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All those years of my Canadian hometown, Georgetown, serving as the setting for movie after movie reached their zenith in 1979 when the little burg seemed to have hit the Hollywood jackpot. One of the biggest stars of all time, Orson Welles, came by to make a picture called “Never Trust an Honest Thief”.

I am forced to say “seemed to have” because, by the time it bobbed to the surface again four years later, “Honest Thief” had spent so much time in plastic surgery that it was barely recognisable, and the fact that it emerged as a horrible, horrible film suggests that the surgeons involved had deliberately disfigured it in the hope that it wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving.

If so, their effort was summarily rewarded. It sank once more, like a rusted, broken, legend-less Excalibur, and today the movie exists only in people’s confused memories and in a sputtering entry at the International Movie database under “Hot Money”, aka “Zen Business”, aka “Getting Centered”, aka “Going for Broke”, aka Never Trust an Honest Thief”, aka The Great Madison County Robbery”.

Every name change is the scar of another traumatic editing-room battering.

The rise and fall of “Honest Thief” was such an extraordinary adventure for the citizens of Georgetown that it might make an interesting movie in itself. Hundreds of townsfolk appeared in it, a couple with actual speaking roles. The shots were elaborate. There were explosions and a car chase. It starred the then-very-promising Michael Murphy as well as Welles.

This was definitely the Big Time. We even got souvenir T-shirts.

And when it was done, the producers invited the community to a test screening in Toronto. We filled out questionnaires afterward, and I think most were positive, but in hindsight perhaps they’d given us a “Georgetown cut”, with our hometown prominently on display, so what’s not to like, right?

When I finally got to see the movie again, on video in 1988, I saw Caribbean sunsets and actors I’d never heard of and wondered, “What the f-f-freaking hell?”

It all started one night when I was covering a town council meeting for one of the local newspapers, The Herald. Johann Egfurst had just been granted permission to put in a new septic tank beside his chicken-feed store, so spirits were already running high in the council chamber, as you can well imagine.

They got a lot higher, though, when a representative of Westfront Productions from Toronto was called forward to make his pitch and he handed out a new release to the members and the press (me and another guy). He wanted council’s approval to film a major film in Georgetown, starring Orson Welles. They’d need to temporarily close off a couple of roads at some point, but hey, Georgetown would get buckets of benefits. These weren’t spelled out, but presumably he meant buckets of cash in the form of fame and tourism. Or something.

The councillors didn’t get excited. They pondered this proposal gravely and at length, fretting that the school bus might get held up, not to mention the milkman. Closing roads is not something to be sanctioned willy-nilly, you know. The mayor eventually called for a show of hands, though, and basically council said, “Hell, yes!”

And so it was in the shiny summer of 1979 that a genuine Hollywood movie crew (well, they were mostly Canadians, as federal law requires) started hammering up sets and recruiting extras from among the local populace.

The man in charge would also be a Canadian, but boy did he know California. George McCowan – that’s him in the photo with his back turned, attempting to tell Orson Welles what to do – had directed “The Shape of Things to Come” the year previous and made his name doing episodes of the TV series “Fantasy Island” and “Charlie’s Angels” (as well as the Canadian Lassie-as-German-shepherd-weeper “Littlest Hobo”).

I am now going to attempt to recreate what happened next while at the same time explaining what became of the scenes that were shot, and the movie itself – all without a net, and using only the IMDb as a balancing pole.

I took the photos seen here for The Herald, by the way, and since it doesn’t exist anymore, I consider them my property. If anyone wants to copy them, please credit Dorseyland. If anyone would like large digital copies of the original black-and-whites, Click “Get in touch” at the top of the menu.

Nighttime, Fairgrounds Park: Michael Murphy, fresh from his success in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”, is playing Burt, a clever ex-con who’s assumed a false identity and managed to land a job as a deputy sheriff in Madison, a small town in upstate New York. Smog machines and spotlights set the mood as Murphy hunts around a Civil War monument for … erm, something.

Two viewings of the movie years ago obviously failed to register this scene in my memory, so I’m really not sure what it was about or where it wanted to go, to paraphrase Bob Dylan.

One bright sunny day, downtown Main Street: The most elaborate scene in the movie involves a 4th of July parade along the main drag. Main Street is decked out in bunting and refurbished as Madison, New York, complete with American flags and US post boxes at the curb.

Clowns, floats and beauty queens – almost all of them locals on the payroll – proceed down the hill from Guelph Street as various angles are gobbled up by the cameras. At the intersection of Main and Mill, usually a-bustle with loitering drunks soaking up solar energy ahead of another night’s imbibing, the legendary Orson Welles makes his thrilling appearance.

Outfitted as the town’s boozy sheriff, he emerges from his patrol car and wades into the crowd watching the parade. Some of the locals can’t help applauding as he strides into the shot, but the director apparently thinks this will help demonstrate that the sheriff is very popular.

Sheriff Citizen Kane takes in the festivities for a moment, then steps forward to halt the parade and usher an elderly citizen through, much to the chagrin of a cub scout intent on doing his traditional duty. It’s pretty cute.

In the “completed” movie, such as it was, this remained a comic moment, during which voiceover furthered the plot. Beyond this episode, Welles was not seen for outdoor shots, and indeed ended up with only a small role in the final product.

Needless to say, he wasn’t taking any callers at his trailer. I managed to get a sit-down with McCowan, but Murphy and Welles weren’t about to be bothered by the local rag. Shame, really, because I could have asked them something profound like, “Whadya think of Canadian girls, eh?”

When shooting was completed Orson answered questions at a Toronto press conference, at which there was scant talk of “Honest Thief”. Evidently expectations were even then already low.

While all eyes are on the parade, Burt is busy stealing a million dollars in cash from the cellar safe of the widow Grayson’s house. This was one of the fine old residences on Queen Street, near the now-closed Station House Hotel, and scenes of the subsequent police investigation involved a great many people tramping up and down the steep front steps. These shots, too, remained intact in the final cut.

This is a Google Earth peek at Georgetown showing all the filming locales.

Another day downtown, not so sunny but who’s going to notice?: There was no way they were going to jettison the car chase. This was the money shot. Or should have been.

It’s all quite befuddling, but someone – you would think it’s Burt – is behind the wheel of Townshend Hardware’s Volkswagen Beetle as it takes off at high speed through Madison, headed for the Canadian border. (Remember, Georgetown is supposed to be Madison in New York.)

The VW rockets up Main Street, colliding with a shopper’s grocery cart. Then, with police cars by now hot on his tail, the thief (if it is the thief) drives past the Memorial Arena to the narrow vehicular underpass beneath a railway trestle.

Here, in an example of the magic of cinema, a pair of the pursuing police cruisers get jammed in side by side. Of course the shot took all day to set up and dismantle, much to the consternation of local motorists unaware there was a movie being made in town. The milkman just had to sit there fuming.

“Replacement” police cars continue the chase, the Volkswagen swerving through the dusty parking lot outside the historic Abitibi paper mill.

The highway above the Barber mill dam, over the Credit River, looked close enough like an international border for the producers. It’s got open hills on either side, ideal for shooting a movie, and no doubt resembles frontier checkpoints in some foreign countries, though it’s unlikely there’s one like this anywhere that bridges the US and Canada.

Unfortunately for the suspect in the VW, the border is a bridge too far. The Beetle takes a nasty tumble down the hill and explodes in a fireball. It’s all over in an instant onscreen, of course, but most people who give themselves time to think about it will realise this involved hours of wiring explosives and refueling the fire, hauling the cameras into different positions and repeating Steps 1 through 5.

While all this was going on I was trying to chat up Michele Finney, an actress most “famous” for hosting the Canadian TV children’s show “Razzle Dazzle”. I thought she was the lead actress in “Honest Thief”, and I suspect she did too at the time. It didn’t turn out that way.

Michelle had nothing to do with the Beetle demolition scenes (I think) — she just wanted to see something blow up too. The local volunteer firefighting squad was never intended to be in the flick, much to their dismay.

Another day, back downtown at the old post office on Mill Street: Word of the big heist has spread like, uh, wildfire,and there’s a media scrum on the front steps of what’s supposed to be the sheriff’s office. Among the reporters demanding to know what the police are doing about it was Jack Carpenter, a sometime actor who’s got one of those “radio voices”, so he was a natural for this part. And, yes, he stayed in the film.

Yet another day, a vacant lot at Market and Mill Streets: One of two locations where cops were filmed searching for the stolen loot, the other one being on Mountainview Road.

Here there was a specially constructed shack being torn apart by deputies. Don’t ask me why. The guy in the short shorts is the assistant director, telling them to make more noise or something.

There was another scene left in the movie that was shot inside Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce on Main Street, and … that was it for Georgetown.

After all that effort, our little burg occupied a chunk of the middle of “Never Trust an Honest Thief”.

In late 1988 I stumbled across the video – now titled “Hot Money” – at a store whose owner had bought it as part of a block purchase of B-movies. Between that single rental and IMDb, here’s a recollection of the rest of the film:

At the beginning of the movie they’d added some footage in a prison cell. I guess that was to explain Burt’s crooked origins.

Burt gets away with the heist and runs off to the Caribbean with his girlfriend, a waitress named Jeanette – played by Ann Lange, not Michelle Finney. Then Burt gets gored by guilt and figures he’d better do the right thing by the old widow he robbed.

Mystifyingly, though, Sheriff Orson ends up in Vegas, and an ex-con sings “Feelings” amid a forest of pina coladas at a beachfront nightclub. That’s how it ends.

An Aussie calling himself Sol has this to say on IMDb: “A film about the psychological impact of a robbery in a small town may sound interesting, but that is what this film is and it is not interesting at all. Terrible music the least of the problems of this film with low production values.

“Being top-quality actors, it is very perplexing to think that this was all that Murphy and Welles managed to eventuate to after such great careers. Needless to say, their talents are not used here, but it is not really a film made by people with talent anyway. Although one can bear the watch, there is nothing rewarding at all along the way, unless male nudity turns you on.”

I have no recollection whatever of any male nudity. That must have been an idea of Michael Murphy, who reportedly took over directing after McCowan reportedly quit – despite having a master like Welles there! At some point a fellow named Selig Usher also shared the directing credit. Perhaps someone’s pseudonym of shame.

After “Thief”, George McCowan didn’t get a lot of work. He directed his final flick in 1990, the Louis LeGrande comedy “Sanity Claus”, and was dead five years later.

When “Honest Thief” came out on video in 1983 (as “Hot Money”) McCowan’s name was expunged from the credits. Ultimately listed as director was Zale Magder, who was in fact also the movie’s producer and the man behind Westfront Productions. He’d worked his way up from cinematographer. Nobody could ease the mortal agony of this picture.

Magder only produced one other film, 1980’s “Phobia”, in which the legendary John Huston directed Paul Michael Glaser (IMDb user comment: “John Huston directed this????”), so clearly Magder didn’t lose his knack for wasting top talent.

Disably assisting Magder were associate producer Sandra Johnson, executive producers Terry Marlow and Michael Nobrega, none of whom had any prior experience or have had any since, and a third executive producer, Douglas Macdonald, who has a long list of Canadian movies to his credit with titles I’ve never heard before.

The music in “Honest Thief” referred to by Sol came from John Jones, whose previous screen-composing credits are consistently forgettable, and Rob McConnell, quasi-famous in Canada as the leader of the Boss Brass. This was his only movie score. I don’t remember the music specifics, although I recall thinking it was, um, odd.

The IMDb entry has Phyllis Camesano, Joel Cohen and Carl DeSantis condemned as “writers”. God only knows (a) how many species of hell they experienced and/or (b) what kind of drugs they were on.

Cinematographer Stan Mestel’s only other credits are as a camera operator. The film editing was handled by a sound man, which might explain a few things right away.

Michael Murphy continues to churn out movies, mostly for TV, but he was in the Alzheimer’s weeper “Away From Her” this year and had a minor role in “X-Men: The Last Stand”. Oh, and he was the mayor of Gotham City in “Batman Returns”.

Fortunately for Orson Welles, who died in 1985 (enigmatically whispering the word “rosebud”), “Honest Thief” didn’t even register among his voluminous list of cinematic and theatrical accomplishments. After this one, he only had five more movies left in him, and three of those were mere voice roles.

@ @ @

There’s a great sidebar to the filming of “Honest Thief”, shared with me in mid-2008 by Rebecca Rathbun, who, as four-year-old Rebecca Carney, was living in the house adjacent to one of the properties leased to the crew. The car chase with the VW Beetle actually shot past their place, and Rebecca remembers watching it from her tree fort, with members of the cast “lined up against our fence in the yard”.

“As I was such a chatterbox, I talked incessantly to the people lined up there and Orson Welles was one of them. Seeing as no one could go anywhere, they were forced to listen to me.”

Welles didn’t mind at all, evidently. He took a shine to Rebecca and came to visit between takes.

“He would even come into our yard. I was apparently the only one he talked to nicely, and she recalls that he spoke to me as an adult, not as a child. He even gave me money to buy a popsicle one day. No one understood why he was so sweet to me.”

Alas, these historic moments in cinema history were never captured on film, no doubt to the dismay of Welles biographers, who would love to have more evidence of his rarely seen soft side.