TCM just showed this one, and since I hadn’t seen it for decades I sat down, and I came up with a terrific plot hole that rendered it kind of implausible to me:
Doc McCoy is a super-brainy bank robber, but when the plan gets messy (his collaborators betray him, and he suspects the money men behind his plan) he nonetheless makes a point of going to the original rendezvous spot (in El Paso) where he will collect the phony passport for him and his wife to escape the country.
Or else walk into a trap that will get them both killed.
Which nearly happens. the ex-collaborator and the money-man’s cohorts are laying in wait for him.
The screwy part has to do with two elements: 1) they already have the money they stole in a satchel with them, and 2) at the movie’s end they simply carjack Slim Pickens, a big ol’ countryboy, who simply finds a back road into Mexico, and they escape easy-peasy.
So why did I need to sit through the Adventures of Doc and Carol for an hour in the middle trying desperately to get to the one spot in the universe where they might expect the highest risk and the least reward?
I’m no genius bank robber but even i know better than Doc McCoy here.
No, he was plenty nervous about the money’guy’s people waiting for him–he undertook it like it was a dangerous mission, telling Carol “I’m trying to think this through” beforehand. The more I think about it, there was very little reason to go to El Paso at all, and a lot of good reasons not to.
The Slim Pickens part, about the guy who could drive them across the border, seems to me something a smart, unscrupulous Texan would know. It just comes on the fly after they carjack the guy. “Say, do you know a place to sneak us into Mexico?” “Whaaah, shoo-er Ah do!” and then it’s just a matter of telling the border guard that he’s driving to Chihuahua City (real place?) to dump some garbage in the back of his old pickup. No problem.