Robbery

Best known as the little obscure crime film that gave English director Peter Yates his big game-changing opportunity to make BULLITT stateside, after Steve McQueen had witnessed the rudimentary car chase sequence from ROBBERY, an extremely sparse, deliberately uncaring British Neo Noir Heist-Thriller...

And it's not just the chase that Yates carried over to the McQueen classic but the meticulous and metronomic moments leading up to it...

Starring the always tough/ultra square-jawed Stanley Baker but only because he's in charge, ROBBERY makes pretty much equal use of the male leads...

Including James Booth as the trailing cop, William Marlowe as Baker's strong-silent second, Barry Forster as his strong-silent third while Frank Finlay, as a meek/geek though crooked banker too-easily broken out of prison, is the most vulnerable and sympathetic...

Yet there's very little sympathy for these particular devils, whose only flaw is how long and tediously methodical it takes for the actual train heist (inspired by The Great Train Robbery) to go down... the director not always considering an audience but, like real life crimes - and even the McQueen ultra-realistic police-procedure about the other side of the law - Yates showcases the slowburn reality like being right there, for better or worse since it's not always extremely exciting, and that's the point...

Just don't let the casting of beautiful poster-perfect Joanne Pettit fool you. ROBBERY cares neither about romance or the human condition.

The terseness of the one-word title perfectly fits the low-keyed demeanour of this laconic heist movie that just a couple of years earlier would have been shot in black & white but now had to be in colour (but with results so pleasing to the eye I'm not complaining).

The initial car chase promptly brought Peter Yates to America to repeat the trick but seeing it staged in the narrow streets of London rather than in San Francisco in 'Bullitt' (which could have been built for the job) the results were thus ten times more harrowing; and the film that follows is far more coherent.

A gang of crooks plan a big score and use other smaller robberies as a means of financing it. Clearly inspired by the Great Train Robbery of the 1960's, although the facts are shifted - maybe made for legal reasons?

This is the kind of film that I loved as child. And still do. Live-for-today criminals that stop at nothing to get their hands on the loot and heaven help anybody that gets in the way. While having the plus of the robbery and the usual gang of rent a villains it does minor variations on the expected while not leaving the well trodden track.

The car chase through central London is one of the best things here and inspired many impersonations. Indeed it is probably the first homicidal chase through a big city seen on screen.

(The chase in Bullet is a complete rip-off - although Peter Yates directed this as well!)

As another viewer noticed the dialogue is dated (no swearing!) and the thing lacks a clear hero and villain. All-in-all like watching one of the better episodes of The Sweeney (a UK TV series) and a good guide to London -- as it was back in the Swinging Sixties.

This is true British gangster filming at its best.

The opening robbery and car chase, from Hatton Garden around central London and out to Maida Vale, is utterly brilliant and that's years before the French Connection or anything like that. Peter Yates was brilliant. In fact, if they re-make any British gangster film these days it should be Robbery, not Get Carter or anything like that.

The music is utterly brilliant, too. Johny Keating should be up there with the likes of John Barry, John Williams, etc. He seems to have done virtually nothing after this film.

Even the faked scenes of the train robbery itself are great despite the London-Glasgow express train really being another train on a branch line travelling at about 30 mph.

They could've made a sequeal to this, too, with the legendary and fantastic Stanley Baker shown in the New World. Same goes for the late Barry Foster.

This movie is well made, with a typical trade mark approach by the crime picture craftsman Peter Yates was. There's no big bang, no unnecessary violence, just the pace that tells the story. This method Yates used successfully in his Hollywood years building up a plot without too much distraction from standard story fillers, which produced great films such as "Bullitt" and "The Friends of Eddie Coyle". In this one Yates gives the audience just enough to paint a picture of a big time robbery, with minimal character development but enough to serve the purpose.

A must see for the fans of this classic director, not great but rather good crime movie that they don't make any more.