Going In Style (1979)

George Burns stares down preschooler.

I talked about the movie Hamsun on here a while back, about the Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer who was pro-Nazi even after the Germans invaded his country. The movie starts with him at 75 telling his wife he's not going to live much longer and could die at any moment. If he had known he was going to live another 18 years, he might not have been so quick to commit treason.

In Going in Style, three old men decide to give themselves a new lease on life by robbing a bank. Unlike Hamsun, they were fictional characters and, as old people in movies tend to do, they start dying for no reason. It makes their decision to become criminals seem pretty reasonable.

But George Burns was 83 when he starred in this movie. Like Hamsun, he lived another 17 years in real life, but I don't know how long his character lasted.

With Lee Strasberg and Art Carney. All three were great. It was nice seeing George Burns not being as cute as in some of the other films he made late in life.