THE BANKER. A thriller that may have inspired Tarantino

The Banker is a surprisingly decent film for a B-movie production. Spaulding Osbourne is a highly successful banker. Filthy rich, he can afford practically anything: he drives the most expensive sports cars, dines at the best restaurants, lives in a lavish mansion in Los Angeles’ wealthiest neighborhood, and spends his free time sculpting his impressive physique at a modern gym. Yet Osbourne harbors a dark secret: at night, he prowls the city, murdering luxury prostitutes supplied by two pimps—Fowler and Cowboy. These aren’t ordinary killings, though. Obsessed with ancient South American tribes, Osbourne performs his murders as rituals: he slays the women with a crossbow bolt, mutilates their bodies, and finally draws mysterious symbols in blood. On the trail of the deranged killer are world-weary, cynical detective Dan Jefferson and his former partner, TV journalist Sharon.

American director William Webb made only eight feature films, and judging by their descriptions and reviews, every one of them falls squarely into the B-movie category. The Banker certainly belongs there, filmed in parallel with Party Line (1988). The movie never had a U.S. theatrical release, going straight to video (though, surprisingly, it did play in Japanese and Hungarian theaters). Quentin Tarantino, who worked for years in a video rental store, was so impressed by it that many years later, when casting Jackie Brown (1997), he gave the role of Max Cherry to Robert Forster, who had played Jefferson in The Banker (at least according to the late actor himself, who passed away in 2019). Alongside him, Webb’s film featured Duncan Regehr (Spaulding Osbourne), Shanna Reed (Sharon), Jeff Conaway (Cowboy), Richard Roundtree (Lloyd), Leif Garrett (Fowler), and Teri Weigel (Jaynie), who later went on to become a porn star.

A young, handsome, athletic tycoon who spends his days multiplying his fortune in a steel-and-glass skyscraper, and his nights transforming into a brutal serial killer—sound familiar? No wonder: Spaulding Osbourne from The Banker comes across almost as a prototype of Patrick Bateman, the antihero of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious 1991 novel American Psycho, later adapted by Mary Harron in 2000. I haven’t found any direct evidence that Webb’s film influenced Ellis’s book, yet the similarities are striking. It’s not just the protagonists, but also the themes tackled in both works: wealth, consumerism, materialism, power, the amorality of self-styled elites, and the darker sides of human nature. Like Bateman, Osbourne too has his predecessors—he’s essentially an extreme version of Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987).

Whereas Ellis (and later Harron) aimed for incisiveness, Webb opted for a surface-level police thriller. The director packed in nearly every stereotype of 1980s crime cinema [think George P. Cosmatos’s cult hit Cobra (1986)]: a wisecracking veteran cop who doesn’t always play by the rules, his fresh-faced rookie partner (naturally from an ethnic minority), and the hero’s ex-lover drawn into the investigation, whose life is threatened by a killer with a blank stare and flawless hair. Add to that a somewhat tacky soundtrack, the obligatory dose of eroticism, and a predictable plot. And yet The Banker is surprisingly watchable. Maybe it’s Forster’s laid-back performance, maybe it’s the unique vibe of that era. Either way, it’s the perfect film for a Saturday night with a six-pack of beer—preferably straight from VHS/DVD/TV, with Knapik as the voice-over.