Somewhere I have a video copy of The Split.

I recorded it off the TV maybe ten years ago so rather than try to dig it out I’m looking for a digital copy. It amazes me the crap you can get on DVD – often in several flavours – while the really good stuff is stranded way down the long tail waiting for someone like me to give it a home.

I usually have a list of around ten movies a month that simply aren’t available that I need.

Now ‘need’ is an interesting word. Sometimes of course I’m just being greedy and it would simply be nice to have a copy of something like A Man Called Sledge with James Garner playing against type (that one I found pretty quickly). A lot of the time though this is work related. There’s a very good chance that The Split will be nothing more than a footnote in the book that Rob and I are working on, but I can’t with good conscience even write a footnote without refamiliarising myself with the movie.

Plus who’d give up a chance to watch Jim Brown, Ernest Borgnine, Gene Hackman, Jack Klugman, Donald Sutherland, James Whitmore and Warren Oates fall out over a heist.

Danny Ocean 2.0 wishes he had such a crew.

So for whatever reason The Split is unavailable to me. But one way or another I’ll have it in a few weeks because someone will have a decent copy and that copy will be out there in the wild.

And digging this stuff up means you find treasure buried right along side. Another heist movie called Three-way Split with Robert Vaughn wasn’t on my radar until this morning.

No idea if I’ve seen that one, but the tagline is hard to resist:

Three “Sex-O-Pathic” Killers Attempt the Most Daring Heist of Their Sordid Careers…Sharing the Danger…The Money…And the Women…In a…”Three-Way Split”