone in this movie, a perfect-crime hijack-ransom plot pulled off by a crack criminal team, but instead of no-nonsense city police on the other side of the phone line we get a droll workplace drama starring Walter Matthau as lead transit cop, a sickly coward mayor (Lee Wallace, who’d also play the mayor in Batman), and timely jokes on camera-toting Japanese tourists and women in the workplace.

Robert Shaw (Robin and Marian‘s sheriff) is the lead baddie, serious about his deadlines and their consequences, and on his team is the ex-train operator who knows the system, the loose cannon, and the guy without a strong personality. The city scrambles to come up with the money, which it does in time to save almost all the hostages, then Matthau turns to preventing the color-coded criminals’ escape. One is killed by a cop, the other by his own men, and the leader third-rails himself to avoid capture. They track the final guy (Martin Balsam, later of Mitchell!) by looking through the records of fired train operators, recognizing the sick criminal during an apartment interview by his sneeze, previously heard over the intercom, and I ask you, is this the final shot of a serious crime movie?