The Olsen Gang's Last Trick

Plot

The gang is in crisis when the film opens: Yvonne, Kjeld's wife, botches a heist at a pig-festival organizer's premises, and Egon returns to Vridsløse prison.¹² On release, Egon skips the usual welcoming committee and drives off instead with the financier Holm-Hansen (Bjørn Watt-Boolsen), who has hired him to open a Franz Jäger safe in Switzerland containing the famous Bedford diamonds, promising him a 25 percent share.² Egon discovers too late that he has walked into a trap, and Holm-Hansen cheats him of his fee.¹¹

Revenge and misfortune. With Benny and Kjeld's careers as independent thieves going nowhere, the gang reunites to interfere with Holm-Hansen's dealings in the Bedford diamonds and take the money.¹¹ They succeed in stealing the diamonds, but Yvonne stores the bag "somewhere safe", and the diamonds end up swapped for paper knives, Little Mermaid figurines, a Tivoli guard figure, and an ashtray from Dybbøl, souvenirs she had been told to throw out before the move to Spain.^{4 • 10} Hearing this, Egon suffers a complete childish breakdown, a famous sequence in which he paddles barefoot in a puddle with his shoes off until Bøffen collides with him over an ice cream.¹⁰ Bøffen, Holm-Hansen's enforcer, also fails in his assigned task of making Egon "disappear completely", which this time means casting him in cement and lowering him into the harbor.¹⁰

The ending. After Kjeld and Benny restore him, the gang cheats Holm-Hansen out of $15 million, and Holm-Hansen is arrested for possession of the Bedford diamonds.⁴ The film closes with the gang boarding the plane to Mallorca; as the aircraft disappears into the sun, the on-screen text reads "Og de levede til deres dages ende" ("And they lived to the end of their days").⁴ A running gag has Yvonne ordering "Los fiskos, los salatos, los kotelettos, los vinos blancos og los coca colos" at the Spanish holiday resort.⁵

A planned finale that was not

The film was written as the last in the series, which is why the heist succeeds for once, but audiences wanted more, and Balling had to invent a new story for the following year.^{4 • 8} The series continued with Olsen-banden på sporet (1975) and ran to thirteen films by 1981, plus a sequel in 1998, so the title's promise of "last exploits" was overtaken by the series' box-office success.^{1 • 14}

New recurring characters. Several elements that became series signatures appear here for the first time: Ove Verner Hansen as Bøffen, the hatchet man who always knows exactly how to make Egon disappear and never succeeds because Benny and Kjeld rescue him at the last moment; Bjørn Watt-Boolsen as the series' first big-boss villain, a role his name and profession would change each film while the character type stayed the same; and Ole Ernst as Detective Holm, joining Axel Strøbye's returning Detective Jensen as the series' fixed representatives of the police.⁶ From this film onward, Watt-Boolsen appears through most of the series as the backer of schemes involving politics, high finance, and EEC bureaucracy.⁵

Ove Sprogøe won a Bodil Award for Best Male Leading Role for the film.⁶ Contemporary Danish critics reviewed it on its premiere dates in October 1974, including reviews in Politiken, Berlingske Tidende, and Jyllands-Posten; the critic Ib Monty of Jyllands-Posten found it brilliant and praised its wealth of ideas, witty dialogue, and comic supporting performances.^{4 • 10}