Heist Movies: Masterminds and Mavericks

Having already alerted film lovers to a rogues' gallery of wrong 'uns in Heist Movies - A 20-Year Stretch, Cinema Paradiso lines up the usual suspects behind the biggest blags of the 1970s and 80s.

Every self-respecting film schedule contains a heist movie or two. Slickly plotted to guarantee tense action, edgy wit, character clashes, treachery, and last-minute hitches, they have a cool cachet that attracts big name actors and directors. Moreover, they provide irresistible escapist entertainment that allows audiences to live dangerously by rooting for the bad guys.

It all starts with a plan. Usually a man with a plan. A crook. Not just any old villain, though. A criminal mastermind who thinks big. Gold bullion. Uncut diamonds. Payrolls. Bearer bonds. Casino safes. Deposit boxes. The stakes are high. He'd do it alone if he could. But he needs a crew. Hand-picked. The best in the business. And that's where the problems begin...

A Swift Continental Shufti

One of the golden rules of the Hollywood heist movie was that crime could never pay. The Production Code saw to it that there was no honour among thieves and that every gang from John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) onwards implodes and lands in the arms of the law. With the ditching of the Code in 1968, however, film-makers suddenly had the option of making heroes of their villains. Instead of being shifty schemers in fedoras and trenchcoats, criminal masterminds became roguish charmers in sharp suits, who had the wisecracking nous to stick it to the Man and get away with it. Admittedly, Charlie Croker and his crew were left with some thinking to do at the cliffhanging denouement of Peter Collinson's The Italian Job (1969), but they set the trend for a new breed of robber.

The continental effect was further reinforced by the French connection. Crime films had been given a new sense of chic during the nouvelle vague with the likes of François Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist (1960), which was adapted from David Goodis's pulp novel, Down There. But the same year saw the release of an even more influential thriller, Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques, which follows the efforts of fugitive gangster Lino Ventura to coax his former confederates into giving him some money.

Among those to pay homage to Sautet's downbeat style was Jean-Pierre Melville, who had already mastered the heist format with Bob le Flambeur (1956) and Le Doulos (1962). He reached new heights, however, with Le Cercle Rouge (1970), which culminates in a 30-minute jewel robbery involving newly released jailbird Alain Delon, escaped prisoner Gian Maria Volonté, and drunken ex-cop, Yves Montand. Only Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) and Topkapi (1964) can match this heist sequence for intricacy and tension.

Melville and Delon would reunite for what would prove to be the director's final feature, Un Flic (1972). This time, however, Delon is on the right side of the law, as he pursues Richard Crenna (with half an eye on his mistress, Catherine Deneuve) between a bungled bank raid and an audacious bid to use a helicopter to steal a consignment of heroin from the Lisbon express.

Others would follow in Melville's footsteps over the course of the decade, including Claude Lelouch, whose Le Voyou (1971) and Le Bonne Année (1973) respectively starred Jean-Louis Trintignant and Lino Ventura. Jean-Paul Belmondo played similarly no-nonsense crooks in Henri Verneuil's Le Casse (1971) and Philippe De Broca's Incorrigible (1975). These would quickly become cult items on this side of the Channel if someone had the sense to release them. But Cinema Paradiso does have a couple of 70s French gems on offer.

René Clément's And Hope to Die (1972) was adapted from another David Goodis novel by Sébastian Japrisot, who was also responsible for such Charles Bronson classics as Jean Herman's Farewell, Friend (aka Honour Among Thieves, 1968) and Clément's own, Rider on the Rain (1969). Jean-Louis Trintignant and Robert Ryan lock horns in the reworking of Goodis's Black Friday, as a fleeing Frenchman is held hostage until he reveals the whereabouts of some loot. Hard-boiled novelist José Giovanni (who had written Classe Tous Risques) was also a capable director, as he demonstrated with The Sewers of Paradise (1979), which stars

Francis Huster as Albert Spaggiani, who had famously attempted to break into the Société Générale bank in Nice through the city's drainage system.

Elsewhere in Europe during the 1970s, Danish director Erik Balling enjoyed such success with the Olsen Gang that they robbed their way through 14 features between 1968-93, while their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts went on equally popular sprees of their own. Yet, the series remains largely unknown outside Scandinavia. Much better known is the Poliziotteschi genre that was spun off from heist movies like Carlo Lizzani's Bandits in Milan (1968) and joined giallo in taking over Italian cinema in the 1970s from the Spaghetti Westerns and Sword and Sandal epics that had dominated in the previous decade. The doyen of the form was Fernando Di Leo and Cinema Paradiso users can admire his genius for suspenseful, but violent storytelling in Caliber 9 (1972), Mr Scarface (1976), and Blood and Diamonds (1977). He specialised as much in exposing the methodology of the Mob and the failings of the legal system than in staging heists. But his work reflects the criminality and corruption of the 'anni dil piombo' or 'Years of Lead', when organised gangs and terrorists held the country hostage.

As prolific as Di Leo was Umberto Lenzi, who was also renowned for his horror outings. Cinema Paradiso is the place to come to discover Syndicate Sadists (1975), Free Hand For a Tough Cop, The Tough Ones (both 1976), The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist, and Brothers Till We Die (both 1978). Hollywood stars like Richard Conte, Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, and Mel Ferrer took guest slots, although none were of the same calibre as Kirk Douglas, who plays a safecracker tempted into one last blag in Michele Lupo's The Master Touch (1972).

With their unflinching attitude to crime and punishment, Poliziotteschi had a considerable impact on such Hollywood crime pictures as Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, William Friedkin's The French Connection (both 1971), and Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974). So, why not check out such gritty examples as Sergio Sollima's Violent City (1970) and Revolver (1973); Enzo G. Castellari's High Crime (1973), The Big Racket (1976), and The Heroin Busters (1977); Sergio Martino's The Violent Professionals (1973) and Silent Action (1975); Bruno Corbucci's Cop in Blue Jeans (1975); and Massimo Dellamano's Colt 38 Special Squad (1976) ? And to learn more about this key Italian genre, click to order Mike Malloy's comprehensive documentary, Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Movies That Ruled the 70s (2012).

Stealing 70s Style

The Hollywood heist movie got off to an unconventional start in the 1970s, with Clint Eastwood and his cohorts being in Second World War uniform in Brian G. Hutton's Kelly's Heroes (1970) when they hit upon a scheme to empty a French bank behind enemy lines of its cache of 14,000 gold bars. Written by Z-Cars - Z Cars: Collection 1 and Z Cars: Collection 2 (1968-72) scribe, Troy Kennedy Martin, this was very much in the caper bracket, with comedians Don Rickles and Carroll O'Connor joining Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland in Eastwood's cockeyed crew.

George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) had similarly reworked the formula in a Western setting and Paul Newman and Robert Redford reunited with Hill to fleece 1930s Chicago mobster Robert Shaw in The Sting (1973). This Best Picture winner is often mislabelled a heist film, but it's actually a con caper. The term is more accurately applied to another Redford vehicle, Peter Yates's The Hot Rock (1972), a William Goldman adaptation of one of Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder novels that was originally released in the UK under the catchy title, How to Steal a Diamond in Four Uneasy Lessons.

Full of twists that make the theft of a stone from the Brooklyn Museum increasingly complicated, this rattling yarn splendidly lampoons the conventions of the genre and is cannily played by Redford and a supporting cast that includes George Segal and Zero Mostel. It would make for a splendid double bill with Richard Brooks's $ (aka Dollars, 1971), but no one has thought to release this droll story about Warren Beatty's security analyst stealing the cash stashed by various crooks in a Hamburg bank. Equally ingenious, however, is Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes (1971), which was also scored by Quincy Jones and riffs on the notion of security and surveillance, as Sean Connery attempts an audacious raid on a Manhattan apartment block that is riddled with covert cameras and bugging devices.

If this tense thriller benefited from its enclosed setting, the open road proves crucial to Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), which was scripted by Walter Hill from a Jim Thompson novel to follow Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, as they head for the Mexican border following a double cross after a Texas bank raid. Hill wrote and directed another getaway classic, The Driver (1978), which charts the alliance between Ryan O'Neal's wheel man and the enigmatic Isabelle Adjani to outwit devious detective, Bruce Dern. Despite being a critical and commercial misfire, this undervalued actioner influenced the likes of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (2011), and Edgar Wright's Baby Driver (2017).

Among the other heist pictures to head out on the highway are John Hough's Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (both 1974). The former opens with a supermarket heist before aspiring NASCAR drivers Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke burn rubber to escape cop Vic Morrow, while the proceeds of a bank robbery keep Clint Eastwood's eyes on the tarmac, as he evades angry sidekick George Kennedy in the company of car thief Jeff Bridges.

Adopting a jokey attitude towards violence, these chase capers are joined in the left-field by Byron Chudnow's The Doberman Gang (1972), which sees thief Hal Reed team up with Byron Mabe to rob a bank with six canine accomplices: Bonnie, Clyde, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Ma Barker. Another atypical tale is told by Aram Avakian in Cops and Robbers (1973), a Donald E. Westlake scenario that has NYPD officers Joseph Bologna and Cliff Gorman lift $10 million in bearer bonds so they can retire.

John H. Reese's novel, The Looters, provided the inspiration for Don Siegel's Charley Varrick (1973), which stars Walter Matthau as the New Mexico crop-duster who accidentally nabs Mob cash when he robs a small bank run by the crooked John Vernon, who dispatches sadistic hitman Joe Don Baker to retrieve the loot. The ever-watchable Matthau also excels on the right side of the law in Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), a breakneck thriller set on the New York subway system that tasks Matthau's Transit Police lieutenant with negotiating the release of the hostages taken for a $1 million ransom by Robert Shaw and his gang. This neat variation on the heist format was adapted from a novel by John Godey that would be revisited by Tony Scott, with Denzel Washington and John Travolta, in The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009).

Back in 2008, there were rumours that Jean-Claude Van Damme was going to headline a film entitled JCVD. Critics were appalled that the Muscles From Brussels was going to remake Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which had already inspired Luigi Petrini's Day of Violence (1977) and Yee Tung-Shing's People's Hero (1987). In fact, Mabrouk El Mechri's slyly self-reflexive film only borrows elements from Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning adaptation of P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore's Life magazine article, 'The Boys in the Bank', as Van Damme wins over a crowd of onlookers. Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) would do the same after being trapped inside the First Brooklyn Savings Bank with accomplice Salvatore Naturile (John Cazale), while trying to steal the money to pay for gender reassignment surgery for his partner, Leon Shermer (Chris Sarandon).

Two robberies and a kidnapping keep Massachusetts gunrunner Robert Mitchum busy in Peter Yates's The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), as he tries to cut a deal about an imminent sentence for truck hijacking with ATF agent, Richard Jordan. This brooding neo-noir has a companion piece in Michael Tuchner's Villain (1971), as London loner Richard Burton has to forge an alliance of convenience with gangster T.P. McKenna in order to rob a plastic factory wages van. Burton's bisexuality also makes this adaptation of James Barlow's The Burden of Proof a fine companion piece to Silvio Narizzano's Loot (1970), a take on the Joe Orton play that follows Inspector Richard Attenborough's attempts to pin a bank robbery on lovers Roy Holder and Hywel Bennett, who have hidden the loot in the coffin of the former's recently deceased mother.

Staying on the comical side, Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers) heads to Lugash to investigate the theft of a fabulous diamond from a high-security museum in Blake Edwards's The Return of the Pink Panther (1975). Concerted murder attempts dominate The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), as Clouseau is respectively targeted by ex-boss Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) and drug baron Philippe Douvier (Robert Webber).

There's also a playful tone to Ted Kotcheff's Fun With Dick and Jane (1977), which really should be on disc, as it teams George Segal and Jane Fonda as the suburban robbers who were played by Jim Carrey and Téa Leone in the 2005 Dean Parisot remake that was co-scripted by Judd Apatow. The caperish mood continues in Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery (1978), which the director adapted from his own novel about a raid by Sean Connery's respected member of 1850s London society (who is really a master cracksman) on a train carrying the monthly gold shipment destined for the British troops fighting the Crimean War.

A clutch of 70s heist flicks are currently unavailable on disc in the UK, even though Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time, Daryl Duke's The Silent Partner, William Friedkin's The Brink's Job (al 1978), and Noel Black's A Man, a Woman, and a Bank (1979) all have plenty to commend them. The same goes for Martin Brest's Going in Style (1979), although Cinema Paradiso users can see Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin in Zach Braff's 2017 remake in the roles originally taken by George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg.

Another trio is driven into a life of crime in Paul Schrader's directorial debut, Blue Collar (1978), as Michigan auto workers Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto, and Harvey Keitel decide to crack the union safe to pay off their debts. However, their heist turns into a political crusade after they find documents linking the company to organised crime. There was nothing so high minded about the blag planned by David Niven in Ralph Thomas's A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (1979), a Guy Elmes-scripted caper that sees a London gangster lure bank janitor Richard Jordan off the straight and narrow.

Our last 70s heist offering takes us off the beaten track, as Hayao Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) centres on Arsène Lupin III, the gentleman thief created by manga artist, Monkey Punch, in homage to Maurice Leblanc's cracksman and master of disguise, who had first appeared in 1905. This was the second Monkey Punch feature after Soji Yoshikawa's The Secret of Mamo (1978) and follows Lupin III to the realm that had produced the counterfeit bills he had stolen from a casino. Cinema Paradiso members can also catch up with Gisaburo Sugii's The Secret of Twilight Gemini (1996), as well as more recent capers like Sayo Yamamoto's The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012), Yuichiro Yano's Lupin III (2015), and Takashi Yamazaki's Lupin III: The First (2019).

Loadsa Money 80s

The prevailing mantra of the 1980s was 'greed is good' and such was cinema's preoccupation with people like Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) making money in a legal (if morally dubious) manner that going to the trouble of breaking into a bank and stealing it came to seem passé. Consequently, the 1980s produced relatively few classic heist movies, although Cinema Paradiso has picked out one or two to keep you amused.

The list doesn't include Don Siegel's penultimate outing, Rough Cut (1980), or Robert Scheer's How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980), which sounds like something we should all be watching at the moment. Not that we are advocating large scale theft from a shopping mall in imitation of Oregon housewives Susan Saint James, Jane Curtin, and Jessica Lange, you understand.

Let us direct you instead to Jim Henson's feature debut, The Great Muppet Caper, which follows identical twin journalists, Kermit the Frog and Fozzy Bear, to London and culminates in a bid to steal the Baseball Diamond belonging to fashionista Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg) from the Mallory Gallery. A cache of emeralds kept in a room at the top of a skyscraper belonging to the scheming Omar Sharif is the quarry pursued by electronics engineer Ryan O'Neal and sidekick John Larroquette in Ernest Day's Green Ice (both 1981).

Heist aficionados will want to catch Michael Mann's feature debut, Thief (1981). Adapted from Frank Hohimer's 1975 tome, The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar, the story of a safecracker (James Caan) stealing jewellery for a welching mob boss (Robert Prosky) typifies Mann's attention to detail and meticulous approach to set-pieces. He would return to the heist scenario with L.A. Takedown (1989), which was originally a pilot for a TV series that was reworked as a stand-alone teleplay. Scott Frank stars as Vincent Hanna, the cop obsessively pursuing crook Patrick McLaren (Alex McArthur). And if you think you recognise the name of the LAPD lieutenant, it's because Mann recycled it for Al Pacino's character in Heat (1995), which marked the first time in which he appeared on screen with Robert De Niro (as Neil McAuley, a variation on McLaren).

Despite the teaming of Albert Finney and Martin Sheen, nobody has seen fit to release John Quested's Loophole (1981) on disc and the same, more bafflingly, goes for Crackers (1984), Louis Malle's remake of Mario Monicelli's masterly caper, Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958). So, we move on to Stuart Rosenberg's The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), which had been lined up for De Niro and Pacino by Michael Cimino. Instead, Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts play the cousins who inadvertently steal from a gangster when they blow a safe to get the seed money for their dream restaurant. As a stickler for detail, Colin Friels ensures there are no such snafus in Nadia Tass's first feature, Malcolm (1986), as a gizmo wizard plots a Melbourne payroll haul with lodger John Hargreaves. Full of wonderful gadgets, this is a film well worth (re) discovering via Cinema Paradiso.

Someone should also give audiences the chance to see Peter Falk on fine form in Happy New Year, John G. Avildsen's English remake of Claude Lelouch's aforementioned La Bonne Année. However, 1987 also yielded four other crime films that are well worth a watch. Former Beatle George Harrison was among the producers of Richard Loncraine's Bellman and True, which sees London crook Richard Hope abduct computer expert Bernard Hill in order to disable the security system of a bank near Heathrow Airport that is bulging with pre-Christmas cash. Chow Yun-fat plays another reluctant accomplice in Ringo Lam's City on Fire, as rival Hong Kong inspectors, Sun Yeuh and Roy Cheung, order him to infiltrate Danny Lee Sau-yin's jewel heist crew. Of course, this is the film that proved influential on Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), but why not try the Bollywood thriller that riffs on both films, Sanjay Gupta's Kaante (2002), which stars Sunil Dutt, Sunil Shetty, and the great Amitabh Bachchan?

Although neither Peter Werner's No Man's Land nor David Mamet's House of Games (both 1987) is strictly a heist movie, we shall include them anyway - well, because we can and you'll be glad we did. Deputy Sheriff D.B. Sweeney goes undercover to bust Charlie Sheen's grand theft auto racket in the former, while the latter sees psychiatrist Lindsay Crouse become so obsessed with con man Joe Mantegna and the scams he devises that she asks to become his accomplice.

Mordant wit marbles this teasing classic, but the humour is on the broader side in Kenneth Johnson's Short Circuit 2. This follow-up to John Badham's Short Circuit (1986) sees Fisher Stevens and robot Johnny 5 being lured by banker Jack Weston into completing a tunnel in order to steal the Vanderveer jewellery collection. Barrister John Cleese also finds himself embroiled in another jewel heist in Charles Crichton's A Fish Called Wanda (both 1988), after he becomes involved with Jamie Lee Curtis and her confederates, Tom Georgeson, Michael Palin, and Kevin Kline.

Kline won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his ferociously funny turn, but Alan Rickman should surely have been nominated for his acerbic display as Hans Gruber in John McTiernan's Die Hard (1988), as he poses as a terrorist in other to steal $640 million in untraceable bearer bonds during the Nakatomi Corporation's Christmas party. Unluckily for him, one of the guests is the estranged wife of vest-wearing NYPD detective, John McClane (Bruce Willis). Amusingly, as Roderick Thorp's source novel, Nothing Lasts Forever, was a sequel to The Detective, the studio was contractually obliged to offer the role of McClane to the star of Gordon Douglas's 1968 film, the 70 year-old Frank Sinatra!

Age clearly meant nothing to the casting director of Sidney Lumet's Family Business, as Sean Connery was only seven years older than Dustin Hoffman when they were cast as a father and son arguing over the merits of a laboratory break-in suggested by Hoffman's son, Matthew Broderick. Has any other heist in Hollywood history turned on a scientific logbook? We think not, but the robbery is no more expertly executed in Jim Kouf's Disorganised Crime (both 1989), as mastermind Corbin Bernsen gets arrested before the job and the motley crew of Fred Gwynne, Rubén Blades, William Russ, and Lou Diamond Phillips are left to bungle through alone.

Getaway driver Blades pays as much attention to his appearance as to the job in hand and Mickey Rourke is similarly taken by his new look in Walter Hill's Johnny Handsome, as the plastic surgery he had received in prison gives him the perfect disguise for wreaking revenge on treacherous former cohorts Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen when they recruit him for a robbery. There are more crimes than you can shake a truncheon at in Eddie Murphy's sole directorial outing, Harlem Nights (both 1989), which harks back to the 1930s to show how club owner Richard Pryor and his prodigy (Murphy) switch the bag containing the bets placed on a boxing bout to pull a fast one over nasty rival Michael Lerner.