The Heist Film: Stealing with Style [Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only] 9780231850582

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SHORT CUTS INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES

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OTHER TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street MISE-EN-SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer ITALIAN NEO-REALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES Mike Chopra-Gant GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW Ian Roberts FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY Daniel Shaw CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR James Leggott RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE WORLD S. Brent Plate FANTASY CINEMA: IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS ON SCREEN David Butler FILM VIOLENCE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, GENRE James Kendrick NEW KOREAN CINEMA: BREAKING THE WAVES Darcy Paquet FILM AUTHORSHIP: AUTEURS AND OTHER MYTHS C. Paul Sellors THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA Jeffrey Weinstock HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE AND REPRESENTATION Belén Vidal QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COWBOYS Barbara Mennel ACTION MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF STRIKING BACK Harvey O’Brien BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR, AND GOSSIP Kush Varia THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Bruce Babington

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THE HEIST FILM STEALING WITH STYLE

DARYL LEE

WA L L F L OWE R L O N D O N a n d N E W YO R K

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A Wallflower Press Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York • Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Daryl Lee 2014 All rights reserved. Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press. A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-16969-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85058-2 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements

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Introduction: The Heist as Genre

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Origins: The Noir Heist

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Foundations: The Noir Heist and its Satire as Aesthetic Parables 38

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Conventions: The Heist Adapts its Message

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Returns: Perpetuating the Myth of Originality in the Remake 92 Select Filmography

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Let me firstly thank Yoram Allon, Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press, and his devoted team for undertaking the publication of this book. Research travel for the book was made possible by generous funding from the College of Humanities and Center for the Study of Europe at Brigham Young University. Thanks to experts and institutions: Mark Quigley of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Elena Cazzaro of the Archivo Storico delle at the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, the Inathèque of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and Kathleen Dickson of the British Film Institute. I add my gratitude to the family of Sir Michael Balcon for granting me access to the Balcon Collection at the British Film Institute. I am grateful to my students Allison McCall and especially Jonathan Smith for their thoughtful assistance in research, and to my students in my crime film courses. I received constructive feedback on parts of my manuscript from the Brigham Young University Film Studies Group, and from colleagues and friends: Travis Anderson, Brent Bingham, Bruce Burningham, Corry Cropper, Bob Hudson, Chip Oscarson, Laura Rawlins and Steve Riep. I reserve my warmest gratitude for my wife, Mary, and our children, Sophie, Maude, Henry, Theo and Cy, who sacrificed much for this book to be completed. Lastly, I dedicate it to my parents, the origin of my interest in movies: Pat Lee, a movie buff and projectionist during a lonely year in Thule, Greenland, and Carla, who had a hand in getting movies to US military personnel abroad in the 1960s.

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INTRODUCTION : THE HEIST AS GENRE

The hold-up film deserves credit for having revealed, as Thomas de Quincey so tastefully did long ago, the aura of art and beauty that any human activity may assume, no matter its morality. (Lacourbe 1969: 71)

The heist film, or ‘big caper’ as it is sometimes called, is back on the marquee. The year 2001, annus mirabilis, saw the production of four major heists. Original titles from seasoned directors – Frank Oz’s The Score, Barry Levinson’s Bandits and David Mamet’s Heist – were all successful, but the smash hit of the year was Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded reprise of the 1960 Rat Pack showcase Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone). The draw of Soderbergh’s remake came in part from its ensemble cast – George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Elliot Gould, Andy Garcia and Matt Damon among others – and the mere hint of a revived 1960s title seemed promising to audiences. Witness John McTiernan’s 1999 remake of Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), replacing Faye Dunaway with Rene Russo and Steve McQueen with Pierce Brosnan in the title role. Other remakes followed: the high-profile F. Gary Gray picture The Italian Job (2003) reclaimed Peter Collinson’s original 1969 feature starring Michael Caine, Neil Jordan’s low-profile The Good Thief (2003) took a gamble in redoing Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1956), and in 2004, Joel and Ethan Coen put their signature on a remake of the darkly comic caper The Ladykillers (1955, Alexander Mackendrick) with Tom Hanks in the lead role. More significantly, 2004 marked a new, serialised step in remakes, giving us Ocean’s Twelve. Soderbergh’s sequel dropped

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in critical appreciation, but not significantly in financial gain. Worldwide in theatres, Ocean’s Eleven grossed over $450 million, Ocean’s Twelve took in $232 million, and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) earned $310 million; The Score brought in almost $110 million; The Italian Job saw receipts of $160 million; and The Thomas Crown Affair topped $125 million. Add to these original titles such as Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006: $110 million), Ben Affleck’s The Town (2010: $92 million), and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010: $820 million), and the major heists alone have made off with over $2 billion in box office sales alone in the last decade. Crime pays very well these days; recidivism even better. It is not a bad time to be thinking about the heist as a genre. The heist film is clearly a type of crime film. But does the heist constitute a stable or unique genre? What does it mean, for example, when what one critic calls a caper film, emphasising the crime at its narrative core, another calls a ‘thriller’, a term that characterises the movie’s reception, its affective impact on the audience, making it akin to many other genres? And if the heist or big caper does in fact constitute its own genre, is it solely a crime genre? After all, does the synonym ‘caper’ not also suggest an adventure? For that matter, does the heist have to be any one thing at all? There are several ways to approach a history of the heist film, each with its limitations. One way of answering the question is to trace the ‘parentage’ and ‘evolution’ of heist movies over time. But we can only do this as long as we do not get trapped working through the entire corpus of films with theft as a central plot element. This would fall short of providing a precise conceptual account since plenty of films with petty thieves, or genre films with exciting robberies, let alone idiosyncratic films like the documentary Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008), are partially identifiable as a caper. There is a reason critics refer to the ‘big caper’ film. They emphasise the centrality and grandeur of the crime in the narrative. Tracing the heist’s filiation would helpfully tease out features shared with well-defined genres, criminal or otherwise, such as 1930s gangster films. Yet, where the gangster film has remained relatively stable over time, a sign of its enduring form, the heist film has been taken as a weak or unstable genre by critics who nevertheless know one when they see it. From another point of view, early heists find themselves just as often in a historical lineup with film noir, which has been variously understood as a cycle, a visual style, or a discourse of crime film, but in any case is

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lacking generic moorings. A heist can be both a type of gangster film and a narrative variant of film noir. Or more problematically for the parentage approach, neither of them – many heists are purely comical, have bumbling thieves as opposed to gritty tough guys, or are devoid the visual qualities of noir. The big caper’s ‘inter-link of generic strains’ (Newman 1997: 70) also reveals something of the heist film’s utility and pleasure. It shares ties with war movies of all sorts (The Dirty Dozen, Robert Aldrich, 1967; Kelly’s Heroes, Brian G. Hutton, 1970; Les Morfalous, Henri Verneuil, 1984; Three Kings, David O. Russell, 1999) or draws on the post-war problems of veterans looking to practice their skills (The League of Gentlemen, Basil Dearden, 1960; Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Michael Cimino, 1974; Dead Presidents, Albert & Allen Hughes, 1995). The western (The War Wagon, Burt Kennedy, 1967; The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah, 1969), the spy movie (Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton, 1964), con artist films (The Sting, George Roy Hill, 1973), and lone wolf thief movies (To Catch a Thief, Alfred Hitchcock, 1955; Thief, Michael Mann, 1981), all have connections to big capers. Other films borrow from the heist, such as the ‘Noc-list’ sequence with Tom Cruise in Brian De Palma’s espionage thriller Mission: Impossible (1996), the robbery montage in the family melodrama Millions (Danny Boyle, 2004) or the Joker’s (Heath Ledger) double-cross heist in Batman: The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008). But these films tell us more about how valuable the heist is to their generic projects than they do about the heist film itself. While important, the generic lineage and ‘inter-links’ of the heist will not fully account for the specificity of its cinematic form, let alone its social function as a mass genre. The genre must be linked to a flexible conceptual definition that takes into account the specific and most enduring motifs or conventions of the formula and the use to which the genre is put, all the while assuming that genre films transform over time as their specific cultural and production contexts pressure or remodel its conventions. In addition, any account of the heist film must take into account its evolving critical conceptualisation, paying close attention to a fluctuating taxonomy and terminological differences proposed by film theorists, historians and industry players. When Stuart M. Kaminsky revised the second edition of his influential study American Film Genre a decade after the first edition (1974, 1985), he expanded it but also dropped the chapter

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‘Variations on a Major Genre: The Big Caper Film’. Kaminsky’s analysis stands as the most important of the genre’s formula and is a crucial reference for this study. But its purview ends in the mid-1970s. For Kaminsky, the big caper had already enjoyed a ‘limited but distinct history’ (1974: 74) to this point, but had ‘not continued as a significant generic form’ (1974: vii) from the 1970s through the mid-1980s. That claim resonates with another made in a much-read 1984 essay by the genre theorist Rick Altman in which he argued that the big caper was among a set of genres that had failed to develop a ‘coherent’ or ‘stable syntax’ (1984: 16). This view persisted tacitly when Altman included the same essay in his study Film/Genre (1999: 225) that appeared just as the heist began a resurgence around 2000. With few notable exceptions, heist films continued to appear sporadically between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, such that Kaminksy and Altman’s claims have merit. But I wonder to what extent those claims may be viewed as historically contingent, since starting around the mid-1990s, and particularly since 1999, a proliferation of heists have solidified the heist genre’s syntactic patterns while modifying its social function or message by emphasising certain virtualities of the genre that have existed since its inception around 1950. * * * This study attends to the formal conventions or textual structure of the heist film, but its principal target is the genre’s historical trajectory and concomitant notional thrust – its social message and function. In the introduction I will restrict my comments to establishing a few methodological views and to what I perceive to be the heist film’s function as a genre. By ‘textual structure’, to begin with, I have in mind the ‘semantic/syntactic approach’ of Rick Altman. Semantics, for Altman, refer to recurring ‘building blocks’ of the same film genre, ‘common topics, shared plots, key scenes, character types, familiar objects or recognizable shots and sounds’ (1999: 89). Stuart Kaminsky was the first to carefully analyse those recurring semantic features of the heist that provide it a lexical ground. Among the heist’s most salient semantic features are its character types, which are, according to Kaminsky, of two broad categories. First, the gang leader, defined as a man of action (rarely a women), and a

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mentor with experience of the criminal world (1974: 80). In John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) is the man of action, mentored by the mastermind of the job, ‘Doc’ Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe); in The Italian Job (F. Gary Gray, 2003 version), John Bridger (Donald Sutherland) is the mentor, Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg) the man of action. Sometimes the mentor and man of action are blended into a single character. Next, there are the team members with ‘individual skills and crafts which command no great social respect and which have little or no chance of making those who possess them wealthy by any legal method’ (Kaminsky 1974: 79). This group of social misfits and societal castoffs traditionally embraces serious craftsmen, such as safecrackers, mechanics, drivers, demolitions experts and other technicians. Semantics, however, has its limitations as a means for identifying genres – at least since Jules Dassin’s caper team in Topkapi (1964), made up of peculiar members like mute acrobats and a maker of automata. The quirky cases of Virgil (Casey Affleck) and Turk (Scott Caan) Malloy, the puerile brothers from Provo, Utah, in Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001 version), are an example of this sort too. The serious craftsmen and the curious oddball, as opposed as they might appear on the surface, occupy the same role as thieves in a heist film. Yet another binary divides the heist film’s types between a ‘thuggish prole’ and cool caper characters of the sort found in the original Ocean’s Eleven (Newman 1997: 71). There are seeming differences in the sleek professional thieves of Michael Mann’s Heat (1994) and in the bumbling professional ones in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (2000), but then there are amateur thieves in many a comic heist such as Mad Money (Callie Khouri, 2008). Semantics may be necessary for generic understanding, but it is far from sufficient. In the aforementioned examples, as thoroughly dissimilar as the heroes might appear, they perform the same task in heist plots and the audience is led to cheer for their victory. Heist films afford a powerful screen identification with criminals breaking the law, providing ‘escapism and voyeurism, or in other words the pleasure of watching stories about illicit worlds and transgressive individuals … that may appeal to our fantasies and desires’ (Thompson 2007: 4). The heist encodes in story form a particular desire to elude the oppressive aspects or limitations of contemporary mass society. We recognise the necessary cooperation among team members and the rivalry

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between competing criminals, and want to see whether the social microcosm remains resolute or dissolves in the face of pressures (see Mason 2002). Will the team overcome obstacles in order to execute the plan, pull off that one last job, and break free at last from whatever constraints bind them? Risk and reward, bound in an equation invariably distorted by the ‘foolproofness’ of the plan, induces apprehension in the spectators and the hope that they will experience an affective payoff at the end. The audience’s reception of the heist film is thus also a part of its utility. But in this we are encroaching on Altman’s notion of generic ‘syntax’. Syntax works in alignment with audience reception and serves to identify ‘generic affiliation’ more tellingly than semantics ‘because a group of texts organizes those building blocks in a similar manner (as seen through such shared syntactic aspects as plot structure, character relationships or image and sound montage)’ (Altman 1999: 89). The syntactic dimension of Altman’s model for analysing genre is crucial: vocabulary (semantics) varies with relative ease, as I have suggested, but syntax often matters more in figuring out form and meaning, especially over time. At the heart of the heist film is the extraordinary robbery of a formidable institution that requires careful planning and the skills of specialists. Kirsten Thompson’s lucid definition calls the heist ‘a cycle or sub-genre of crime films that feature an elaborately planned and executed robbery, and whose narratives emphasize the logistical and technical difficulties of a crime and its execution’ (2007: 43). And Kim Newman’s superbly concise entry on the ‘caper’ as a criminal ‘sub-genre’ in the cheekily titled BFI Companion to Crime points to how ‘professional crooks plan and execute a clever, daring but (the censors insisted) ultimately unsuccessful robbery’ (1997: 70). Newman’s definition reiterates the central narrative focus on crime, highlights the skill and ingenuity of the ‘professional’ criminals, and foregrounds the failure of the crime in most capers made before 2000. (At this moment the genre seems to turn away from its longstanding ‘fatal strategy’, as Telotte puts it [1996: 163], that is, its tragic ending or the failure of the criminal exploit; I’ll return to this point.) Newman and Thompson’s definitions echo Kaminsky’s: ‘the one essential element of big caper movies, the essential which defines them, is the plot concentration on the commission of a single crime of great monetary significance, at least on the surface’ (1974: 77). Kaminsky’s qualifier ‘big’ implies a unique subset of films differentiated from those

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in which a robbery functions merely as a backdrop. The job must involve a risky operation that will reap great rewards; the plot ‘concentrates’ on a singular crime that occupies a significant portion of the diegesis and the affective buildup of the story, ennobling the work, skilled labour and physical or mental effort of the crimes represented. The narrative focus of the heist film is wrapped up in the ‘execution’ of the crime as much as or more than criminal psychology. Kaminsky’s most valuable contribution to a theory of the big caper is therefore his succinct, almost passing classification of it as an ‘adventureprocess film’ (1974: 74). The representation of process imparts to the genre its syntax. This stems not merely from the fact that big capers typically present a smaller crime before the central exploit (Kaminsky 1974: 77-8). The planning, preparation and execution of a robbery offers filmmakers an exceptional opportunity to dramatise human interaction and activity, just as they call upon the specific resources of film as an art of time and social space. The obvious criminal content is subtended by the fact that process becomes a formal opportunity, if not a representational challenge, for the heist film director. (Subsequent critics have not referenced Kaminsky’s classification explicitly enough, though Kim Newman deserves credit for pointing out that the big caper unexpectedly ‘shares its story structure with the putting-on-a-show musical and the mission-that-could-shortenthe-war combat film’ [1997: 70]. The musical shares no topic and little of the semantics of the caper and war film, but the musical and heist are in fact homologous through their common ‘choreography’ of action.) Following Kaminsky, I emphasise that the heist film is most conspicuously characterised by its emphasis on the crime unfolding as process and often presented through special descriptive moments, elliptical montages and extended sequences, sometimes using thrilling parallel or rapid editing for captivating the audience and at other times long takes for dilating the temporality of activity. Still, this textual account of the heist film falls short if it fails in the end to show how the genre appropriates its own function and expresses a particular message that corresponds to the changing desires or interests of its purveyors and audience. This inevitably requires us to consider the ‘social context in which the [genre] is used’ (Altman 1999: 97). This book sets out to provide a theory of one recurrent social function of the heist film as one among many (criminal) genres. Classifications, definitions and

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illuminating interpretations of heist films already exist. The task will be to emphasise underappreciated connections between existing typological definitions and histories, and relate them to possible social meanings. Is there a community of structure or intention between early, middle and late heist films? For the most part, from the mid-1950s onward the semantics and syntax of the heist film remain in place. Yet there may not be continuity across six decades in terms of the genre’s social message, although I do believe there is one in terms of two of the genre’s social functions. The first of the two social functions of the heist film is to provide a critique of the socio-economic order through mostly likeable characters achieving something extraordinary from marginalised social position. In terms of its potential to express something to a broad public, unlike film noir’s primary emphasis on individual psychology, the heist’s collaborative dimension affords a sustained sociological reflection. The heist crew may be relatively small or incorporate several individuals – 11, 12 or even 13 – but, centrally, the marginalisation experienced by the gang induces a combative and anti-social attitude that propels them to work against mainstream society or one of its important institutions. Kaminsky incisively reads the implicit nostalgia of an ‘old social unit of family or clique’ in the big caper as a reaction against ‘the manifestation of the new, impersonal social structure’ of the postwar era (1974: 80), including its technological and bureaucratic structures. Fran Mason’s sophisticated reading of the failure of community particularly in the noir heist pits the nostalgic ‘fantasy’ of community against modern reality: since the gang is a ‘temporary’ or ‘simulated’ social structure struggling against a ‘decentralised world’ that rejects it, it is doomed to failure (2002: 99). Even when heist plans succeed in Steven Soderbergh’s playful Ocean’s series, the films ‘employ the utopian resolve of Hollywood narrative – an optimistic determination to overcome injustice or inequality’ in the name of a social critique, articulating what Aaron Baker calls a ‘disaffection’ with the 21st century economy (2011: 2). Doomed or not, embedded in the desire to form a new social reality is a critique of society and its system of values, be they political, economic, aesthetic or other. At its most abstract, this represents a utopian impulse, or at least bohemian one, to form an unconventional collective on the margins of society. The genre inscribes a wish-fulfillment for a new social order with the express intention of breaking away from a technologically and institutionally threatening society.

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My analysis will draw out another aspect of this socio-economic critique in the heist film to articulate narrower function of the genre. To get at that function requires us to pause on a key phrase in Kaminsky’s definition of the crime in the big caper: ‘a single crime of great monetary significance – a crime always directed at monetary gain, at least on the surface’ (1974: 77; emphasis added). What motivates the thieves appears to be straightforward: cash for a better life, the means to get out of financial trouble or stagnancy. But as critics and audience members alike know, while the leader’s motives may start there, they are inescapably more complicated. As Barry Keith Grant reminds, ‘genre movies take … social debates and tensions and cast them into formulaic narratives, condensing them into dramatic conflicts between individual characters and society or heroes and villains’ (2007: 16). If so, then a clean break from society may be a surrogate for something more ethereal, perhaps even a search for a kind of transcendence that makes the heist, well, rather poetic. In fact, that’s precisely how Steve Frizelli (Edward Norton) dismisses Charlie Croker’s plan to steal back gold bullion from him in The Italian Job: ‘I mean, that’s very poetic and all, but I just don’t see it.’ Charlie’s curt reply is that Frizelli ‘ain’t got no imagination’. Heist films are also about imagination and poetry. They examine aesthetic activity by encoding the values of imagination and creative effort into criminal activity, and construct criminals as rule-breaking artist-geniuses whose labour (mental or physical) unfolds as a process of artistic creation and their efforts producing an artistic or poetic work. This is true from the genre’s origins. In Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), one of the first and most violent noir heists, one gang member tells another: ‘the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They are admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present an underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.’ The analogy between the artist and criminal in mass society dates back at least to nineteenth-century romantic heroes, probably even to Enlightenment theories of art (see Porter 1981, Senelick 1987 and Black 1991). This fact locates the heist film within a larger field of reflection on the nature and role of artists and art in modern times. These theories shaped the law-breaking criminal genius we see in many crime films – displaced from a moral or criminological plane onto an aesthetic one. Moreover, the exploding market economies of the modern era ushered in a new age of consumerism and economic valua-

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tion that impacted the wages and living conditions of a new industrial class of labourers, as well the products of the artist’s mind and hands. Market economies pressured the widespread nineteenth-century notion of aesthetic autonomy – the doctrine that art is not subject chiefly to the money-making interests – making it seem impossible to preserve art from the supposedly corrosive touch of commercialisation. My purpose here is not to retrace a debate that continues to dismantle the separation of commercial and artistic interests, which seem always to have been intertwined. But at base the heist film is constructed on a tension, real or perceived, between purely aesthetic and purely commercial interests. That heist films are part of a broader reflection about the role of the film artist in consumer societies, gives us some purchase on that nagging qualifier in Kaminsky’s definition of the big caper, ‘a crime always directed at monetary gain, at least on the surface’ (1974: 76–7). Is a heist movie about the money or not? Is it about the cash or the art of the crime? Let’s say that the answer is, well, both. While the heist as a genre may modify its message from film to film, from era to era, I believe its underlying function has remained relatively consistent: to reflect on the raison d’être and condition of the film artist in a commercial medium from within a commercial genre. The heist film serves as a vehicle for exploring aesthetic value and artistic creation as a problematic in which capitalist economics, labour and pure aesthetic value face off against each other, or at least appear to do so, in the wake of the modern socio-economic transformations mentioned above. The heist genre may thus be read as a locus of mass-art in which the business of film tries to work out its relation to art. To this end it uses criminal business to define itself to itself and to militate for its status as art to its audience, and it promotes a sublimated myth of the filmmaker as an artist rather than a business type. In terms of the heist film’s social function, then, the community of structure that links heists across time turns out to be a common yet consistent reflection on the status of film art in a consumer society. Directors recognise in the heist genre a readymade template for arguing about whether film is business or art, or both, just as it articulates their frustrations with the constraints of the system and expresses their desire for creative autonomy – for a clean break. The heist’s social message, on the other hand, is susceptible to change from film to film and over time. This is where tracing the trajectory of the heist film across several decades – the task of individual chapters below – becomes fruitful.

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Any account of the heist film must take into account its changing critical conceptualisation, paying close attention to a fluctuating taxonomy and terminological differences proposed by film theorists, historians and industry players. I have already mentioned Kaminsky’s claim in the second edition of American Film Genres that the genre dwindled ‘as a significant generic form’ (1985: vii), a position seconded by Rick Altman’s sense that the genre hadn’t produced a ‘coherent’ or ‘stable syntax’ (1984: 16). Film historians and theorists generally take the big caper to be a criminal sub-genre or at best a weak genre, but ambivalence sways the day. Eugene Rosow is non-committal in his study of American gangster films: ‘heist or caper films … can be considered a sub-genre (or separate genre)’ (1978: 279). Ron Wilson claims ‘the caper or heist film was another crime sub-genre of the 1990s’ (2000: 154). For Steve Neale, heists are an ‘intermittent series’ of the gangster film stretching from the 1950s to the 1980s (2000: 81). The most relevant contribution comes from Altman, for whom the ‘big caper’ is fully a genre and not a sub-genre. Indeed, the big caper figures in his discussion of generic durability: The Hollywood genres that have proved the most durable are precisely those that have established the most coherent syntax (the Western, the musical); those that disappear the quickest depend entirely on recurring semantic elements, never developing a stable syntax (reporter, catastrophe, and big-caper films, to name but a few). (1999: 225) For Altman, the big caper film had suffered from a lack of ‘reinforcement’ that would have secured the ‘syntactic patterns of individual texts’ into a ‘durable’ and ‘coherent’ syntax. While I agree with Altman’s suspicion about the simplistic semantic elements of the big caper, the continued tensions between filmmakers aspiring to artistic license and autonomy, and the crasser objectives of Hollywood or other film industries, suggest the heist film still has something to say – even if only to create the illusion of conflict. Terminology can be mildly elusive here, so some attention to the terms caper and heist is in order. ‘Caper’ likely derives from a Dutch noun for a corsair and its corresponding verb, kapen, which means to take or plunder. But a more suggestive possibility is related to ‘capriole’, a ‘fantastic’

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and ‘frolicsome leap’ that applies to dance and horsemanship (http:// www.oed.com accessed 7/24/2011). From this, ‘caper’ has assumed a connotation for any fashionable pursuit, even an elusive or tricky game. American usage includes the notion of a ‘capricious escapade’ and an ‘illegal or questionable act’ (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caper accessed 7/14/2011). The term thus bridges ludic notions of performance, spectatorship and criminal activity, always governed by playful moves and unexpected outcomes. ‘Heist’, common to United States slang, derives from the German and is a variant of ‘hoist’, for lifting or raising. Historically it signified housebreaking or shoplifting, and in twentieth-century usage it refers to armed robbery. That aspect gives ‘heist’ a more ominous, violent association than the lighter, performative aspects of ‘caper’, and this divergence appears to have impacted critical usage. ‘Heist’ is more inclined to evoke the serious, dramatic, violent and perhaps professional dimensions of criminals carrying out ill-fated robberies, while ‘caper’ lends itself to the colourful and amateurish side of such crimes (almost literally, colour films as opposed to their black and white – or film noir – counterparts). The difference between the two terms generally identifies the heist as a dramatic form, whereas caper tends towards the comic. The distinction between the two is not absolute; however, it may be useful if we keep in mind two things. First, that a film audience roots for the ‘thuggish prole’ (Newman 1997: 71) in the heist just as much as for cool caper characters – sympathy is elicited for both, an aspect of the genre’s audience reception that surpasses semantic difference (thug versus cool hero). Second, that crime films (and fiction) do not parse the terms in the same way some critics do; they use caper and heist interchangeably. ‘Caper’, for example, is the actual term used for the robbery in the source novel High Sierra by W. R. Burnett and its film adaptation by Raoul Walsh (1941), as well as in Robert Siodmak’s crime films – all works that were gangsterish, noir, certainly not comic. The relation between the two critical labels is subject to history too. ‘Caper’ gained currency in critical discourse well over a decade after the 1950s dramas first appeared, at a time when comedy had overtaken the genre. Newman explains that the caper film ‘was largely unknown in Europe until the late 60s’, at which time it was used ‘retrospectively’ to describe 1950s dramas about professional crooks trying, unsuccessfully, to pull off a daring robbery (1997: 71). When the term ‘caper’ came into

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more common usage in the 1960s, it was living up to its double meaning: it ‘had a much stronger element of romantic comedy and often a fantastic plot involving the theft of a priceless objet d’art’ (ibid.). With reference to The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 version), the Overlook Film Encyclopedia says essentially the same thing: ‘the film’s playfulness is an indication of how far the heist film had come from its origins (represented in America by The Asphalt Jungle, 1950) in the process of its transformation into the caper film (as exemplified earlier by Ocean’s Eleven, 1960, and Topkapi, 1964)’ (Hardy 1998: 273). The designation between ‘heist’ and ‘caper’ is thus not a static binary but a shifting language used by writers, the industry, audiences and critics to make sense of forms. Moreover, the history of a generic designation itself must be considered in relation to the changing form it designates, just as shifts in terminology invent, re-classify and ignore earlier films. Rick Altman reminds us that ‘instead of considering that changes in terminology modify the generic identity of previous films … critics have always assumed that new terms should have no effect on already existing films and that generic identification is a once-and-for-all affair’ (Altman 1999: 19). Disregarding the changing usage of critical terms has its pitfalls. This takes on special interest in our discussion because Altman uses the big caper to illustrate his point about terminological difficulties; he criticises Kaminsky for citing ‘only three pre-1950 films and reach[ing] the conclusion that “The big caper film did not emerge as an identifiable genre, however, until the 1950s”’ (Altman 1999: 19). The big caper crops up not only as a privileged example of weak genres, but also as a hallmark in recent genre theory for demonstrating the slipperiness of generic terminology and the misapplication of genre designations. Needless to say, I proceed with some trepidation. At times I adopt the difference between (comic) caper and (noir) heist as used in critical language. Otherwise, in the following chapters I use the terms interchangeably, and overall my study subsumes both under the designation ‘heist’. Chapter one will trace the origins of the heist film, moving from precursors in the silent era through film noir, particularly Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949), to John Huston’s groundbreaking film The Asphalt Jungle, and setting the heist film against the cultural anxieties of urbanism and the post-war economy. Chapter two reads a core set of mid-1950s films – noir heists by Jules Dassin (Rififi), Stanley Kubrick (The

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Killing), and Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le flambeur), and comic heists by Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951) and Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) – that crafted the heist into a reflection on the film artist’s work in an era pervaded by ideological and economic compromise. Chapter three considers how the heist film, having consolidated its conventions in the late 1950s, tosses off the fetters of fatalism in favour of more staid dramatic tones or flashy big production caper comedies that provide a ready-made form for pressing socio-economic concerns the heist addressed across the 1960s and early 1970s. Chapter four analyses the resurgence of the heist in the 2000s, extrapolating a general principle about the contemporary heist by noting the contradictory myths of originality conveyed in the numerous remakes that characterise the last decade.

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ORIGINS : THE NOIR HEIST

In their 1955 Panorama of American Film Noir French film critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton declared the birth of a ‘neo-gangster’ film in the United States. Their exemplary titles were Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947), John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, and Robert Siodmak’s The Killers and Criss Cross (2002: 78). The French critics were attuned to the manner in which these films reworked the gangster genre, splintering the 1930s archetype into other forms. In hindsight, however, it is striking that three of the four ‘neo-gangster’ films named were heists. Indeed, critics and filmmakers alike generally take John Huston’s crime thriller as the historical point of departure for the heist film, the work that first distilled the semantic and syntactic elements of this cinematic form. As far as the heist film in the United States is concerned, this etiological claim must be qualified by articulating the relationship between the 1930s gangster film, 1940s film noir, crime fiction and the new heist genre in the post-war context. The genre that found its particular form in The Asphalt Jungle implies a long tradition of crime movies dating back to the origins of cinema. These early films lack the most salient semantic and syntactic features of the post-war films designated as heists, yet they conditioned audiences to the psychological thrill of seeing representations of the underworld and transgressive behaviour. The relation of most early crime films to the later heist is primarily thematic and affective, not necessarily semantic or syntactic, which is to say that they told stories about criminal mas-

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terminds, gangs, and daring actions that thrilled their audience; for the most part these stories possess identifiable features of the heist while not shaping repeatable plot elements or characters in as significant a way as the heist’s more immediate predecessors: gangster and lone-wolf thief movies. For example, early crime films used violence and robbery as stimulating plot elements in films such as A Daring Daylight Burglary, Trailed by Blood-hounds and A Desperate Poaching Affray (all from 1903) (see Musser 1990: 365; these British films were themselves ‘duped’, a fraudulent form of copying in the burgeoning American film industry, and a case of life imitating art). But these films did harbour other qualities that make them relevant to the heist. The most important early film of this sort, in the United States at least, is Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). Kaminsky called it ‘the first Big Caper film’ (1974: 81). Rosow, on the other hand, in his history of gangster movies, dismissed Porter’s film as an original heist film because it lacked the ‘balletic teamwork, precision, and underworld settings that are characteristic of films like The Asphalt Jungle or The Killing [and that] are first clearly discernible in [1930s] gangster movies, as in the montage sequence in Little Caesar’ (1978: 282). Although the vast majority of these early films may justifiably be excluded as influences, we miss an opportunity to draw a connection to them in the very terms Rosow uses to define the heist – the ‘hold-up montage’ as a special representational moment that anticipates the very ‘balletic teamwork [and] precision’ that would come to characterise the heist. In The Great Train Robbery, bandits stage a hold-up that turns violent and finally fails when lawmen catch the thieves. The film, long for its time at eleven minutes, does not set out to detail the plans of the hold-up or the assembly and preparations of the gang. Yet Charles Musser identifies an ‘operational aesthetic’ (1990: 354) in Porter’s adventure that anticipates elements of the full-blown caper: ‘The careful attention to the details of robbing a train, the emphasis on process as narrative, almost takes The Great Train Robbery out of the realm of fiction and suggests a documentary intent’ (Musser 1990: 355). The Great Train Robbery is aware, however inchoately, of the representation of process, of the filmic construction of temporal unfolding and, specifically, of criminal spatial penetrations typical of the heist. Nor can we gloss over those crime serials from the 1910s involving underground crime organisations and professional thieves. This new

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cinematic form, Tom Gunning reminds us, ‘provided ready-made plot formulas familiar to a mass audience and also challenged filmmakers to develop visual means for telling economic and fast moving stories with a certain degree of complexity’ (2000: 88). Notable among them are Louis Feuillade’s French productions Fantômas (1913–14) and Les Vampires (1915–16). The alternate realities of the underworld operating on quiet Paris streets and the sympathetic criminals who contend with each other as much as with the police are elements that persist into later heists. Feuillade’s stories feature antisocial but likeable ‘anarchist villains’ who assault elite culture, and ‘convoluted plot reversals’ involving daring thefts and covert break-ins (Andrew 1995: 27). The semantic possibilities for the big caper developed in these early crime melodramas such as Les Vampires, in which criminals ‘commandeer automobiles, scramble about moving trains, disappear around corners and down manholes, and creep unseen over the rooftops of the city … anesthetise a whole party of wealthy Parisians and rob them of their jewels’ (Abel 1984: 73). These elements may be mere semantic resemblances more than atavistic generic traits that suddenly reappear in the heist; more certain is that they aestheticise transgressive social behaviours crucial to the fully formed heist film. Moreover, the social complexities operating in early crime serials in France appealed to popular audiences and avant-garde aesthetic groups alike, notably the Surrealists. The films deserve credit for presaging gangster movies in representing criminal organisations in competition with each other. Pointedly, the heist lacks the fantastic atmosphere we find in Feuillade’s films, but the affective power of his direction is akin to the suspense of the best heist sequences. Other resonances with the heist are apparent in German cinema of the Weimar Republic (1919–33). For the most part the German crime film in the 1910s lagged behind its counterparts in England or France, focusing less on thrillers than on detectives. With more animus than the social allegorisation of the French serials, the Weimar cinema of the political left endorsed a scathing social critique. Walter Benjamin’s anti-capitalist tirade drawn from a review of Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Novel is applicable to this cinema: ‘Bourgeois legality and crime – these are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brecht’s … novel depicts the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former’ (2002: 9).

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Benjamin’s claim resonates with Stuart Kaminsky’s about the ‘collective, antisocial’ attitude of the criminal specialists in the heist who ‘usually work unappreciated and unrecognized’ by society at large (1974: 79). The same critique of social relations in modernity is evident in the work of the German director Fritz Lang. Lang’s famous cross-cutting between the police and criminal leaders, debating how to capture a child murderer in M (1931), aligned and equated the two. Anton Kaes’s study of M describes the gang-like Ringvereine, or ring clubs, of Weimar-era Berlin that were ‘structured like small companies’ or ‘legitimate businesses’ lead by ‘charismatic figure[s]’ (2001: 51). Like Lang’s M, the heist frequently examines the relationship between legitimate and illicit social activity and institutions and the sometimes arbitrary distinctions drawn between them. Critics also perceive in M an incipient heist narrative. The film’s office break-in to capture the child murderer Beckert was inspired by a well-publicised and successful 1929 bank ‘coup’ by the very real criminals, the Saas brothers, who broke into Berlin’s Disconto Bank through the ceiling, much to the pleasure of a sympathetic public, who ‘relished the battle between ultra-cool thieves and the convivial but ill-starred police inspector … Lang shows [in M], in an admiring touch, a professional break-in artist loosening his fingers like a pianist, as he readies to pick a lock’ (Kaes 2001: 51). In his analysis of M, Kaes captures the aesthetic appeal and the implicit analogy between crime and art that will become a central tenet of the heist. Lang had already mythologised the eponymous criminal mastermind of Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922), the ‘evil genius of modernity’ (Gunning 2000: 97) who assumes various disguises to carry out his attacks on high finance in gambling houses or the stock market. The film’s opening features a complex cross-cutting sequence that depicts Mabuse and his gang stealing a monetary contract on a train, all measured to exact chronological precision. The coordinated cutting between the train, an accomplice on a telephone pole, a getaway vehicle and Mabuse waiting by his telephone for news of the theft, anticipates the spatial and temporal complexities of later heist montages as well as the technological deceptions used against the regimentation of ‘a system already obsessed with precise timing and schedules’ (Gunning 2000: 98). Lang’s own ‘mastery of the co-ordination of space and time through parallel editing’, his ‘rigorous and unswerving temporality’ (Gunning 2000: 97) – not unlike Mabuse’s – is an early ver-

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sion of the heist’s syntax, the complex montage of a collaborative crime. In addition, the film’s delight in role-playing produces scene after scene of Mabuse in disguise, the same kind of play-acting that characterises many a heist and underscores the underlying challenge Mabuse poses: ‘the root of his criminality lies … in his multiplicity. His very being elides the mechanisms of containment and control regulating the modern urban society in which he lives’ (Hall 2003: 385). Fatal flaws will undo the perfectly wrought plans and play-acting of masterminds and gangs in most early heists while more recent ones exploit this system to their advantage, much like Mabuse. They all face the same hostile and complex technological environments of urban modernity in Lang’s films. Heist Predecessors: The Gangster and Gentleman Thief Film The heist inherited its most significant semantic and syntactic features, and some of its generic function, from two cinematic precursors: the gangster film and the gentleman thief film (Kaminsky 1974: 75; Newman 1997: 71). Kaminsky points to two separate lines of heist films deriving from these co-generators of the heist: ‘gang capers’, like Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen or Lewis Milestone’s Ocean’s Eleven stem from the former, while William Wyler’s How To Steal a Million (1966) and Don Taylor’s Jack of Diamonds (1967) grow out of the latter. At one level these two film types provide polarising traits, with the socially outcast professional team of manual labourers or amateur crooks on one side, and the sophisticated, high-society jewel thief on the other. But at another level, the heist film condenses aspects from each. Their common inheritance is ‘the possibility of sympathy for and admiration of the criminal’ (Kaminsky 1974: 76). However the heist is conceived in relation to the gangster film – as a ‘variation’ or ‘root’ (Kaminsky 1974: 74, 76), ‘spawn’ (Rosow 1978: 279), ‘strain’ (Schatz 1981: 82), ‘derivative’ (Krutnik 1991: 201), ‘intermittent series’ (Neale 2000: 81), ‘embryonic form’ (Newman 1997: 71) or subgenre – the gangster film provides the most immediate and salient semantic preliminaries for the heist. The heist can be sensed in gangster films like Little Caesar (Mervyn Le Roy, 1931) and in westerns like Jesse James (Irving Cummings, 1939). But merely ‘show[ing] a few robberies’ does not suffice for a full-blown heist (Newman 1997: 71). What differentiates the heist? According to Newman, around 1950 the robbery that had been

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‘incidental’ in gangster films emerges as a self-sufficient aesthetic core, a critical representational mass, ‘as meticulously-staged robberies interrupt stories of betrayal’ in certain films noirs (ibid.). Eventually, in the wake of The Asphalt Jungle, ‘the heist itself rather than the doomed gangsters assumes narrative centre stage’ (ibid.). The displacement from criminals to the operation of the crime, from the crime’s tangential role in the diegesis to its organising principle and central aesthetic object, affords an autonomous form. The resulting ‘plot concentration’ on a ‘single crime of great monetary value’ (Kaminsky 1974: 77) is not merely a semantic adjustment to the gangster film; it constitutes an axial shift that engenders a new form with its own generic syntax. That syntax is one of process. The question will be to determine what potential social functions movies about gangsters and high-society jewel thieves bequeath to the heist, if any. Crime films have pointed economic underpinnings that allegorically mirror and critique society. Note, for example, the consumerist parable operating in the serial killer film, the ‘epitome’ of ‘consumption practices of late commodity capitalism’ according to Thompson: ‘In films like Copycat (1995), in which killer Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr.) commits crimes modeled on famous earlier serial killer cases, or Suspect Zero (2004), in which a serial killer executes other serial killers, this genre self-reflexively foregrounds themes of seriality and repetition, and also subtly echoes the repetition compulsions of both killer and genre consumer’ (2007: 88). Gangster films, for their part, consistently comment on American capitalism and business success. Audiences from different decades and races have identified with characters aggressively pursuing socio-economic parity in this genre revealing ‘the particularly mythic contradictions of capitalist culture in American’s urban industrial society’ (Rosow 1978: 279). Thompson concludes that ‘the fall of the gangster in classic films like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy represents the ritualised disposal of a figure whose violent entrepreneurial actions are merely an extreme and transgressive form of capitalism’ (2007: 3). The ritualistic, almost sacrificial aspect of gangster films also informs the heist. What does the heist share in common with ‘lone wolf’ (Kaminsky) or ‘gentleman’ (Newman) jewel thief films, such as Raffles (1917, 1925, 1930, 1939), the Pink Panther films (1963–2009), Arsène Lupin (Jack Conway, 1932), and others? In the very label ‘gentleman’ we gather there is a disinterested, aristocratic thread running latently through the heist, where

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money is everywhere present but not necessarily what counts above all. This idea toys with a distinctive thrust in which work, at least the work of the criminal-artist, is not motivated solely, not even primarily, by financial compensation. On a social plane, this appears to run in stark contrast to the economic interests that drive heist criminals to steal. But it also opens onto one central trait of the heist: a disinterestedness with regards to the intended monetary gain that complicates the ostensible desire for money. The heist film is about an acte gratuit. The money counts, but thieves in heist films steal as a means for some other end, usually to acquire escape or freedom from society. But this is not all. The motive behind a theft that is not reducible to financial gain is also typically predicated on getting away with something original and extraordinary. In this we understand the frequent reference to the ‘perfect’ crime. What does perfection have to do with it? Why not use a blunt but effective instrument to get what is wanted? That the heist is built around a collaborative and choreographed activity aimed at perfect execution shows that it celebrates a collective aesthetic act – even in the grittiest heists, the thieves steal with style. The confluence of these two generic strands – of the gangster film critical of American economic and social life, and of the disinterested aesthetic motives of the gentleman thief film – suggests the heist film examines the relationship between economic freedom and aesthetic activity. Noir Heist Turning Points: Walsh and Siodmak To Borde and Chaumeton’s list of neo-gangster films we add two protoheist films by Raoul Walsh, each essential to the development of the genre. Walsh’s High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart in a breakout role, was adapted by W. R. Burnett and John Huston (the latter was working as a screenwriter at the time), the same team that would go on to make The Asphalt Jungle. Burnett’s Depression-era fiction had already influenced the gangster film in the 1930s. His first successful novel in film terms had been Little Caesar, which Warner Bros. picked up, hiring Burnett on contract and putting him in regular contact with John Huston. High Sierra was produced for Warner Bros. by Mark Hellinger, who would later yield influence over noir productions for Universal Pictures, including Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, and Jules Dassin’s Brute Force and The Naked City (1948). High Sierra features a ‘caper’ orchestrated by Roy Earle (Bogart), a

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good-hearted country boy from the Midwest gone rogue with the Dillinger gang. After being released from prison, Roy organises a hotel robbery from atop a mountain. Roy’s shuttling between the rugged western landscape and a Los Angeles on the verge of bursting into a metropolis points to the changing social and spatial dynamics of America at the time, just as it links the film to the western genre. Roy’s plan also gently anticipates another feature of the heist: the use of architectural plans, in an insert shot, that detail the spatial layout of the hotel for the purpose of prestaging the robbery. The graphic resembles a maze as much as a rational diagram. Roy’s plan to pull off ‘the big one’ unravels, and he is killed by the police. Walsh would go on to direct, at the end of the decade, White Heat (1949), with James Cagney playing an ageing, epileptic psychotic named Cody Jarrett. This was not a mere reprisal of Cagney’s iconic roles from 1930s gangster movies. Of note are Jarrett’s reliance upon the detailed architectural drawings of a chemical plant, his allusion to the Trojan Horse – a classical archetype for the inside-man heist – and a flamboyant ending to the payroll heist of the plant, where Jarrett dies on an exploding gas tank. The complex choreography and timing of the heist in White Heat becomes a key theme in the planning of the job. But neither film is classically noir in style, nor do these films convert the robbery in their narratives into a cinematic problem or opportunity, any more than they pause on process, a key element of the heist. Yet they are significant in other ways. A ‘transitional work’, High Sierra formulates ‘a more or less self-conscious farewell’ to the 1930s film gangster and the genre itself (Irwin 2006: 213). The same could be said of White Heat. The films hint at inchoate possibilities for the heist form that would be more fully exploited later by Hellinger and especially by Huston and Burnett, who together are credited with ‘humanizing’ the gangster in a way that opens the door for the new noir antihero (Irwin 2006: 216). With Walsh’s transitional films in mind, the appearance of the noirinflected heist steers us towards a set of films by Robert Siodmak, The Killers and Criss Cross. The films of this German exile director ‘foreshadow’ what is eventually ‘consolidated’ in The Asphalt Jungle (Leitch 2002: 36). It turns out that they too intersect with Burnett and Huston, as had Walsh’s films, the result of a happy confluence of good filmmaking and crime fiction, independent production possibilities, and new cultural anxieties arising from post-war urban space and rationalised time. Sharing

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a host of similarities between them, the two Siodmak films emblematised the noir vision and were instrumental in giving the heist its noir strain in America. They pushed towards the heist as an autonomous offshoot that would be more readily perceived in Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle despite fundamental aesthetic differences between the two filmmakers. Siodmak’s films amplified the representational attention given to the planning and execution of the heist. On the one hand, they devoted lengthy screen time to the crime’s planning, the moment of collective social organisation, while on the other the robberies themselves were presented through a stylised formal treatment that stands out in – or against – the narrative. Prior to this, the robbery may have existed as a narrative element, as a semantic feature of crime films; it’s amplified role in these 1940s narrative subsequently allowed it to alter or offer an alternative to the ‘syntactic’ nature of the gangster film. The robbery had become a central representational problem around which the film’s action is predicated, rather than a secondary complement to the gangster’s character. Both The Killers and Criss Cross were financially successful, and the genre’s lineaments would congeal into a repeatable form while being produced independently of the usual studio strictures, under Mark Hellinger, now working for International Pictures through Universal. Anthony Veiller was credited for the screenplay, based on an Ernest Hemingway story, but by Siodmak’s account John Huston was the unseen hand that crafted the screenplay for his direction (Taylor 1959: 182). Huston, in fact, would have directed the film had he not gotten into a dispute with Hellinger (Clarens 1997: 199). Siodmak took over, making what he viewed as a gangster film and what critics have subsequently celebrated as one of the most telling examples of film noir. Suffice it to say, the genesis of the noir heist in the United States around 1950 rests largely on the shoulders of Burnett, Huston, Hellinger and Siodmak. The Killers and Criss Cross are both gangster noirs with a double-cross narrative built around a heist. The films share an Expressionist style – ‘chiaroscuro lighting, minimalist sets, mobile camera, extreme angle shots, and the use of narrative fragmentation through flashback’ (Munby 1999: 201). They focus on the patsy who allies himself with an unsympathetic gang in order to achieve or retrieve masculine power in a way that committing the crime will afford. Given his impressive physique, Burt Lancaster was well cast in the role of a vulnerable, feckless male hope-

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lessly trapped in doomed relationships with disloyal women (Porfirio 1996: 121; see also Munby 1999: 190, 194). In archetypal noir fashion, the male character is the victim and prisoner of a past he cannot escape, and these films heighten tension between their evident fatalism and the hero’s tragic yearning for freedom, be it metaphysical or material, a point which the heist film has pursued relentlessly. The Killers recounts in baroque flashback the demise of Ole Anderson (Lancaster), known as ‘the Swede’, after his boxing career is cut short by injury. His infatuation with Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), the kept mistress of crime boss Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker), ushers him into their underworld activities. The Swede’s story is focalised primarily through an insurance agent, Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), who, like a detective, reconstructs its elements from the vantage point of those who knew the Swede. Colfax and Collins use the Swede to double cross the gang after they pull a payroll hold-up. Our interest in both of the Siodmak films stems primarily from two elements that run parallel in each, a doubling or repetition indicative of semantic and syntactic consolidation: the planning of the heist and the execution of the robbery. (I recommend the close readings of the film in Shadoian 1977: 83–113, and Walker 1992: 128–35.) The planning meeting in The Killers does not consist of an autonomous preparation montage, but it is a dramatic piece in its own right that sets up the ulterior stakes of the crime. Colfax, waiting for the Swede and illuminated by the sole light in a darkened room, calmly asks his men to play cards, metonymically marking the robbery as a gamble, a game to him but also a serious risk. As the Swede comes in and greets everyone, his face changes dramatically when Kitty’s voice addresses him off-screen, a haunting aural presence. The Swede runs his hands over a green handkerchief decorated with golden harps that Kitty had given him while he was in prison. We cut to her lying on the bed in deep focus in the background. The handkerchief is a token of the power she wields over him even when absent – she is the object of his interest in the caper. When Colfax asks whether he is in, the Swede agrees and looks off-screen to Kitty and we cut to her as further confirmation of his obsessive intentions. One man asks Colfax about the job in a meta-cinematic way – ‘What’s the picture?’ – that Siodmak then visualises in the subsequent sequence. Siodmak fashioned the robbery sequence into a formal focal point. He bookends the entire sequence by means of an ironic voice-over that

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contrasts with what is on the screen. Reardon’s insurance boss reads a newspaper account of the robbery, as if captioning the images in a documentary fashion and situating the event in relation to the general public, who have no knowledge of the individual players. The filmed robbery unfolds in a single long take of great complexity, much of it with a mobile frame. ‘The normal emphasis [in later heists] would be to bring us in close to the robbery, create suspense about the mechanics of the heist and about the potential of imperfect performance on the part of members of the gang’ (Shadoian 1977: 106). Yet here a crane-mounted camera follows the action through different spaces of the factory towards a gun battle on the street outside the factory, its detachment mirroring the journalistic perspective of Reardon’s boss. To film the thieves’ escape, Siodmak and his director of photography, Elwood Bredell, raised the camera to a high-angle in order to take in the entire street and factory. For its formal idiosyncrasy and technical complexity, the sequence surprises the viewer. The camera’s ‘godlike objectivity’ (Shadoian 1977: 106) or ‘Olympian viewpoint’ (Clarens 1997: 200) ultimately undermines the voice-over’s

Formal experimentation with a crane shot and voice-over narration in Siodmak’s The Killers

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documentary objectivity because we see gang members not identified by the newspaper (Walker 1992: 131). ‘The whole episode seems evanescent, unreal, unimportant [because so detached in shot scale], a fragment of a dream’ (Shadoian 1977: 107). The Killers represents another crucial transitional phase in the gangster film in which the stylised display and technical challenge of the robbery is realised as a montage and thus finally imagined as the kernel for its own concentrated aesthetic approach. Siodmak’s Criss Cross further crystallised the heist as an organised process narrative. In its stylised robbery – punctuated by another formally striking overhead shot – we see the reliance on specialists and an emphasis on precision timing that would become a temporal hallmark of the heist. Like The Killers, Criss Cross recounts a fatalistic triangular relationship. Burt Lancaster stars as Steve Thompson, whose ex-wife, Anna (Yvonne de Carlo), will drag him into criminal activity with her new husband, Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). Steve gets a job with an armoured car company and moves back in with his mother in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles, a location Siodmak uses more pointedly than the nondescript settings of Criss Cross. The opening shot and credit sequence is an aerial view at dusk, the city illuminated by its street lights; the camera flies over the urban expanse of Los Angeles, hovering over City Hall before descending towards the parking lot of a club in Bunker Hill. The frame dissolves to a street-level shot, then cuts to a car pulling up, shining headlights on Steve and Anna kissing. Anna tells him their relationship will be the way it should have been, the two of them together. Torn between the depravity she experienced during the Depression and her sensual cravings, Anna is divided between the security Slim can provide and the sexual fulfillment she derives from Steve. Knowingly or not, she induces Steve to hatch a plot to rob the armoured car company as an insider – a model for the ‘inside job’ semantics of the heist genre. As in The Killers, Siodmak reconfigures the plot according to a set of flashbacks, notably as Steve drives to the robbery (see the narrative analysis in Walker 1992: 139–45). Though the events are separated by a long time, Steve’s recollections order the heist planning and execution consecutively. In the former, Anna is lying on a divan near the table around which the robbery is planned; she represents both the stakes and the threat to the plan. But here the sequence is more than just a structure for furthering the dramatic rivalry of the trio. It is also a commentary on

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the need for specialists (an explosives expert, a locksmith, a getaway driver and so on), detailed maps and a plan. The robbery sequence unfolds as if it were a scene of combat, the residual effect of World War II on American life. Bells, whistles and sirens sound, and diversionary smoke bombs explode, as if it were a military action. It begins as an intricate, oblique interplay of medium two-shots, long shots and high-angle shots that establishes the space and creates clashing vectors for dramatic intensity. While factory employees run around chaotically, the crew members emerge out of the smoke. Steve is unable to protect his partner Howard when Slim walks up and calmly shoots the old man; then another gang member shoots Steve. The frame dissolves as he loses consciousness, before refocusing on faces looking into the frame, from Steve’s point of view. He is now in traction in a hospital bed. The defamiliarising photography of the sequence is highly self-conscious. Relying on the talents of his editor, Ted Kent, and his DP, fellow exile Franz Planer, Siodmak made the prologue hint at the modernist sensibility of earlier European avant-garde movements. The first element here is the striking high-angle shot of the armoured truck coming into the factory premises. The shot lasts some twenty seconds and is taken from a roof several stories up. The truck pulls across tracks where a train car is moving forward – vertically upward in the frame – and seems to defy gravity. Then the camera pans left, horizontally in the frame, to follow the truck down a narrow corridor, creating by contrast with the preceding motion the shape of a cross – the iconographic realisation of Slim’s double-cross. It also conforms to the narrative’s criss-crossing structure as it loops back on itself to the middle point where Steve, hoping to cross the double-crossing Slim, is driving to the heist. In addition, the shot distance changes the human figures into ant-like creatures. For a brief moment the disorienting shot leaves the audience struggling to recognise the space of the action. This shot is reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s European avant-garde documentary cinema and photography of Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), which was familiar to Siodmak before he left Germany. Siodmak’s mother had hosted events with a ‘dizzying’ array of artistic talents of the time (Alpi 1998: 11), and in 1929–30 Siodmak collaborated with the self-styled avant-garde group Filmstudio 29 on the naturalistic Kammerspiel (‘slice of life’) film Menschen am Sonntag (1930). This was a seminal work in German cinema that involved several Jewish film artists

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Modernist compositional strategies in Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross

who would later flee to Hollywood after the Nazis came to power, including Edgar Ulmer, Oscar-winning directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinneman, and DP Eugen Schüfftan. The formally striking establishing shot of Criss Cross also recalls the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s framing, particularly high-angle shots in industrial spaces, in The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). Vertov’s film was part of the so-called City Symphony films, avant-garde documentary works that developed an urban cinematic discourse of ‘fragmentation and evocation’ through a concerted formalism of, among other things, alienating angles, ‘skewed perspective and violent changes in scale, [and] simultaneous perception of different sites and objects’ (Uricchio 2008: 107). The shot brings to mind similar photographic manoeuvres by Alexander Rodchenko or Otto Umbehr’s overhead Berlin photograph Unheimliche Straße (‘Uncanny Street’, 1928) (Webber 2008: 66–7). Ulmer claimed he had the idea for Menschen after seeing the Vertov film (Alpi 1998: 20); Umbehr, meanwhile, had worked as an assistant cameraman on Walter Ruttmann’s documentary Berlin: The Symphony of The Great City (1927). Furthermore, in Siodmak’s film about a labour-management conflict from the same period, The Whistle at Eaton

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Falls (1951), it appears he ‘wanted to break away from the restrictions of Hollywood, and was excited about returning to a contemporary form of the neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) he had pursued in Menschen am Sonntag’ (Alpi 1998: 200). In both of the proto-heists, then, Siodmak returned to his modernist avant-garde roots, at least in a restricted formalistic sense. The heist would therefore be born under the sign of a selfconscious aesthetic and ideological agenda. What, then, would this ‘contemporary form’ of the New Objectivity mean, and what would its utility be, when deferred by twenty years and displaced culturally and institutionally into a mass-media Hollywood genre? After all, these formal, film-specific elements that recall European modernism prior to the 1940s must be articulated to specific social dynamics. In a study on urban settings in film noir, Edward Dimendberg suggests that a post-war contextual shift put these avant-garde practices ‘in the service of an aesthetic transfiguration without social transcendence. The metropolis portrayed in the film noir cycle seldom appears [as] a space of genuinely enhanced freedom and possibility’ (2004: 13; emphasis added). In other words, the modernism of Hollywood noir – a ‘vernacular,’ or middle-brow mass culture phenomenon, as Miriam Hansen describes it (1999: 23) – was also about freedom and liberation, but had turned inward and fatalistic in the period following the war. Dimendberg’s point requires one major qualification with regards to its effect on the heist. The heist is sustained by a similar urban backdrop that reacts to an ‘alienating system of exploitative drudgery permitting few possibilities of escape’ (Dimendberg 2004: 13). In this context, ‘the possibility of meaningful activity and freedom inherent to the caper was choked off in the fatalistic contexts of forties melodramas’ (Shadoian 1977: 339). Such fatalism marks much of Siodmak’s work that follows the blockage experienced by the modernist avant-garde movements of the late interwar and war period. But it is precisely a tarnished utopian impulse, a damaged search for ‘transcendence’ and ‘enhanced freedom and possibility’, that underwrites the collective effort of the noir heist team. Significantly, Siodmak’s films were watched by a mainstream American audience. One device marks the shift: we do not identify with the gang, only with the doomed male lead. Starting with Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, the heist begins to elicit sympathy for the crewmembers. The technical bravura displayed in the heist sequences of The Killers and Criss Cross are not just empty virtuosity but rather pivotal. The

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sequences undeniably eschew dialogue-laden representation in favour of pure action and movement. Their stylised presentation, particularly the high-angle shots, become figures for the filmmaker’s craft itself, a possibility hinted at by Clarens when he grasps that the single-take location tracking shot of The Killers’ sequence is ‘as daring as the heist itself’ (1997: 200). In a different context and with reference to the ‘bravado’ of the opening to Criss Cross, Dimendberg warns us to be suspicious that the film ‘display[s] far more of the city than is necessary to commence [its] narrative and do[es] so through complications and expense of aerial cinematography’ (2004: 89). There is another way to interpret the extended aerial shot. When Steve gets hired at Horten’s Armored Car service, he wonders aloud whether there is a ‘defense against an aerial holdup? Who knows, they’re liable to start coming at you one day with a helicopter.’ His coworker replies that there has been no holdup in twenty-eight years. Steve’s comment recalls the prologue’s exceptional device for representing the urban landscape of L.A. – Siodmak has already ‘heisted’ the city and gotten away with it. These moments call to mind a host of mannerist modernist tropes of god-like artistry, asserting the superiority of aesthetic prowess even in the sombre, godless world of noir. The implications, then, are twofold. First, the planning and robbery sequences break away from gangster and neo-gangster films. Second, they foretell the meta-cinematic potential of the heist structure as a collaborative, technical and technological parable of film art. The common themes between Walsh’s and Siodmak’s film noirs find a motivated fitness in the generic environment of the heist. ‘Noir laid the groundwork,’ Shadoian tells us ‘ – a motley crew united by a specific task, the concern with expertise and precise execution, the lone woman, aloof, still, but observant amid an atmosphere charged with male ego – but it was only in the psychological inertia of the fifties that the slow-fuse caper film took clear shape’ (1977: 339, n2). Siodmak’s legacy for the heist was not merely to open the door to a new form; it reiterated a promise to realise the utopian implications of its interwar roots in a new cultural context. The Heist Comes of Age Carlos Clarens rightly claims that the ‘subjective realism’ of Siodmak’s Criss Cross gave it a European ‘aesthetic’ as opposed to the American

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‘realism’ of John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle (1997: 202–3). The representational strategy of American realism, however, even when coupled with noir’s modernist fatalism, inherited a utopian impulse for social transcendence and freedom in the heist. The title The Asphalt Jungle, taken from W. R. Burnett’s novel, calls to mind the brutal forces vying in America’s urban landscape. The film tells the story of organised crooks setting out on a million-dollar caper and the central figure of Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), a rural Kentuckian down on his luck and caught up in the big city (Cleveland). He dreams of escaping from the urban jungle and of returning to his native thoroughbred-horse country. As with Huston’s films generally, The Asphalt Jungle derives its power as a tale in which a group of individuals tackle a task but fail. Doc Riedenschneider, an older man recently out of prison, masterminds the jewelry heist. His team consists of Dix, Gus the driver (James Whitmore) and the Italian-American safecracker, Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso). By repeatedly showing the faces of these men at work in close-up, the film humanises them and shows affection for work, effort and labour. The robbery goes as planned until a snooping security guard fatally wounds Louis. From there, the plan unravels at both ends. Dix is severely injured when he confronts their corrupt fence, an attorney named Emmerich (Louis Calhern), who tries to double-cross them. Doc, meanwhile, gets caught during his escape. As the perpetrators of the crime are hunted down, the film ends with Dix and his adoring girlfriend, Doll (Jean Hagen), finally making it back to Kentucky after a harrying car ride towards a sunlit countryside, but Dix’s wounds prove fatal, and he dies in a field surrounded by horses grazing near his body. Dix’s fragile humanity crops up in two sequences organised around a black colt owned by his family that is both a metaphor and metonym for the character. In these sequences, his fixation on returning to Kentucky encompasses his nostalgic and troubled longing for a bygone America. The film implies that the Depression severed the agricultural and community roots of everyday Americans, leaving people at the whims of the market and sometimes needing to look to crime as the only solution to their material woes. Early in the film, Doll tells Dix he had mumbled about a ‘corn cracker’ during a fitful night of sleep. In Dix’s dream he had ridden a bucking black colt, with his father and grandfather praising him as a ‘real Handley’, when in reality, he admits to her, the colt had thrown him.

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Dix goes on to say that the colt broke its leg and had to be shot the ‘rotten year’ the Depression hit; then his father died and the family lost the farm. The difference between dream and reality, especially the violent death of the colt, proleptically announces his own demise, but also serves to articulate his buried dream to regain the status and stability his family had enjoyed prior to the Depression. Huston disposes of the planning and heist sequences with as much efficiency as the caper itself. The planning takes place rather quickly and consists essentially of three shots in low-key, high-contrast lighting. The first is of Doc, Dix and Louis hunched around a table and looking at Doc’s papers, with Gus standing by. An overhead lamp casts light on the faces of the men at the table, while their backs and shoulders and Gus remain in the shadows. The shot resembles Siodmak’s compositions in The Killers and Criss Cross, but the brief sequence lacks the intense suspicion Siodmak developed, owing to the absence of the female stakes (Kitty Collins and Anna). In The Asphalt Jungle, the men trust each other; their solidarity is born of common socio-economic circumstances, despite different dispositions and cultural backgrounds.

Chiaroscuro lighting and Dix’s determination as Gus and Louis commit to Doc’s plan

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Doc’s plan is strategic both spatially and temporally. He maps it out, literally, on an architectural drawing of the sewer, bank and street, and describes the timing: Louis will take six minutes to penetrate the bank before opening the door for Doc and Dix ‘at exactly 11:54’, and the job should be done before a watchman arrives at 12:15. The heist sequence takes about six minutes of screen time. While Gus waits outside in the getaway car, Doc, Dix and Louis get into the bank. The film must be one of the first in history to evoke new surveillance technologies and practices: Doc points out the ‘electric eye’ security system they have to avoid to access the vault. Louis’s job is physical and requires a drill and nitroglycerin. One succinct shot from the rear of the vault captures Louis’s frame right in close up, acrobatically extracting the nitroglycerin from a small bottle; his face and extended hand frame Doc in the middle plane, outside the vault, looking on intently. What ensues is the condensed process of Louis applying drop after drop to the vault hinges with Doc looking on. The explosion opens the door but sets off an alarm. In democratic fashion, they vote unanimously to carry on with the job – ‘the biggest one yet’, according to Doc. Before leaving, Louis places his bottle of nitro in the vault’s safe as a signature of his talented work. The crucial two-part semantic shift in the heist brought about by The Asphalt Jungle consists of its sympathetic treatment of the criminal gang, portrayed as a brotherhood of small-time crooks with big aspirations, and the correlated audience response to their professionalism. Despite the ultimate failure of the heist – or precisely because of it – spectatorial identification with the crew as a social unit changes from previous noir robberies. Kaminsky sums it up: ‘Huston … not only creates sympathy for the criminal but respect for the way he does his job’ (1978: 71). The attention to sympathetic, industrious, working-class criminals has been read as an instance of social noir, films made by leftist filmmakers who were implicated in House Un-American Activities Committee hearings: ‘it is not surprising that they made some of their best pictures from the point of view of criminals,’ James Naremore points out (2008: 28). This context sits squarely with the film’s oft-quoted line that ‘crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor’. The Production Code attended to the depiction of criminal acts and the treatment of professions in The Asphalt Jungle. While the Production Code Administration’s (PCA) report raised some concerns, notably regard-

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Dix – ‘the hardened killer … without human feeling or human mercy’ – at the farm his family lost during the Depression

ing the unsympathetic portrayal of the police, and the PCA’s direct formal question asked of all films whether ‘the story tends to enlist the sympathy of the audience for criminals’, it nevertheless read Doc’s capture and Dix’s death as ‘justice triumph[ing] through efforts of law’ (Naremore 1998: 128–9). Yet such an assertion runs counter to Huston’s affection for the criminal gang – though less so for the double-crossing Emmerich – and against the narrative frame of W. R. Burnett’s source novel. Burnett’s novels, as mentioned, provided a narrative groundwork for the gangster film, as well as for the heist. Huston and Ben Maddow adapted the novel, an adaptation Burnett admired even more than those of Little Caesar and High Sierra (Burnett 1980: 145). The adaptation’s success can partially be measured by the fact that Huston garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Still, Burnett objected to Huston ‘overdramatiz[ing]’ Dix’s death (Kaminsky 1978: 145) and editing that undermined the police radio report by showing Dix struggling to get back to the farm his family had lost during the Great Depression (Naremore 2008: 129–30). Huston’s emplotment, then, undermines Burnett’s novel and the PCA’s expectations. No matter, the potent combination of Mark Hellinger’s production

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vision, Burnett’s generally sympathetic take on the professionalism of criminals, and Huston’s taut attention to criminals at work condensed years of related movements into a single film. Noir Heist as Modernism It is important to bear in mind the immediate context in which Huston’s film appeared. The war and then the complex economic network of postwar America and Europe demanded the full realisation of ‘Fordism’ and ‘Taylorism’, those pre-war practices of precision time and the efficiency of movement, tools, task allocation and cooperation used in mass production. The targeted institution’s ‘complexity and size require a systemization which mechanizes human action or reduces such action to a subordinate role’ (Kaminsky 1974: 83). To the extent that Frederick Taylor’s theories in Principles of Scientific Management (1913) included a wage system based on worker performance, one could think of the heist as an anti-Taylorist manifesto of performance value. In terms of time, this means that ‘the gang must exploit that dependence on regimentation by employing their own skills to be, temporarily, even more regimented and precise’ (Kaminsky 1974: 84). The team thus simulates those processes of modernity in order to combat their abuses. This gives shape to what is the most obvious convention of the genre from Criss Cross and Asphalt Jungle to Heat or the insert shots of watches ticking in Inception: the team must use mechanised society’s chronometric devices against itself by mastering and manipulating time. The heist plan is a rational programme formulated with a powerful mimetic component in relation to industrial time. The heist’s spatial aspects, as we begin to infer from these prescient proto-heists, are as complex as the temporal motifs, though less commented on. To begin with, we should point to the reliance on architectural drawings and schematics in these proto-heists. The films’ insistence on rational plans parallel the temporal precision of the heist and signify a need to master the built environment and human design of the impenetrable spaces that crews will challenge in fully formed heists. Furthermore, the metropolis – that most privileged site of modernity – is a crucial setting. The Killers takes place in New Jersey and Philadelphia, while Criss Cross is set in Los Angeles. Dimendberg’s study of film noir, The Spaces of Modernity (2004) differentiates between what he deems the ‘centripetal’

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cities of early modernity and the post-war, and sometimes postmodern descendant, ‘centrifugal’ spaces. Dimendberg uses Criss Cross emblematically, to illustrate how ‘the palpable absence of a single prominent center (despite many recognisable landmarks) and the continual motion of the camera hint at a decisive shift in the identity of the postwar American city’ towards an ‘uncentered’ urban form (2004: 89). The coming-into-being of the heist around 1950 may be no accident, then, since 1949 marked a ‘pivotal’ turn in the American spatial imagination brought on by phenomena ‘ranging from a dramatic increase in television ownership, to the passage of the Federal Housing Act, to the establishment of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, to the first successful atom bomb test by the Soviet Union, to the first transcontinental flight by the U.S. Air Force in under four hours, each of which in its own way introduced a new understanding of space’ (Dimendberg 2004: 177). Significant to this changing culture of space was the development of large-scale suburban communities starting with the first Levittown on Long Island in 1947 and later in Pennsylvania. These communities were one way of rejecting the dense urban centres that generated social anxiety at the time and that were addressed in films such as Jules Dassin’s The Naked City and The Asphalt Jungle. Let me suggest one final way of framing this commentary on the spacetime concerns of the noir heist by tying the genre to modernism. Situating the noir heist within modernism gives us some purchase on the expansive philosophical reach of the evolving genre between the 1940s and 1950s. For the purposes of this discussion, modernism encompasses a range of intellectual currents and artistic practices, dating roughly between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and underwritten by fervent ideological positions that oppose commodity culture and demand autonomy from political or institutional compromise. Modernism honed its aesthetic principles against those economic forces and markets that transformed the roles of art and of the artist in modern society. In relation to literature and fine art, the heist film of the 1940s and 1950s emerged belatedly and as a minor mass media form, but it appears to have found its bearings from modernism. This resonates with Jack Shadoian’s observation that film noir is a starting point for film modernism: With film noir … we get the beginnings of modernism: a refined technique, a disenchanted irony, self-conscious creation of filmic

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worlds, a metaphorical level of action, a greater degree of compositional abstraction, a photographic virtuosity with light and shadow that calls specific attention to itself as a tour de force … an increased philosophical flavor and control … as in, most notably, the metaphysical pessimism of Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross. (1977: 12–13) Notably, Shadoian’s illustrations for noir’s modernist sensibility are Siodmak’s heists. Unlike high modernist art and avant-garde movements, the noir heist is an ‘expression of anxieties about modernity as a mode of simultaneously modernist and popular generic representation’ (Bergfelder 2007: 141). That is, where we tend to identify Picasso, Le Corbusier, James Joyce or Virginia Woolf as high modernists, Miriam Hansen has reclaimed classical Hollywood, film noir included, as a ‘vernacular’ modernism (see Hansen 1999). For Dudley Andrew, the consequences of Hollywood being a ‘popular rather than an official or elite’ art are far-reaching: ‘Hollywood, more than the intellectual pioneers we always adulate, brought modernism into the world’ (2006: 23). Narrow though its formula may be, the noir heist shares philosophical underpinnings with high and low modernism and thus participates in the vernacular critique of post-war modernity. Moving beyond the accomplishments of Siodmak and Huston, the noir heist would embark on a path to reflect more self-consciously on the role of art and artistic autonomy in commodity culture, but would also find itself subject to the conventionalism of all successful genres.

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2

FOUNDATIONS : THE NOIR HEIST AND ITS SATIRE AS AESTHETIC PAR ABLES

In the 1950s the heist film came into its own. There were a spate of not-somemorable works from this era, but in the hands of more deft directors, the genre began to express idiosyncratic concerns across dramatic and comic modes, as in Jacques Becker’s taut elegy to an ageing gangster, Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), or Alexander Mackendrick’s splendid farce The Ladykillers. Moreover, the heist film hit two pivotal points that gave the genre a broader appeal to audiences: eliciting sympathy for the criminal gang and experimenting with widescreen and colour formats. In the first case, it was never inevitable the heist would continue to focus on likeable characters. Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery (1950) showcased a violent, precision-engineered robbery whose ‘militarisation of gang life’ recommend it as ‘the most typical of the heist sub-genre’ (Mason 2002: 99–100), just as his later work Violent Saturday (1955) presented the most unsympathetic of criminals. Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955), meanwhile, the first Hollywood studio film ever made in Japan, also foregrounded violence without sympathy for the gang as a whole. More indicative of the shift was how Phil Karlson’s dark, anti-heroic Kansas City Confidential (1952) differed drastically from his next film, Five Against the House (1955), in which the audience sides with four college students motivated by the intellectual challenge of robbing a Reno casino. On the other hand, Fleischer’s Violent Saturday and Fuller’s House

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of Bamboo also anticipated the noir heist’s symbolic move away from its B-movie roots and innovated by experimenting with emerging widescreen and colour formats (Bordwell 2008: 321). As important a factor as the audience’s reception of sympathetic thieves, then, Technicolor and CinemaScope presaged the inevitable inclination towards mainstream tastes before the colourful caper fantasies of the 1960s. Most significant to the heist film’s history during this era, however, was its transformation into an allegory for collaborative creative activity. This arises in three foundational noir films from the middle of the decade – Jules Dassin’s Rififi, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, and JeanPierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur – but also in two satirical works that bookend the decade – Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob and Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street. This chapter will examine the noir heist first before moving on to the comedies, though it should be evident each set profoundly shaped the genre. Dassin, Kubrick and Melville borrowed John Huston’s sociological interest in working class people or professional criminals living on society’s margins. The tragic outcome of their films – their ‘enigmatic fatal strategy’ (Telotte 1996: 163) – hones the post-war pessimism of film noir (see chapter one) in the face of a new corporate era, a pessimism abandoned by most post-1980 heists that induces us to characterise this manifestation of the genre as a noir heist (see Telotte’s two phases of the noir caper, 1996: 165–6). Yet despite the amusing tone and lack of violence of Crichton’s and Monicelli’s films, they share in common with these noir heists a pleasure in failure. These films are remarkable for energising the functional message of the heist by fully realising the genre’s potential as subtle mainstream parables about aesthetic and economic autonomy with a modernist edge that celebrates failure as the ineluctable end of artistic endeavours. Allistair Rolls and Deborah Walker’s observation about Dassin’s Rififi applies equally to the genre at large: ‘Rififi is notable for its emphasis on crime as work and the role of the skill and cooperation in transforming labour into art. In this … Rififi’s heist cries out to be read as an allegory of the film-making process itself as collective craftsmanship’ (2009: 154). These films each separately exploited the generic potential of a transgressive act – robbery – that lends itself particularly well to the sublimated desire for both economic and aesthetic independence, a potentiality of the form that remains a constant into the twenty-first century.

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Contexts for the Mid-1950s Noir Heist The noir heist’s entangled and sometimes contradictory strands in the 1950s may be interpreted in light of three interrelated contexts: the imminent demise of film noir at the very moment critical attention begins to recognise it as a distinctive film idiom operating both within and against Hollywood; the concomitant emergence of auteurism, the influential theory of film authorship championed by critics at the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma; and the transatlantic exchange of ideas and forms of several heists of the period. James Naremore points out that auteurism and film noir worked in parallel: ‘film noir was a collective style operating within and against the Hollywood system; and the auteur was an individual stylist who achieved freedom over the studio through existential choice’ (1998: 26). The freedom or artistic autonomy embedded in the films examined in this chapter mark this moment as a watershed in the genre’s history and link the modest aspirations of the noir heist (even when comic) to modernism, the cultural current of the first half of the twentieth century, inflected by a wariness towards commodity culture’s effect on artists similar to what we find in a more restrictive sense in auteurism. The major noir heists I examine in this chapter were released between 1954 and 1956, a felicitous moment in the history of film criticism when the concept of the auteur arose in French film criticism. François Truffaut’s 1954 landmark essay in the Cahiers du cinéma, ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’, circulated his ‘politique des auteurs’, a theory that celebrated the individual ‘author’ of a film. Truffaut and his fellow critics admitted that cinema, and Hollywood cinema in particular, was a mass art. But they venerated those directors and screenwriters who put signature touches on their industrial products. The critic Jean-Luc Comolli, for example, railed against the genre film spectator’s ‘conditioned’ desire ‘for familiar forms, recognized patterns, the whole homogenized apparatus’ (1986: 211), while praising those auteurs that ‘sought to opt out of Hollywood, or to subvert it’ (1986: 212). The auteur debate raised questions about the nature of film as a commercial art, and the status of its practitioners within and without the system. The politique des auteurs debate matters here because it evokes the independent stance assumed by those filmmakers working in and around, but also subversively against,

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Hollywood. The thematics of the heist in the mid-1950s and this critical discourse, while not causally linked, are substantively related. Auteur theory’s wariness towards institution and commerce echoes similar concerns expressed by the older and more far-reaching agenda of aesthetic modernism (described briefly at the end of chapter one). The avant-garde practices of European modernism are characterised by a sharpened sense of form and medium, a desire for aesthetic autonomy and self-reflective attention to acts of artistic creation. Film noir, too, including the noir heist, could also be imagined as an attempt ‘to define artistic value in ways that … maximize’ filmmakers’ control over their art, and ‘to make specific claims about what art is or has been’ (Adamson 2007: 18). Film noir arose from within popular media but reacted to the very same commodity foe as did high-culture modernists. Dassin, Kubrick and Melville were in their own ways wary of the studio system’s all-consuming power and worked ‘as independent producers outside of – and in opposition to – the Hollywood establishment’ (Kaminsky 1974: 76). Dassin was shunned by Hollywood as a result of House Un-American Activities Committee suspicions and fled to England, France and eventually Greece. Kubrick, an East Coast American like Dassin, chose to work on the edge of Hollywood. Melville could admire America’s B-film culture from a safe distance in Paris, where he remained resolutely aloof from the French studio system. The autonomy these filmmakers carefully guarded – ‘a certain estrangement from the centres of movie industry power’ (Naremore 2008: 1) – cannot be overemphasised, as it aligns with the very thematics of independence in their heist plots. Just as modernism was a transatlantic phenomenon, so too was the heist’s consolidation into a social and aesthetic parable. Although the noir heist may have an American patent, the sub-genre’s full realisation benefitted from a French-American collaboration (and a British twist, once we include The Lavender Hill Mob). As Ginette Vincendeau reminds us, ‘noir is also a French word’: film noir borrows something of its everyday environments and the ‘ordinariness’ of its characters from 1930s French Poetic Realism (1992: 57). James Naremore adds that postwar French intellectuals essentially ‘invented the American film noir … because local conditions predisposed them to view Hollywood in certain ways’ (1998: 13). Rolls and Walker suggest that the ‘constant communication and transference’ between the two traditions, modernism and noir, formed

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a related response to the ‘psychological trauma of the Second World War and its aftermath’ (2009: 2). The two traditions also shared a suspicion of ‘capitalist-driven modernization’ (2009: 5) that differed from the technocratic policies and state-run markets of socialist states during this time, which may be why the heist is found more readily in western liberal democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Though some French intellectuals feared the Americanisation of French cultural objects, no matter how Americanised the narrative syntax or directorial touch, the world portrayed was decidedly French. Instead of a flat transposition of forms, this cross-cultural encounter led to a congenial and ‘highly successful and influential generic matrix’ (Vincendeau 2003: 103). Modernist in spirit, several noir heists critique the corporatist, money-mongering compulsions of the new expansionism in effect on both sides of the Atlantic. Jules Dassin: The Dark Work of Creation Dassin’s adaptation adopts much of the coarseness of Auguste Le Breton’s source novel about the Paris pègre (it was a title in Gallimard’s Série noire), or criminal underground. Yet Dassin also pursued a modernist line of thinking, namely, the futility of any aesthetic project that seeks transcendence. One must aspire to break free, but Rififi’s tragic ending hues to a Girardian formula, suggesting that desires between rival gangsters will inevitably lead to mimetic violence, and that Tony’s and the gang’s search for independence will ultimately fail. This has biographical resonance for Dassin as he was trying to find a place to pursue his art unhampered by the politics of the HUAC proceedings. Rififi is ‘social noir’, a kind of noir film, as Rolls and Walker put it, that decries the ‘alienating excesses of free-market, consumer capitalism’ and expresses frustration over the failure of the New Deal that had promised to lead America out of the Depression into a progressive era (2009: 152). Having started in the working-class theatre milieu of New York, Dassin’s film combined a progressive social message with the theatrical milieu and pursuits of artists. But having fled the United States for France, he managed to convert a very small budget ($200,000), a set of B-list players, and drab location exteriors into a model heist that elegises manual and creative labour, thereby transforming failure into a triumphant paradigm for the heist. He

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did so by distilling Le Breton’s literary figures into graphic leitmotifs, by representing the process of labour and violence as a mixture of choreographed physical exertion and inspired intellection, by transforming the lacklustre spaces of bas-fonds Paris into a modernist tableau through an economical use of expressionism (Rolls and Walker 2009: 157), and by using sound judiciously to portray poetic creativity and mimesis. Rififi’s main character Tony Le Stéphanois has an art. It is stealing. Fresh out of the prison, ageing ex-con Tony (Jean Servais) forms a team for one last job: to steal diamonds from a high-end jewellery store. It is a dangerous proposition because of the dishonorable criminals competing in the same marketplace for a share of the take: Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), who owns the L’Âge d’Or (‘Golden Age’) nightclub, and his drug addict brother, Rémi (Robert Hossein). Tony’s old flame, Mado (Marie Sabouret), has taken up with Grutter. Tony’s partners Jo the Swede (Carl Möhner) and Mario Ferrati (Robert Manuel) are married men who enjoy domestic satisfaction. Mario’s safecracking Italian friend, Cesar – played by Dassin himself, though he is credited as Perlo Vita – will betray the team, unintentionally, by divulging their plan to a lover, Grutter’s singer Viviane (Magali Noël). Dassin maintained Le Breton’s image of the gangster’s eroding place in a new, post-war context without honour, even among thieves, but he also translated one of the novel’s figures into a central metaphor that underscores the value of manual labour. In Le Breton’s slang-laden novel, Tony catches a couple of cardsharps cheating. He tells one not to move his ‘mitts’ (pognes) and another to keep his ‘claws’ (griffes) off a gun, before Tony suddenly draws a gun from his own ‘fist’ (poing) (1953: 18) and Jo riddles one in his paluche (‘paw’) (1953: 18). Le Breton’s knack for the economy of dialogue comes in the French phrase ‘pas de pognon, pas de cartes’ (‘no cash, no cards’) thrown in Tony’s face by one of the cardsharps. Pognon is a metonym for ill-gotten money and derives from the French verb empoigner, ‘to grab something with hand or fist (poing)’. Le Breton’s title Rififi is slang both for fire and hand-to-hand fighting, and by extension a firearm or handgun. The hand serves as a metonym for manual labour, craft and instrumental violence. The first thing Dassin presents on screen is men’s hands throwing cards and chips, smoking and gesticulating, finishing with a close-up of Tony’s hands holding losing cards. No faces, just hands. Later, during a sequence in which Grutter

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Grutter’s hand threatening Cesar in the prop room

tortures Mario to learn the whereabouts of the diamonds, a low-angle medium shot captures Mario’s limp hand centred in the frame. Finally, the stunning symmetrical sequences in which Grutter captures Cesar and then Tony executes Cesar, are built around manual action. In the first, Grutter (out of frame) surprises Cesar in Viviane’s dressing room. A hand holding a gun comes into the right edge of the frame and gestures for Cesar to follow – Grutter is not in the frame, we hear an off-screen voice, then cut to a tracking POV of Cesar moving through the prop room until he is thrown into the frame and another hand reaches in from the left, shoving a diamond ring into his face. Dassin constructs a symmetrically parallel sequence later when Tony happens upon Cesar tied up at in the prop room at L’Âge d’Or. Here Dassin uses the same tracking shot, this time from Tony’s vantage point looking towards Cesar through the doorway. As he exits the prop room, Tony executes Cesar. This mimetic, right-left counterpoint of threatening hands finds its full realisation in the final firefight between Grutter and Tony, in which Dassin’s shot compositions and editing might be characterised as ‘gun-line’ matches that aestheticise the work of death dialectically. Dassin distills the hand – also foregrounded

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in the manual labour of the robbery sequence – from Le Breton’s gristly prose into one of the film’s figurative or poetic grounds. The execution sequence is significant for its modernist theatricality. Dassin had the benefit of working with one of Europe’s finest production designers in Alexandre Trauner, whose highly adaptable career spanned from the silent period and Poetic Realist Films to the cinéma du look of the 1980s. Trauner claims that the film was not to have an ‘imaginary’ but rather a ‘quasi-documentary’ feel from footage taken in Paris streets (Berthomé 1988: 128). His triumph was the expressionist conversion of the nightclub’s prop room into a space redolent of the 1920s avant-garde: ‘Cesar is executed amid a bric-a-brac of surrealist symbols: naked mannequins evoking the ghosts of old comrades, masks and a guitar for dissimulation and “singing” betrayal, daisies for happy illusions and (broken) ideals’ (Rolls and Walker 2009: 155). In this fanciful mise-en-scène Trauner harmonised the theatricality of the nightclub with several latent aspects of theatricality of the film, notably in the central heist sequence. Much has been written about the heist sequence, primarily because of its lack of dialogue or musical overlay. The ambient sounds of work are meaningful in and of themselves, because they draw our attention to the manual labour of these craftsmen. The robbery occupies a secondary place in Le Breton’s novel behind its seedy characters, and nowhere is process at issue. As Rolls and Walker rightly claim, ‘the dramatic intensity of the [robbery] sequence, still the quintessential reference in the genre, is wrought from an almost surgical attention to detail (the transformation of everyday objects into professional, precision tools), taut direction and camera work (cross-cutting between the closely framed action in the room, ticking clock on the wall, and the street below) and, of course, the Bressonian soundtrack, entirely without dialogue and music for 25 minutes’ (2009: 153). Rolls and Walker also emphasise the deep-focus group shots as a sign of Dassin’s attention to the collaborative work taking place before our eyes, an apt metaphor for ‘the role of skill and cooperation in transforming labour into [film] art’ (2009: 154). Thus, Dassin converts the robbery into the raison d’être of the film, the core aesthetic motivation. I wish to extend Rolls and Walker’s insights by emphasising the performative and richly analogical aspect of the sequence. The heist unfolds as a stage spectacle and music concert – without music. The men work in concert, as if they were performing improvisatory jazz, with one working

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Joe, Mario, Tony and Cesar labor as a team

on a task – Jo methodically piercing through the floor, Tony on the alarm, Cesar on the safe – as others stand by ready with the next necessary tool, their movement interacting harmoniously. They have practiced and planned, but never before performed. Other analogies come to mind. The heist is indeed ‘surgical’: Cesar cuts into the safe as if into a body; Mario functions as a nurse by handing Cesar scalpel (screwdriver) and clamp. It is also a dance: the men’s gestures are choreographed as they move about and reposition themselves in relation to each other and the safe. The sequence never turns away from the attention to manual effort. Jo collapses into the chair after hours chipping away at the ceiling. We see the exertion in close-up as the other three gently lean the safe onto Jo’s back and then onto wooden blocks. And, of course, the final segment of Cesar rhythmically cutting through the safe’s back, intercut with shots of the ratchet, the tightly framed shots of the faces of Tony and Cesar, then of Jo and Mario in acute anticipation, as we hear the ratchet turn faster and faster, is a crescendo of energy and exertion leading to a climax of virile fulfillment – all without a second’s worth of music or dialogue.

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Yet we fail to grasp the virtuosity of the heist sequence if we sever it from the entire sound-image economy of the film, especially the preparation montages, which function in concert with the theatrical work of the robbery. The music accompanying the initial practice-and-preparation montage effectively whisks the sequences along. George Auric’s score shifts between a playful and a modestly suspenseful tone, setting the spectrum of emotional response for the audience not merely for this sequence but for the film in its entirety. And before we ever enter the jewellery store, it too emphasises the talent of the work displayed, manual skills, intelligence and dexterity. From the street, Tony cases Mappin and Webb and the surrounding boutiques, while Jo jots down the comings and goings of the florist in a notebook. With Tony on the lookout and as Mario surreptitiously makes the imprint for the key, a light string and flute melody plays, with gentle brass, bass and woodwind accents. Significantly, as Mario finishes the copied key back in a workshop, the sound of a grinder run by Cesar in the background melds rhythmically with the string parts – the men are making music. Similar instrumentation continues throughout the montage, dipping occasionally into minor chords, and a brassier segment calling on timpani, flute and xylophone as the criminals test their escape in a car, until a crescendo completes the segment once Cesar reaches Mappin and Webb to determine which kind of alarm the store uses. Cesar’s visit is brief but almost as striking as the heist sequence. Certainly this segment adds to the work’s purity of medium. Unlike the previous sequences in the preparation montage, there is music without (heard) dialogue: a teasing flute and string intertwine while Cesar examines cigarette lighters before requesting to use a phone in the rear of the establishment. But what is unique in this ‘mimed sequence’ (Hayes 2006: 77) is that we also hear ambient sounds under the musical accompaniment – a female clerk’s shoes striking the floor, a male clerk in a creaky chair, and, most importantly, Cesar’s shuffling of bills. But the words mouthed by the clerk and Cesar remain unheard. Given the other diegetic sounds, this scene truly was played in mime! Gesture counts more than word; it works in conjunction with non-diegetic sound. Cesar slips into the back of the shop where, on the phone, he watches a clerk examining jewels, in a tightly framed low-angle medium two-shot, and glances around at the safe and alarm. The bass picks up, as does the volume, cymbals and drums clashing with the insert shot of

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the safe, brass sweeping everything away and a close up of the alarm. In these sequences, Dassin gives a nod to both theatre and silent film. What critics have failed to mention is that, differentially, it sets up the spectacular and performative nature of the central heist, which encodes the crime as an aesthetic act within the genre. Graeme Hayes highlights the ‘professionalisation of criminality’ in Rififi (2006: 73). The criminals are trained craftsmen, working-class castoffs in a society turning increasingly towards technology for its salvation. The film ‘revels in the display of craftsmanship,’ an exemplary use of Murray Smith’s category of the ‘cinema of process’, and, for Truffaut, the film is ‘heroic, a celebration of the dignity of labor, its moral worth and social utility’ (quoted in Hayes 2006: 74). One might be tempted to differentiate between Cesar’s artificiality and the working-class efforts of the other gang members. But because Dassin juxtaposes Mario, Tony and Jo’s manual skill with Cesar’s mime, the latter’s playacting is necessarily associated with the manual effort of the former, while theirs is elevated to the status of stagecraft. The montage thus metaphorically fuses physical labour and art, shrewd professionalism and mimesis, crime and the aesthetic. As an elegy, it raises the status of the skilled labourer to that of artist. As a final comment on process, I wish to address Tony’s particular genius as an innovator. Critics stress that because he uses a fire extinguisher to mute the alarm, he is not technologically oriented or the technology is outdated (presumably so as not to arouse the suspicion of censors). This may not be the fairest reading. Tony keeps running through possible solutions as the others look on, stumped as to what to do. Tony walks away from their objections, picks up a champagne bottle, and then looks over at the extinguisher on the wall, apparently realising the possibility of using compressed fluids that expand when exposed to air as a solution to disarming the device. I see three things here. First, it is Tony who comes up with the solution for the alarm – the team bears the burden for preparing and executing the plan, but Tony’s intelligence wins out. Second, it is a technological solution, one that involves a simple transfer of knowledge from one domain to another. Third, the alarm sequence alone takes up about as much screen time as the elliptical prep-andpractice montage. As with that montage, this sequence emphasises work and collaboration. But it distinguishes Tony’s superiority and operates as

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process. Rififi draws not merely from the ‘cinema of process’, but hints at mental processes that we are left to infer. We see that something is happening but we are not sure what – the process of problem-solving, of inventiveness, of creativity. Tony does to the alarm what Dassin does to Auric’s score: he mutes it. The result is genius. The Criminal Bestiary: Of Poodles, Parrots and Fate in The Killing Stanley Kubrick was notorious for controlling all aspects of his films. The Killing, Kubrick’s first important film in terms of budget ($320,000), was no different. Distributed by United Artists, which catered to independent producers, The Killing was based on Lionel White’s novel, Clean Break, about a racetrack robbery. The ultimate independent producer-director, Kubrick must have been drawn to White’s wonderfully titled novel because it afforded the filmmaker an allegory of modernist aesthetic autonomy – the story of a clean break from the establishment. Yet the fatalism of early heist films, which dismantle the best-laid plans of thieves, is ostensibly at odds with Kubrick’s insistence on complete control over all aspects of his own filmmaking. At the very least The Killing may be viewed as experimental in the sense that it lays out Kubrick’s intense film ‘modernism’,

Kubrick’s The Killing parroting the noir composition of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Siodmak’s Criss Cross

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according to James Naremore, that encompasses among other things ‘a concern for media-specific form, a resistance to censorship, a preference for satire and irony over sentiment, [and] a dislike of conventional narrative realism’ (2007: 3). The Killing’s modernist bent has deep roots in the aesthetic individualism of Romanticism and finds an idiosyncratic expression in the film when Maurice (Kola Kwariani), a chess-obsessed professional wrestler, doles out a life-lesson to the main character, the ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden): You have not learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else. The perfect mediocrity. No better, no worse. Individuality’s a monster, and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comforted. You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They are admired and hero-worshipped … but there is always present an underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory. Maurice’s theory of individualism in mass society is intrinsically hostile, facing the mediocrity of conformity against the adulation of the artistgangster and requiring a metaphorical infanticide. It also presents a selfconscious reading of the gangster genre itself: the masses derive pleasure from the artist-gangster’s catastrophic rise and demise. The Killing explores the possibility of independence from societal forces coupled with the economic power to break away from the constraints of everyday life on the margins. Johnny has assembled a crew to rob a racetrack of $2 million: Randy Kennan (Ted de Corsia), a corrupt cop looking to pay off debts to a loanshark; Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer), a barman at the track whose sickly wife needs costly medical care; George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr.), a track cashier whose adulterous wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor), ridicules his masculinity; and Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen), a bookkeeper who bankrolls the operation. Sherry and her younger lover, Val (Vince Edwards), plan to double-cross them. Johnny hires two contract workers to create diversions at the track: Nikki Arcane (Timothy Carey), a sociopathic loner and weapons expert, who will shoot a racehorse; and Johnny’s mentor, Maurice, who will pick a fight with track employees. Johnny points out that ‘none of these men are criminals in the usual sense; they’ve all got jobs, they all live seemingly normal, decent

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Echoes of Arthur Fellig (aka Weegee) crime photography in Kubrick’s The Killing

lives. But they got their problems, and they’ve all got a little larceny in them.’ Though not the professional thieves of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, the characters’ willingness to play mercenary shows that their social, economic or psychological marginalisation is enough to draw them into criminal activity. The Killing is about love, obliquely, and violent death, articulated to each other by money and fate, and organised through a comparison between two couples, Johnny and his girlfriend, Fay (Coleen Gray), and George and Sherry. Fate here is not culled from a mythological past. Rather, it comments on the cold abstraction and alienation of mass society, efficiently evoked by the film’s insert shots of crowds at racetracks engaged in a communal gamble. Johnny intends to settle down with Fay. Neither ‘pretty or smart’, Fay dresses soberly in stark contrast to Sherry; phonetically, Fay’s name evokes her faithful devotion to Johnny and their common fate. George and Sherry’s failed relationship stems foremost from Sherry’s cupidity and venality – she’d ‘sell [her] mother for a piece of fudge’, says Johnny. Fickle, sexually alluring, ever the intoxicating femme fatale, Sherry’s emasculating treatment of George pushes him to divulge the plan and then betrays him with her lover, Val. In the true spirit of the process film, The Killing’s most important procedural breakdown is that of the crime. It sews together discrete but

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Kubrick’s frightening clown thief

overlapping events marked rhythmically by repeated stock footage and the racetrack loudspeaker’s voice repeatedly announcing the start of the eventful seventh race. The Killing’s modernism rejects ‘conventional narrative realism’ (Naremore 2007: 128), portraying itself through the narrator as a ‘jumbled jigsaw puzzle’ and an ‘unfinished fabric’. But it is no postmodernist game of disturbed temporal jostling or perspective in which various points of view compete for truth. The structural effect of the loudspeaker’s repeated phrase is that we read the individual components of the robbery together as a larger whole coordinated in rhythm – and held together by various forms of violence. Maurice’s brute violence against the guards is counterbalanced by the sequence’s symmetrical compositional qualities that give his fight a poetic quality, only to be swept aside by racist, psychopathic violence in the subsequent segment in which Nikki berates a black parking attendant and then shoots the thoroughbred Red Lightning as planned. Another disturbing threat of violence comes in the form of Johnny’s mask and gloves. The clown mask tags Johnny as a mischievous trouble-maker and a monstrous social outcast, and its grotesque mimetic allusion realigns other moments in the film into a singular aesthetic, recasting the pseudo-scientific edge of the film’s dry voice-over against the carnivalesque, the absurd, the surreal. (The Town and Batman: The Dark Knight are only the latest heists

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to exploit the clown mask; another would be the Hughes brothers’ Dead Presidents, which used whiteface to great visual effect.) Within Kubrick’s oeuvre the mask anticipates the frenzied, grotesquely deformed visage of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) as an ‘ignoble savage’ in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and, less directly, the Venetian masks of Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The latter harp on the libidinal eros, whereas The Killing, by title, evokes thanatos, death. Johnny’s gun also has a distorted quality. It was the subject of protracted negotiation between Kubrick and the Production Code Administration that had outlawed the use of automatic weapons. Though James B. Harris, Kubrick’s early producer and an important figure early in his career, and Kubrick himself tried to pass a trick shotgun off as an automatic weapon, the PCA disagreed by noting that as long as the audience perceived it as illegal, then the difference was pointless. In the end Kubrick mounted a special handgrip on a shotgun. Because ‘the gun’s odd appearance gives Clay a sinister, deviant menace and adds to the psychological power he wields over the employees’ (Prince 2003: 133), its ‘compromised form’ was well worth the fight with the PCA. Kubrick’s sardonic contribution to the genre distinguishes it in several respects. If the plot is a ‘fabric’, as the voice-over announces, then Kubrick embroidered a veritable bestiary of horses, dogs and birds into the narrative cloth. Horse racing provides an intertext with The Asphalt Jungle. In

The Squawker in The Killing

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Huston’s film the black mare Dix Handley’s (Sterling Hayden) family had once owned in Kentucky serves a nostalgic function, fixing pre-Depression tranquility in opposition to the city’s post-war decrepitude. In The Killing, Hayden’s character Johnny asks Nikki to shoot Red Lightning: ‘You’d be killing a horse. That’s not first-degree murder. In fact, it’s not murder at all. In fact, I don’t know what it is.’ If anything, it is an unsentimental affront to his previous character Dix and an oedipally charged homage to Huston. The attention The Killing gives Red Lightning also makes us question the voice-over’s lucidity. When, in an extreme point of omniscience, the voiceover announces that Red Lightning had only been fed ‘a half-portion of feed’ – quite literally, a tongue-in-cheek moment in the narration – the film pushes the limits of credulity and narratological purpose. Then, Johnny recruits Maurice because he knows he will not ‘squawk if the going gets rough’. This indicts Sherry and George as squawking informants, a fact borne out by the two matching scenes of the couple, hardly lovebirds, at the beginning and end of the film. The film’s first sequence, with the overlapping dialogue and jarring sounds of Sherry and George’s caged bird, foreshadows their last – Kubrick’s explanation of the term cuckold. Sherry identifies herself as an informant by putting her hand on the cage as the bird squawks in the background – her adulterous ‘squawking’ to Val leads to violent death. When George shoots Sherry and collapses, he takes the birdcage to the floor with him. The last shot of this sequence is a close-up of George’s pockmarked face next to his gun on the floor, with a quick pan to the bird mimicking Sherry’s final words ‘not fair, not fair’. The bird becomes both a figure for the informant couple in opposition to Maurice, but also a mirror figure mocking the exchange between Sherry and George. Finally, Johnny stuffs the stolen money into a suitcase, a ‘Flamingo Hotel’ getaway bag branded with a pink flamingo sticker. Unable to take the suitcase on the plane, Johnny and Fay watch helplessly as a doting old lady lets her poodle, whose curls resemble Sherry’s, run onto the tarmac. A luggage carrier veers to avoid the pooch, the suitcase breaks open as it falls onto the ground, and the cash is released into a swirl of air funnelled by airplane engines. Flamingo Films is the name of the production company Kubrick started with his partner, James Harris, in 1955, and this was their first film. The Flamingo logo never appears in the film. But it takes little effort to read the flamingo suitcase as a playful figure for the producers’ desire to

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make their own clean getaway. Kubrick himself said that The Killing ‘was a profitable picture for U[nited] A[rtists] … the only measure of success in financial terms’ (Philips 2001: 144). The narrative outcome constitutes a self-reflexive, poetic act of bad faith to the extent that, unlike what happens in the plot, the film as a product did not fail: it tripled Kubrick’s budget for his next project, Paths of Glory (1957). Bob le flambeur Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur is a master film policier elevated by its ironic unleashing of fate and its self-conscious approach to the genre. Melville claims to have written a serious version of Bob as early as 1950. But feeling beaten to the punch by The Asphalt Jungle, Melville abandoned his ‘dramatic or tragic’ screenplay without discarding the theme of the ‘futility of effort: the uphill road to failure’ found there (Nogueira 1971: 53). He rewrote his original screenplay, with assistance from Auguste Le Breton, Dassin’s Rififi collaborator, turning it into a ‘light-hearted … comedy

Bob Montagné as iconic gangster in Bob le Flambeur

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of manners’ (1971: 53). Melville managed to create in Bob a dual ‘iconic’ figure that nostalgically resurrected both the American gangster film of the 1940s and the French, pre-war Parisian criminal milieu (Vincendeau 2003: 111). Vincendeau shrewdly proposes that we see in Melville’s mannerist aesthetic a ‘baroque minimalism’ and in his character Bob a self-reflexive cinematic identity, a rather nostalgic one searching to escape the present. Melville’s independent streak is legendary, yet his attitude towards collaboration in filmmaking may be misunderstood. Melville acknowledged riding on Le Breton’s success as a writer, but years later he was disappointed with how Le Breton’s underworld slang had ‘aged terribly’ in Bob: ‘Every time I collaborate with someone, something goes wrong. I have to work alone’ (quoted in Nogueira 1971: 55). Melville is not being disingenuous here; he always relied upon the most professional help, such as the editor Monique Bonnot. A more telling case would be his consistent reliance on cinematographer Henri Decaë. Decaë went on to become one of the most important behind-the-camera agitators for New Wave directors like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Louis Malle and mainstream ones like René Clément and Gérard Oury. Nor is Melville overstating his own conception of the director’s lead role for films produced outside of the studio system: ‘I have always had offers to make films which I have always refused’ (quoted in Nogueira 1971: 64). Melville’s commentary on collaboration has more to do with his career-long effort to purify his cinema into a classical elegance than with a disregard for those who supported him. His was a calculating form of independence that found expression on-screen in Bob’s desire for ‘the job of a lifetime’ (‘L’affaire de ma vie’). The eponymous hero of Bob le Flambeur, Robert ‘Bob’ Montagné (Roger Duchesne), a modish, silver-haired gambler from Montmartre, spends his nights doing battle with cards and dice. Bob has avoided illegal activity for some time, thanks in part to his friendship with Commissaire Ledru (Guy Decomble), whose life Bob saved during a gun battle. But sensing his age and down on his luck after a loss at the horse track, Bob decides to act on a tip from his friend Roger (André Garet) that the Deauville Casino safe will soon be overflowing with eight million francs. Bob plans to play the casino while his team waits outside for a dawn raid. A croupier at the casino, Jean de Lisieux (Claude Cerval), provides them with the building’s architectural layout and the safe’s specifications, but Jean’s avaricious wife, Suzanne

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Bob as a modernist artist in Montmartre

(Colette Fleury), blackmails Bob. Another obstacle arises from Bob’s protection of Anne (Isabel Corey), a young woman on the streets in the seedy world of Pigalle, a neon quarter of Paris at the base of Montmartre, home to nightclubs and cabarets. Anne attracts the attention of Bob’s surrogate son and accomplice, Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), but also that of a brutal pimp, Marc (Gérard Buhr). In pillow talk, to prove his bravado, Paolo boasts of the heist plot to Anne, who accidentally blurts it out to Marc. The police learn of Bob’s plan beforehand, but in a delicious twist of fate, none of the planning will matter. Bob begins to win so well at Deauville on the eve of the robbery that he plays through the night, seemingly impossibly winning against the house, and so distracted by his good fortune, that he completely forgets the job. The team arrives at the casino at the same time as the police, shots are exchanged, and Paolo is fatally wounded. The plan turns out to be a complete failure, yet Bob walks away having taken the house for all of its holdings. The film identifies Bob as an artist and an innovator, a man nostalgic not just for the pre-war order of Paris, but, like the legendary Pigalle

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he inhabits, for a bohemian nineteenth-century Paris that cradled artists, poets and the bas-fonds, an underclass of criminals and society’s spurned. Bob’s top-floor painter’s studio that looks through a bay window onto Sacré-Coeur Basilica was a location with special significance for Melville, who had lived in the area as a child. (Asked about the studio at 36 Avenue Junot, Melville answered that Roger Duchesne had actually lived and been arrested there.) When Bob complains about Paolo’s unkempt apartment, Paolo replies: ‘Not everyone can live in a painter’s studio. I’m not an artist [like you]’ (‘Tout le monde ne peut pas vivre dans un atelier de peintre. Je ne suis pas artiste, moi’). At another moment, Commissaire Ledru mentions the ‘Rimbaud bank’ job that got Bob pinched, likely an allusion to the nineteenth-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, who haunted Montmartre during his brief time in Paris. When we also recognise that Bob is an ageing criminal, one of those ‘weary rogues’ that Truffaut praised; like Rififi’s Tony le Stéphanois, it is clear that he is more than just an American-French iconic hybrid. His ‘refusal of modernity’ is decidedly modernist, as is his ‘penchant for actes gratuits’ (Vincendeau 2003: 211). He is a hold-out from the past who recuperates several threads of the modernist tradition. Ultimately, the construction of Bob as an artist-ideaman from Montmartre places him in a constellation of figures of Parisian modernity that includes the painter, the poet, the gambler and the dandy (through his sartorial meticulousness), each a forebear to and proxy for the gentleman gangster in the fictional twentieth-century criminal world of Melville’s making. The planning and heist sequences bear the marks of Melville’s attention to process, enhanced with a rich metaphorical layering akin to the representational strategies of Dassin’s Rififi. The planning sequences entail work; the ‘coup’, or job, is all about play. The voice-over says simply that the planning and setup constitute a ‘waltz’ (literalised at several moments by the score composed by Eddie Barclay and Jo Boyer). The planning montage in Rififi evoked a concert through the relation of sound and image, and the robbery was performed as if it were a choreographed dance of manual labour. The self-conscious narrator of The Killing, on the other hand, called his story a ‘fabric’ and a ‘jigsaw puzzle’. In Bob, Melville’s self-conscious metaphorical recourse for planning and prep is, like Rififi, to music and dance, which convey geometry and graceful movement in time. Colin McArthur links Melville’s cinema to the material-

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ist philosophy of the French nouveau roman, whose interest in the ‘brute facticity of objects in the real world’ inspired the filmmaker’s ‘cinema of process’ (2000: 191). The canonical texts for this ‘virtually wordless attention to physical actions’ (McArthur 2000: 192), post-date Bob (Le Doulos [1962], Le Deuxième souffle [1966], Le Samouraï [1967]), yet this aspect of Melville’s cinema can be found in Bob (see M. Smith 1995: 218–23). The planning sequences complicate a simplistic view of Melville as a filmmaker solely of materialist process. As Bob trains his platoon of ‘parachutist commandos’ – this military terminology stems not only from the war’s effect on film noir, but specifically Melville’s fascination with the French Resistance – he places the men in position in a vacant lot on which he has traced to scale the layout of the casino, as if they were actors working through their parts in a play that Bob was directing. And, in fact, following this practice run, Melville inserts a dreamlike sequence (one and a half minutes long) in which Bob imagines the heist unfolding according to his plan. Cued by the narrator, we experience the imaginary event as focalised by Bob. Everyone is in place, but the eeriness of the deserted space is only heightened by a melody of strings, muted wind instruments and xylophone. Strictly speaking, this is not a prolepsis foreshadowing what will happen, but it does set up expectations of what will follow. (Lenny Borgher’s ingenious English subtitles for the Criterion Collection DVD interpret the sequence in just such a way by rendering Melville’s spoken French narration ‘Voilà comment, d’après Bob, tout doit se passer’ [‘Here’s how, according to Bob, everything must happen’] as ‘Here’s how Bob pictured the heist’; emphasis added.) On the other hand, as an example of Melville’s visual eclecticism, the subsequent sequence showing Roger refining his use of technology to break the safe eschews the recourse to long takes and ambient sounds in favour of a more dramatic rhythmic editing. In this sequence Bob, Paolo and the fence McKimmie – and McKimmie’s German Shepherd – look on and listen attentively as Roger augments the sound of his work on the safe’s tumblers by means of a speaker and oscilloscope. The sequence cycles through a series of close-ups of each of the men watching Roger, interspersed with shots of the devices and the dog panting with his ears perking up, building towards a climax. The narrative point of the sequence is to show Roger perfecting his timing through technological enhancements, but its aesthetic consequence is to demonstrate Melville’s own stylistic variability.

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Melville’s approach to gambling and chance have far-reaching ramifications for the noir heist film as a narrative of fate and failure, and for narrative dynamics generally. In reworking Huston’s plot, Melville places the robbery at the very end of the narrative; it never materialises as planned, becoming instead ‘an ironic non-event which in fact never takes place’ (Kavanagh 1993: 144). This too is part of what the narrator introduces as the ‘curious’ story of Bob. It plays off the expectation and build-up to a climactic event, only to veer in another direction, a let-down that still manages to fulfill its promise of process – but through gambling sequences that occupy the final fifteen minutes of the film and not the planned robbery. Bob had promised Roger not to gamble until after the job, but when de Lisieux fails appear to give access to the safe, Bob decides to wait for the job by doing just that. At first he plays casually, but is slowly drawn into the games: roulette at first, then the French card game chemin de fer. He wins so well that he departs for the higher stakes of the private rooms. While there is ellipsis in these sequences (Bob starts at 1:30 a.m. and moves to the private rooms at 2:45) and a tightly edited montage of play, Melville also extends the process of playing and winning in much the same way he had done for the planning and practice sequences. Bob’s ‘old mistress’ Luck returns, he forgets why he is there, and in a completely unforeseeable turn of events, his winning streak continues, unabated, until he entirely breaks the house. (See Kavanagh’s intricate explanation of the games Bob plays and the mathematical improbability of his wins; 1993: 154–6.) When he finally looks at his watch, it is already 5 a.m., the moment his gang is to carry out the ‘raid’. The police, tipped off by the scheming Suzanne, arrive at the same moment, a gunfight ensues, and Paolo is mortally wounded. The title establishes Bob as a risk-taker whose mode of existence is based on chance. Flambeur is a French slang term that entered common usage in the nineteenth-century. It connotes a person devoted to highstakes casino gambling and stems from a figurative use of the verb flamber, which, properly speaking, means to burn quickly and violently. Here, it touches on the sense of a mad, rapid expenditure of one’s fortune, as if consumed by flames. This connotation takes our reading in the direction of Thomas Kavanagh’s absorbing analysis of Bob le Flambeur, which opens onto the theoretical assumptions surrounding chance and gaming; Kavanagh shows that Melville’s self-conscious work meditates on ‘the

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ironies to which we expose ourselves in claiming to be [chance’s] masters, and on its corrosive relation to all narratives of human planning and control’ (1993: 145). Melville makes explicit the underlying irrationality of human endeavours that rely entirely on rational control, a lesson the noir heist borrowed from film noir and refined for its own purposes. Moreover, Kavanagh underlines our surprise at Bob’s ‘faith … in the technical skill of the master casseur [robber] rather than in the luck of the consummate flambeur’ that had defined his life to that point: ‘Bob defines his future not as an exploitation of chance, but as the execution of the carefully planned narrative’ (1993: 148). The exquisite yet biting irony for Bob is that in winning so magnificently, he has utterly destroyed his rational plan and undermined the good faith of his collaborators. Melville’s mannerism ensconces the genre in a meditation on (narrative) aesthetics and money, idolising the risk-taking criminal as a stand-in for the filmmaker, who must navigate an entrenched post-war consumer society with which he was at odds. Comedy Breaks into the Genre: The Lavender Hill Mob and Big Deal on Madonna Street Among Kim Newman’s insights into the ‘caper’ film is that it individuated as a heist sub-genre when it ‘evolved’ from its ‘embryonic form’ as a gangster film in double fashion, from ‘serious’ to ‘glamorous’ films, and from dramatic capers towards ‘such glossy, stylish fantasies such as Ocean’s Eleven, which with its self-mocking stars and flip punchline might be considered the first real caper movie’ (1997: 71). Underscoring the ‘victory of style over morality’ in romantic caper comedies from 1960 onwards, Newman’s concise history blends the phases of the heist film with typological aspects that rightly segregates the ‘caper’ from gangster films and films noirs. The glamorous caper was preceded by foundational comic heist films from the 1950s that overlapped with the foundational noir heists already mentioned, most notably the groundbreaking 1951 Ealing Studios productions, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Mario Monicelli’s 1958 Italian-language satire, Big Deal on Madonna Street. The significance of these films lies in their reliance on the familiarity with dramatic works worthy of parody. In one sense, these films borrowed against the dramatic force of the noir heist while channelling similar semantics and syntax for

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comic ends. The distinction in mode between tragic and comic plots is thus a historical and structural feature of the genre that exists from the outset. Ealing Studios Capers Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob is an original film, by all accounts the first fully emerged heist from Great Britain, which laid the groundwork for Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 comedy The Ladykillers. The Ladykillers came out as the round of gritty American and French crime thrillers examined above were solidifying the noir heist. In retrospect, the two films are clearly at the forefront of the emerging heist genre, though they were not necessarily recognised as such by their directors and producers, who approached the heist in a unique way long before comedy became a mainstay in the years following 1960. But this elides the fact that they were also among the most visible titles in the Ealing Studios’ ‘eccentric’ comedies of post-war Britain. This is no laughing matter, since Ealing comedies, despite their relatively small number, may be taken as a metonym for ‘British cinema’ of this era because of their far-reaching and enduring influence, ‘project[ing] a view of British character’ founded in respectability and coupled with a ‘mild anarchy’ (Pulleine 2001: 81) that sat well with the social message of the heist. The cultural projection of ‘Englishness’ was the conscious agenda of Ealing’s studio head, Sir Michael Balcon. The Ealing films of the late 1940s and early 1950s were not so much genre-oriented as thematically aligned around ‘the social process that ratified notions of right and wrong’ (Harper and Porter 2003: 60). Several of the Ealing films thus relied on criminal activity for their humour and moral message, though Balcon felt there was little moral ambiguity in his narratives: children thwarting a robbery in Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947), outrageous multiple murders in Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), a major theft by villagers in The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1953) and murder and robbery in The Ladykillers. Balcon’s influence over subject matter went hand in hand with an exaggerated sense of the familial culture of his artistic teams over whom he wielded enormous power. So much power, it appears, that Balcon’s inflexibility may have contributed to the eventual disintegration of Ealing in the late 1950s. He misperceived the changing

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social tides in Great Britain, a major flaw in itself, but more germane for our purposes is the fact that he doggedly refused greater freedom to his creative teams and argued for the artistic quality of film in the face of Hollywood’s consumerist attitudes while he increasingly treated film as an industrial product (Harper and Porter 2003: 58). Among Ealing’s most profitable films were The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, which enjoyed critical and box-office success at home and abroad (Harper and Porter 2003: 284, n2). Balcon felt their goodhumoured fun did not threaten police authority, and critics have agreed that they ‘allow no space for meditation’ over right and wrong, bringing their thieves ‘round to knowing guilt and experiencing justice’ by narrative end (Harper and Porter 2003: 61) and ‘reducing the action to a game in which the powers-that-be have an inbuilt right to win’ (Pulleine 2001: 82). Comedies of manners tend to be conservative in their reestablishment of the social order at the end. Nevertheless, this position betrays the very ludic qualities that define these comedies, which may yet express aspirations for artistic autonomy and creative control in a way that Balcon seems never to have surmised. Balcon may have had the first laugh, so to speak, in ‘limit[ing] the directors’ freedom of choice and interpretation’, given that ‘conditions at Ealing were extremely unconducive to the development of a personal “signature”’ (Harper and Porter 2003: 62, 63). But the resonances these two Ealing comedies share with the noir heists of Dassin, Kubrick and Melville, in allegorising creative processes through crime, tell us they also encode artistic aspirations for film as an art of collaboration in commercial society. All of these films end in disastrous failure, but the Ealing works end in a failure that is disastrously hilarious. Whatever the modal differences between the dramatic and the comic, The Lavender Hill Mob begs to be read in conjunction with its noir counterparts. The heist film frequently distinguishes between fine art and commercial or mercantile objects as a metaphor for its own place in a consumer society that transforms the value of mass art. That the heist film is aware of the apparently mutually exclusive relation between art and commercial products becomes strikingly clear in an extraordinary exchange of letters between British film representatives and officials of the 1951 Venice Film Festival over the fate of the The Lavender Hill Mob. In the months leading up to the festival, Balcon and festival director Antonio Petrucci engaged in

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a flurried disagreement over the film’s place in the festival as one of four official British entries. (The correspondents included Petrucci; Balcon; John Davis of Ealing’s distributor, the J. Arthur Rank Ltd. Organisation; and Henry French, chairman of the British Film Producers Association Festivals committee.) When the Ealing production got off to a promising box-office start, Petrucci called it a ‘commercial rather than a festival film’ and predicted that it would not win a prize (June 29, 1951, letter sent to Davis). A clearly irritated Balcon dismissed Petrucci’s assessment: From Ealing’s point of view, we would not care whether the film won a prize or not; we would not even care if it were hissed off the screen; because although there are no absolute values as far as an art form is concerned … we know enough to realise that all that matters on these occasions is that the small proportion of a film festival audience that is not parasitical, should see the best that this country has to offer. (July 2, 1951, to French) French in turn wrote to Petrucci that it should not be the festival’s purpose to ‘draw … or encourage the wholly artificial distinction between commercial and festival films’ (July 4, to Petrucci). Petrucci’s riposte was that ‘commercial success does not often mean that a film is artistically superior’ (July 7, to French). Balcon was to get the last laugh in the matter; the jury awarded the prize for best screenplay to screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke. The sense that life imitates art here is a point Balcon and Petrucci apparently overlooked in their assessment of the film’s reception. The point is far too valuable to ignore because the film itself poses this very dichotomy between art and commerce, between an imaginative and a thick-headed quantitative mentality, even as it exploits the difference for purposes equally commercial and aesthetic. The Lavender Hill Mob was indicative of a momentary turn in early 1950s British crime films away from the overt violence and underworld milieu of spiv-gangster movies (McFarlane 2001: 276; see also Robertson 1999). Despite the film’s moralising or ‘parochial’ conclusion, in which Scotland Yard captures the culprits, it still manages to privilege a crucial commitment to failure – a strategic commitment beyond studio censorship that gives the film community with the post-war noir heist. Most heists of the 1950s were dramatic and predominantly fatalistic; the comic

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heist’s less elevated style and gentle mockery of its characters, though not fatalistic (let alone cynical), still ends in catastrophic failure. The Lavender Hill Mob is built around the exceptional writing of T. E. B. Clarke and acting of Alec Guinness. Clarke’s screenplays (he also wrote Hue and Cry and The Titfield Thunderbolt) elevate oft-ignored smallsociety and working-class types, a fruitful tie to the social outcasts who populate the heist film, and sustain a gentle suspicion of commercialism that surely applies to the plot of The Lavender Hill Mob (Dacre 2001: 236). Alec Guinness plays the unassuming banker Henry Holland, who for twenty years has dutifully escorted gold bullion from the refinery to the bank, quietly biding his time for the right moment to hatch his plan. He eventually forms a ‘mob’ to steal gold bullion, recast it as Eiffel Tower souvenirs, and export them to France, where he and his partner will recoup the gold shipment and live in financial prosperity. Of course, everything goes awry in Paris, and the partners are forced to return to England to recover a handful of gold towers that accidentally get away. The flashback structure of the narrative accentuates the sense of Holland’s failure. The film begins in South America, where Holland has been living it up for a year in the lap of luxury. He recounts in voice-over how he had been ‘merely a non-entity among those thousands who flock every morning into the city’ – an evocation of modern mass society, which exploits the nameless and faceless for the benefit of a few – as the frame dissolves to a shot of a London bridge where teeming hordes of workers cross on foot. Holland’s narration shifts us back in time to when he was working in London, where in his staid, dark wool suit and bowler hat – a man of ‘no imagination, no initiative’ say his superiors – he observes refinery workers pouring molten gold into bar molds. The film valorises invention and creative ingenuity, in the context of a distinction between fine art and commercial objects. If Holland is to somehow steal the gold bars, he needs both an accomplice and a means for getting the gold out of the country. This comes in the form of Alfred Pendlebury, a new pensioner in Holland’s building in the unassuming, unexciting quarter of Lavender Hill. When Pendlebury moves in, he brings with him busts and other art objects, much to the chagrin of the proprietor, Miss Evesham (Edie Martin), who mistakes his objects for merchandise. She tells him he cannot conduct his ‘business occupation’ there, but he proclaims: ‘Ah, my dear lady, this is not my business occupation.

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No! These are my wings … My business occupation is something unspeakably hideous.’ Pendlebury sells souvenirs to British tourists at home and abroad, ‘propogat[ing] British cultural depravity’ to the masses of consumers who unknowingly buy abroad what is made within miles of their own homes. During a visit to the factory’s casting, Holland discovers the Eiffel Tower paperweights Pendlebury exports to France. A tower on a pedestal music box plays the can-can above the din of machinery as the camera pans to the casting vat, where two workers pour molten lead into a mold; when a fleck falls on Holland’s shoe, he instinctively flicks it back into the mould and is reminded of the gold refinery. In this shot, the camera pans up to Holland’s transfixed face. Holland transforms into Vulcan, an inventor-genius with a creative, rather than quantitative, mind. (The sequence anticipates the trial-and-error mental process by which Tony Le Stéphanois comes to realise he can use an ordinary fire extinguisher to mute the sound of a jewellery store alarm in Rififi.) The frame then dissolves to Holland looking intently off-screen at Pendlebury, who is busy sculpting a bust and mumbling to himself: ‘I shall call him “The Slave”.’ The sequence reiterates the heist’s restlessness with modernity and the latter’s occupational ennui and enslavement, including its outrageous commodification of culture. The Lavender Hill Mob’s finale links it to the modernist aspirations we examined previously, extending the backdrop of modernity so frequently associated with Paris as a primary locus of the modernist avant-garde into mainstream film. Holland and Pendlebury successfully export their contraband to Paris, where they have planned to recover the precious souvenirs from Pendlebury’s vendor on the Eiffel Tower. She has unwittingly sold them to a group of British schoolgirls. Pendlebury to his female vendor: I told you never to use a crate marked ‘R’! The woman, with a heavy French accent: But that is not an ‘ahr’, Monsieur. It is an ‘err’ [eh-rr]! Pendlebury, discombobulated: It’s an ‘r’ [‘are’] in English! As the irony of Pendlebury’s comment about cultural depravity now becomes clear, the two bumbling thieves take off to track down the objects for fear that, once in England, the objects could be traced back to them.

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The girls having taken an elevator, Holland and Pendlebury hurry down a winding service staircase. The standout two-minute sequence of their vertiginous descent is marked by rapid cross-cutting between Holland, Pendlebury and the elevator, intercut with shots from the interior of the Tower towards Paris in the background. The men circle the staircase in an overheard shot made by the camera spinning wildly on its axis, until the image itself spins out of control onto the ground. As they spin, a wide angle lens distorts their shapes and the Tower in the background, its iconic frame teetering back and forth in vertigo. The verbal wit and formally self-conscious visuals of this sequence recall several avant-garde moments, whether Crichton intended this or not. They include 1920s New Photography (part of Robert Siodmak’s background and visual style in Criss Cross and The Killers), Dadaism and other modernist film experiments. Dada may be behind the verbal play of the sequence, since Marcel Duchamp’s infamous readymade urinal Fountain (1917), signed ‘R. Mutt’, and one of his pseudonyms, Rrose Sélavy, a pun on Eros, c’est la vie (‘Eros is life’), which featured in his short Anemic Cinema (1926), both play with the French ‘er’, the very phoneme that produces the catastrophic error in The Lavender Hill Mob. The City Symphony films, fascinated and repulsed by the rapid technological change, uncanny spaces and demographic concentration of the modern metropolis, were ‘poetic records of the camera’s ability to capture the dynamic rhythm and kaleidoscopic pattern of city life’ (Barsam 1992: 59). Another possible precursor would be René Clair’s Dadaist experiment Entr’acte (1924) or his fantastical Paris qui dort (1925). The final segments of Entr’acte involve a funeral procession that (quite literally) turns into an unhinged roller-coaster ride through the city of Paris, thanks to rapid editing and swirling camera effects. The science-fiction comedy Paris qui dort portrays a small group of people saved from a mad scientist’s device that instantaneously immobilises everyone else in the city. They walk through the streets, briefly experiencing a life of ease and hedonistic pleasure, thieving where necessary from the inhabitants frozen in time. They bring their booty to the top of the Eiffel Tower where they take in the full view of the city. This reminds us of Clair’s conversion of the Eiffel Tower into a cinematic apparatus, a ‘viewfinder’ and veritable tripod for unique tilts and crane shots: ‘The [T]ower, then, is not only a complex, infinitely stimulating set; it provides a range of low- and high-angle positions, a

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vocabulary of movement, a play of light and shadow, of solid and void, which generate visual tension, a range of kinetic responses’ (Michelson 1979: 39). Likewise, in The Lavender Hill Mob the Eiffel Tower becomes a cinematic playground and apparatus for unusual visual effects for the DP Douglas Slocombe, production designer William Kellner, editor Seth Holcome and special effects supervisor Sidney Pearson, all Ealing regulars. (The film’s score was written by Georges Auric, the prolific composer who slipped easily between the Paris Opera and film, including Rififi.) Whatever its flaws (Harper and Porter call the traveling mattes in backprojection ‘ham-fisted’; 2003: 203), Crichton’s team appeared to absorb visual practices of urban modernity into the sequence, introducing them in a controlled way into a mainstream film. Thus, The Lavender Hill Mob’s disarming comic effects belie a sophisticated visual strategy that places it squarely alongside the modernist affirmations of the noir heist. Unlike the utopian hopes in the ‘new man’ manifest in interwar avant-garde film and photography, however, this post-war sequence undoes the ‘new man’s’ invincibility through comic as opposed to tragic failure. Spurred by The Lavender Hill Mob’s success, Ealing would strike again with its darkly comic heist The Ladykillers. Despite showcasing Guinness and newcomer Peter Sellers, the film may have suffered from its ‘caricatural’ depiction of old and new Britain (Pulleine 2001: 83) or its ‘cartoonish’ set design (Harper and Porter 2003: 203). What is more certain is that it succumbed to the very tensions between studio and director behind so many 1950s heists, if not the genre in general. Balcon insisted director Alexander Mackendrick cut his first version by a full eight minutes. Besides dropping extensive parts with Guinness, Mackendrick was forced to splice the robbery sequence, whittling down the crucial process at the heart of the heist. Nevertheless, viewing this set of Ealing comedies from the standpoint of the heist genre reminds us that their success rests in part on breaking new ground in terms of genre. To close out this chapter, I will briefly pause on one final film, Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Persons Unknown in the UK, Big Deal on Madonna Street in the US). Monicelli’s film is a milestone comic heist for its tenderhearted, yet highly intelligent parody of the fatalism and the methodical, quasi ‘scientific’ efforts of the noir heist. Already in 1951 The Lavender Hill Mob had shown the distance the genre could take from the seriousness of Siodmak’s or Huston’s noir heists, but it still relied upon

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the creative intelligence of its planners and the perfect execution of the robbery and smuggling plan. The satire in I soliti ignoti goes one step further in self-consciously undermining and overplaying heist semantics for comic ends: the bungling thieves never even get close to the cash hidden in a pawnshop safe. Furthermore, just as the powerful metonymic qualities of The Lavender Hill Mob made it emblematic of ‘Ealing’ comedy and ‘British’ film, I soliti ignoti is a ‘foundational film’ in the successful run of late 1950s and early 1960s Italian comic works grouped together as the commedia all’italiana (Celli and Cottino-Jones 2006: 88; see also Bondanella 2009: 180–1 and Brunetta 2009: 164). As parody, I soliti ignoti’s specific intertext was Dassin’s Rififi, but it also seamlessly incorporated elements from Italian theatre and film. In Italianising elements of a French-American crime film, Monicelli broadened the borders of the genre without bending the rules too far from topical cultural concerns surrounding work and economic opportunity. The story takes place in Rome, emphasising the Roman dialect (Brunetta 2009: 181), though regional accents and stereotypes appear along the way. The crew resemble typical heist characters, yet they clearly draw on ‘ancient character types from the theatrical tradition of the commedia dell’arte’ (Celli and Cottino-Jones 2006: 88; see also Bondanella 2009: 180). The crew’s hard-knock leader, the boxer Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), represents a kind of miles gloriosis captain. Peppe turns to a rag-tag crew for the job: an out-of-work photographer named Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni); the fiery Sicilian Michele Ferribotte (Tiberio Murgia), a zanni clown figure representative of Sicily; the young apprentice Mario Angeletti (Renato Salvatori), who crosses Michele when he falls for Michele’s kept sister Carmelina (Claudia Cardinale); and the elderly lookout Capannelle (Carlo Pisacane), whose technical utility never seems worthy of the task because he too is a clown, the Harlequin-like ‘dispossessed worker from Bergamo’ (Celli and Cottino-Jones 2006: 88). The crew receive instruction from a professional safecracker, Dante Cruciani (played by the inimitable Totò), who is a Neopolitan-style zanni; as a black-market capitalist, he makes a respectable living by renting tools to thieves. To get to the pawnshop’s safe, the crew must break through the wall of an adjacent apartment owned by two spinsters, so Peppe sets about seducing their flirtatious Venetian maid, Nicoletta (Carla Gravina). Despite the crew’s repeated attempts to approach the job ‘scientifically’, a phrase Peppe repeats at key moments

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during the planning and robbery sequences, the crew fails to meet his high expectations. They do break through a wall in the spinsters’ apartment – in a clear reference to Rififi, Peppe is sweating profusely from the hard drilling – but they only manage to pierce through the kitchen wall. Capannelle sets a table of leftover pasta e fagioli, and the crew expends its final hours eating and bickering about the job instead of pulling it off. As they split up, Peppe and Capannelle hide from two beat cops in a crowd of men waiting for work calls; the crowd drags them along behind a worksite fence against their will – Peppe and Capannelle represent a will not to work. The massive worksite fence resembles a prison. Capannelle escapes and calls to Peppe, ‘They’ll make you work!’ but Peppe accepts his lot. Celli and Cottino-Jones describe ‘the return to stock characters in the cinema [as] a comfort, even a reassurance of cultural identity in the impending consumerism, migration, and continuing industrialization of the Italian economy’ (2006: 90). Among the self-conscious charms of Big Deal on Madonna Street is its parody of filmmaking itself. Tiberio, the photographer, is assigned the task of filming the pawn shop to lift the safe’s combination. Monicelli’s comic genius is to build this self-reflexivity around a character type devoid of ‘self-awareness’. The crew assemble to watch the film together, as if they were in a theatre, but the experience is a disaster. Tiberio’s film is out of focus, the frame is jumpy, and there is no logic to the editing (shots of the safe are intercut with ones of his own baby). His disclaimer? ‘It’s not Hollywood!’ At the crucial moment, when Tiberio is supposed to film the safe’s combination, a clothesline drags in front of the camera, blocking the view. Dante declares: ‘As a film, it’s a failure.’ Monicelli must have taken great pleasure in consciously keeping his distance from Hollywood, even as he has the young apprentice Mario, his namesake in the film, break off from the gang for a job taking tickets at the local movie theatre. Parody’s parasitic nature recognises, instrinsically, the conventional formula against which it makes its statement. But parody does have a shelf-life: the otherwise successful Nanni Loy directed a slack sequel to I soliti ignoti two years later, Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti – ‘The Audacious Crime of the Usual Suspects’, which reunited several characters to rob the cash receipts of a Milan football match. Monicelli’s films, possible only as a ‘reversal of the generic expectations of the caper film’ (Bondanella 2009: 181), intimated that the noir heist was a fully realised criminal sub-genre

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in need of tweaking, renewal, or a new social function. Before the glamorous Hollywood capers of the 1960s made their mark, Monicelli found his way to a satirical model by embedding ‘a cynical sense of humor reflecting the human drive for survival in the face of overwhelming obstacles’ (ibid.), much in the spirit of the noir heist. Monicelli shows that heist comedy can be every bit as forceful a weapon as the fatalism of the noir heist for commenting on real social and economic problems, without losing sight of its utility for reflecting on film as art. The best practitioners of the heist as a vernacular modernist enterprise find moments to acknowledge its precariousness. At least this was the case in the foundational noir heist films, and here we see it in the finest early comic heists as well.

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3

CONVENTIONS : THE HEIST ADAPTS ITS MESSAGE

Whereas in the previous chapter I separated the modernist noir heist and its satire, in this chapter the two modes – dramatic and comic – reconverge as I map the heist between 1960 and 1980. The first decade was remarkable in terms of character and narrative variability, from social message films like the bleak, urban, race-conscious Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959) to period pieces like The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (John Guillermin, 1960), and from true crime reconstructions (Robbery, Peter Yates, 1967) to comedies of high-society thieves (How to Steal a Million, William Wyler, 1966). Filmmakers exercised the pliability of the sub-genre, exploring the ways in which it could reflect contextual preoccupations. Theorists of generic ‘evolution’ such as Thomas Schatz have argued that after initially passing through an ‘experimental’ stage, highly refined genres achieve an ‘equilibrium’ in which conventions ‘are mutually understood by artist and audience’ (Schatz 1981: 37), before moving into a subsequent phase that escalates the formal self-consciousness of the genre, foregrounding the conventions in a self-reflexive way that leads to radical revisions, parody and so forth. Such ‘evolutionary’ terms have a taxonomical disadvantage with regards to the ‘life cycle’ of the heist genre to the extent that parody exists within the genre from its inception – this was the significance of Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, as the last chapter showed. However, given that genres ‘are permanently available for reconfiguration’ (Stam 2000: 129), perhaps the theory of

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generic cycles gives us reason to believe that the heist had achieved a certain conventional ‘equilibrium’ by sometime in the late 1950s. The development of the heist genre cannot be described by means of a tidy timeline with discrete parts that line up teleologically and move towards some inevitable end. Yet the heist does seem to have stabilised its semantics and syntax by 1960, as evidenced by Henry Hathaway’s Seven Thieves (1960) and Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen. Thus, Kaminsky claims that Seven Thieves ‘incorporates a more satisfying sense of the big caper genre’ (1974: 91) than previous crime films by the film’s screenwriter, Sydney Boehm, had achieved (Six Bridges to Cross, 1954, and Violent Saturday, 1955). The direction by Hathaway, a veteran of 20th Century Fox, shows he had understood the dramatic payoff of a heist carried out by sympathetic thieves. But it may be the lavish production support that appealed to a mainstream audience: shot in black and white but also in CinemaScope; an ensemble cast with Edward G. Robinson, Eli Wallach, Rod Steiger, Joan Collins and Sebastian Cabot; an elegant setting in Monte Carlo; and a robbery sequence that cleverly used a diversion with a performative mechanism – the gang’s plan to rob a casino depends on a faked death to be acted out by Wallach and Robinson – to execute the plan. Hathaway, Kaminsky says, is in ‘full understanding of the formula’ (1974: 92). Likewise, The League of Gentlemen, in which a veteran assembles a team of retired army personnel to rob a bank, ‘may be the most explicit archetype in the big caper formula’ (1974: 92). As genre theorist Thomas Schatz says of genre conventionalism, ‘the narrative formula and the film medium work together to transmit and reinforce that genre’s social message … as directly as possible to the audience’ (1981: 38). Despite the manner in which the narrative recalls the postwar context essential to noir, and, as with Seven Thieves, despite the ultimate failure of the gang’s respective objectives, both works lack the gripping determinism of the noir heist’s plot, its ‘fatal strategy’ as Telotte calls it (1996: 163). The production values, the balance of drama and humour, and the lack of tragic drive qualify both films as a new kind of dramatic heist. The heist films of the period in question (ca. 1960–80) may be situated between the designs of auteurism (explained in chapter two) and this newly achieved conventional equilibrium. The shift away from lowerbudget noir towards more mainstream studio fare inevitably leads to a persistent contradiction within the genre between the exceptionalist

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desire for independence built into the heist plot, and the films’ tendencies to consolidate and repeat motifs in a conventional, imitative manner. During this transitional period, the heist genre faced a common danger: having laboured to establish itself as a recognisable form, it tended to attenuate its strength by losing its originality, even as its social function tended to mythologise creative genius and originality. The noir heist was displaced by the dramatic heist, a recognisable form open to engagement in more mainstream social problems but lacking the driving social mood and concomitant discursive unity of its origins in film noir. Over this same period, too, the comic caper tended to dissipate its strength with facile humour in films like the slack parodies The Big Job (Gerald Thomas, 1965) and Bank Shot (Gower Champion, 1974) or How to Beat the High Cost of Living (Robert Scheerer, 1980). On the other hand, despite some loss in force resulting from its conventionalism, the heist would gain other advantages as the range of its themes expanded. Heist films of the 1960s and 1970s intermingle humour and dramatic tension, splintering into several strains in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, where the genre emerged and has seen its widest development. In this chapter I will map out those strains that comment on prevailing cultural currents or embed a predominant discourse. After beginning with a brief overview of the heist’s elaboration in France during the period in question, I will analyse other forms of the heist: the social film heist of the Civil Rights era, the ‘Las Vegas’ heist, the ‘cosmopolitan caper’ of new jet-set internationalism and, finally, the ‘violent heist’ that is part of Hollywood’s post-Production Code era. It would be impractical to treat all of the heist and caper varieties that flourished during this period; noticeable omissions are capers such as Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair or Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job – even though I treat the remakes of these capers of work and play(boys), as they might be deemed, in chapter four. I am electing instead to focus on a select few in order to demonstrate, more broadly, the adaptability or plasticity of the genre once it had achieved a critical conventional mass. The Heist in 1960s and 1970s France The output of French directors during this period encapsulates the polarised trajectory of the heist. At one end of the spectrum is Jean-Pierre

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Melville, whose sustained explorations of masculine worlds in independent productions merit the auteurist label. At the other end of the spectrum are Henri Verneuil and Jacques Deray, who were prolific mainstream studio directors. Jules Dassin’s Rififi spawned a cottage industry of low-budget international crime films, not all heists, that appeared around 1960 (Du rififi chez les femmes, Rififi à Amsterdam, Rififi à Paname), including Deray’s Rififi à Tokyo (1963; José Giovanni did screenplays for Dassin and Deray). Shooting on location in Tokyo using lightweight cameras and sound equipment, Deray gave the city a chaotic, immediate feel that few studio heists of the era could boast, and it is one of the first heists to feature a television surveillance system in a bank vault. As a gauge of its movement towards the mainstream, the heist had become a vehicle in France for showcasing celebrity talent (Hayes 2004: 78). Stars Jean Gabin and Alain Delon appeared in Verneuil’s films Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) and Le Clan des Siciliens (1969), and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Lino Ventura starred in Cent mille dollars au soleil (1964). Mélodie concluded with a striking sequence of failure – a suitcase of money opens in a luxurious Cannes hotel pool – but worked in a conventional way similar to Hathaway’s Seven Thieves. Thus, in the 1960s, ‘a number of mainstream directors employed the traditional formulas (studio, stars, careful story-boarding, popular genres) to produce a variety of formally tired if sometimes thematically adventurous films’ (Temple and Witt 2004: 186). Even Melville exploited star power in his later heists with actors such as Ventura, Belmondo, and Delon, as well as Catherine Deneuve, Yves Montand and Gian-Marie Volonté. Yet it was idiosyncratic minimalism and attention to process that sustained Melville’s aesthetic and garnered him ever-growing critical and box office acclaim. For Vincendeau, the ‘Melvillisation’ of Le Deuxième souffle (‘Second Wind’), an ‘austere male epic’, consists in ‘stripping bare’ the social context from José Giovanni’s source novel to render the narrative and central character ‘more timeless, more tragic’ (2003: 156–7). This disassociation from the social context of the source novel affords Melville greater freedom for ‘virtuoso’ camera work and editing, particularly when he turns a highway robbery sequence near Marseille into a central aesthetic challenge (2003:160). Le Cercle rouge (1970), meanwhile, engages the genre much more directly than does Le Deuxième souffle: it is, for Vincendeau, ‘both a consummate distillation of the heist genre and a totally original take on it’ (2003: 192). Melville was self-avowedly ‘conventional’ – to the

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point of making Le Cercle Rouge ‘overdetermined’ – but he turned the film into a ‘cinema of attractions,’ the whole robbery sequence ‘standing [selfreflexively] for the precision of his filmmaking’ (2003: 195). The genre in 1960s and 1970s France was an exercise for a small set of craftsmen who specialised in crime film. Most exploited the genre as a stock-in-trade, turning to the same set of actors and crew for repeated success. Sometimes, however, this strategy misfired, as with Deray’s Le Gang (1977), which banked on the iconic power of Alain Delon playing a 1940s gangster, part of a 1970s vogue in French culture for all things retro, a nostalgic aesthetic ‘not [grounded] in history, but in [iconic] style’ (Buss 1994: 114). Melville’s concerted minimalism, on the other hand, deployed the heist as a pretext for refining and reflecting on filmmaking. Implicit in both cases are signs of the genre’s enracinement, its rootedness through conventionalism yet continued availability to the auteur. The heist’s conventionalism holds true across the United States, the United Kingdom and France; but instead of it being the domain of a few specialists or a Melvillean classicism that minimised context, as in France, in the Anglophone world numerous directors looked to cash in on the form and gave it a constantly changing face more connected to social context. The Civil Rights Heist: Social Conscience in the Heist Social issues revolving around race and ethnicity cropped up in heists early on, showing the genre’s potential as a pliable form. Samuel Fuller’s noir heist House of Bamboo (1955) is important for its treatment of intercultural interaction, as undercover agent Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) takes up with a murdered American gangster’s Japanese wife, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), to infiltrate a gang. With a journalist’s observant but distrustful eye, Fuller wrote the script to explore racial difference and enmity. He dealt with Japanese culture without exoticising it, casting light on everyday life and aesthetic ritual (a traditional kabuki troupe on the Koksai Theatre) and moving between spaces that were traditional and modern, sacred and profane (Buddhist temples and pachinko parlours). Fuller had no illusions about the tension he caused by shooting in Japan: ‘I wanted to capture a certain mood in House of Bamboo that I hadn’t seen in either Japanese or American films: the clash between our culture and theirs. At that time, Japan was very anti-American’ (Fuller et al. 2002:

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Sandy lays out the plan as Kenner looks on in Samuel Fuller’s widescreen colour heist, House of Bamboo (1955)

320). But he was acutely aware that he wrote the script in the context of an America dominated by racial tensions: ‘What made me proudest was that it broke race barriers implicit in American movies at that time’ (Fuller et al. 2002: 323). Fuller resituated the story in post-war Japan, and as a result House of Bamboo became the first Hollywood studio production ever to be filmed there. He was intrigued by Japan’s ‘curtain of isolation’, stemming from the country´s sakoku policy, which, from the 1630s through the mid-nineteenth century, effectively kept Japanese from leaving and foreigners from entering Japan. By incorporating interracial sexuality between Kenner and Mariko, Fuller tested the waters of miscegenation. In House of Bamboo Mariko laments how her people reject her for staying with Spanier, since living with a foreigner ‘brings dishonor on them’, without her fellow Japanese understanding how she retains her dignity through loyalty to her deceased husband. The film deftly handles the encounter of two cultures, accounting for differing codes of sexual space, clothing and perceptions of the body. As the heist film also encodes specialisation of labour (with its implied socioeconomic hierarchy), the necessary social unity of the crew, and an antagonism against any form of hegemony (class, race and so on), the genre provides a ready-made template to explore social issues. Such is the case with the racial tensions explored by Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (see Keenan’s excellent treatment of the film; 2007: 106–10). Wise’s film appeared squarely in the middle of landmark events in the complex history of African American civil rights in the United States, between

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the 1954 US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At this time, many were pushing for desegregation and social integration in all domains of life, from public schools and transportation, to stores, restaurants and neighbourhood associations. Wise’s treatment of the plight of blacks and of Southern prejudice in the film amounts to questioning the causes and consequences of ethnic divisions in 1950s America. In Odds Against Tomorrow, Ed Slater (Robert Ryan), a misogynistic, adulterous, racist white southerner recently released from jail, and Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), a divorced African American entertainer swamped by heavy gambling debts, must get along in the same gang. Racial tensions, spurred by Slater’s symbolic refusal to hand over a key to Ingram, divide the crew and thwart the job. Slater and Ingram engage in a gunfight at a refinery, ending in a conflagration. Their bodies are so charred that investigators cannot distinguish one man from the other – colour no longer matters. In the end, Wise’s retooling of the heist into a pessimistic civil rights vehicle commented on the inevitable price to be paid if blacks and whites were never able to learn to integrate. Race continued to be an issue in the heist through the 1960s and early 1970s in films such as Gordon Flemyng’s The Split (1968) or when leveraged by the discourse of Blaxploitation (see Rosow 1978: 279). Across 110th Street (Barry Shear, 1973), for example, combines Blaxploitation and the Mob movie by having black gangsters rob the Mafia. Cool Breeze (Barry Pollack, 1972) was the most direct attempt at a race-conscious heist in this vein, drawing directly from the W. R. Burnett source novel for The Asphalt Jungle but updating it with a utopian and race-specific agenda: a black gang attempts a jewel robbery in order to set up a people’s bank. If anything, it is somewhat surprising that the collective marginalisation embedded in the heist formula failed to generate more films decrying the racial and economic plight of this period. Learning from the Las Vegas Heist Whatever their mutual antagonism, business and gambling seem inextricably linked. This, alongside its obvious cash flow, is why the casino is a likely heist target. A bank may accumulate capital in the form of savings, but it also circulates cash in the form of investments, often as risky as a good bet in a casino might feel safe. And this is why, in turn, the

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Signage on the Strip and new American architecture in the 1960s

casino heist frequently serves as a metaphor for economics. In Steven Soderbergh’s remake, Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his partner Rusty (Brad Pitt) propose an outrageous plan to rob Terry Benedict’s (Andy Garcia) Las Vegas casinos, only to have their incredulous financier, Ruben (Elliott Gould) reply with a brief history of failed casino heists. At this point, Soderbergh inserts a three-part montage paying homage to Las Vegas as the casino-heist capital from the early 1960s through to Reagan’s 1980s: circa 1960, when the city emerges as an iconic gambling capital worthy of caper and other films; in the early 1970s, when the city becomes a model of a new architecture; and in the late 1980s, when the American financial machine turns Wall Street banks into a vast speculative market that reflected certain qualities of Las Vegas, using information technology and new financial instruments to transform the financial markets ‘into a casino’ (Taylor 2004: 174). The privileged locus of the casino heist is indisputably Las Vegas, in no small measure because the city became the ground on which spatial and economic changes to the American landscape played out across the three decades Soderbergh alludes to in his montage. Myriad films attest to the mythical character of Las Vegas in common lore but also to its pride of place in cultural debates in post-war America. We can point to two films in particular – Lewis Milestone’s comedy Ocean’s Eleven (1960) and Antonio Isasi’s violent drama They Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968) – that frame a critical period of change in American cultural history. They intimate by cinematic means what Robert Venturi extrapolated from a Yale architecture seminar conducted onsite in Las Vegas in 1968, the results of which were

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published in Learning From Las Vegas (1972). It was a heady time for the counter-cultural movements of the decade, whose anti-authoritarian, anticorporatist and anti-institutional stances seemed to call everything into question. In this maelstrom of change, Venturi’s book became a veritable postmodernist ‘manifesto’ born out of the gambling capital of America. In a move that resonated with the decline of high modernist architecture, the book argued that architects could learn from the commercial and recreational ‘vernacular’ of the Vegas Strip (Venturi et al. 1972: 1), not to mention suburban space in the United States, which is exactly what most of middle-class America wanted. Las Vegas, Fredric Jameson tells us, is where postmodern architecture ‘stages itself as a kind of aesthetic populism’ that ‘effaces’ the barrier posited by high modernism between high culture and mass or commercial culture (1991: 2). Interpreting these films through the lens of Venturi’s book measures the distance travelled by the heist film, not merely across the decade but since 1950. Milestone’s Ocean’s Eleven presents itself as a post-war male nostalgia vehicle in which a platoon from the 82nd Airborne relives its glory days by teaming up to rob the five biggest casinos on the Strip on New Year’s Eve. The group is made up of the Rat Pack – Frank Sinatra as Danny Ocean, Dean Martin as Sam Harmon, Sammy Davis Jr. as Josh Howard, Peter Lawford as Jimmy Foster and Joey Bishop as Mushy Connors. They are assisted by several eccentric specialists, such as Clem Harvey in the role of a Mormon cowboy from Salt Lake City named Louis Jackson, and Richard Conte playing an electrician named Tony Bergdorf, fresh out of prison and trying to make things right with his wife and young son. When Bergdorf learns that he will die soon of heart problems, he decides to go along with the plan to provide for his family. Crewmembers on the inside of each casino deliver stolen money to Howard, a garbage truck driver who hides the loot at a landfill. Things go according to plan until Bergdorf collapses and dies on his way to the meet. To make matters worse, Duke Santos (Cesar Romero), a professional thief engaged to Foster’s mother, figures out the plot and blackmails Ocean for half the take, calling the plan ‘a real work of art’ pulled off by ‘amateurs’. After the team tries to ship the money to San Francisco in the coffin with Bergdorf’s body, his wife unwittingly cremates his remains and all goes up in flames – except for $10,000 the crew leave to Bergdorf’s wife and son. In one sense, Ocean’s Eleven is a sacrificial narrative: the thieves do not get away with

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The Strip as refuse in Ocean’s Eleven (1960)

it, but Bergdorf’s ‘burnt’ sacrifice consecrates the theft for his family’s betterment. The closing credits self-reflexively feature the team walking down the Strip in front of the Sands Hotel, with the Rat Pack’s names on the marquee. Among the lessons Venturi took from Las Vegas is the idea that ‘the sign is more important than the architecture’ (Venturi et al. 1972: 10). Ocean’s Eleven pointedly makes this claim by repeating shots of the massive signs that sit on the edge of the Strip, with the casinos set far away from the roadside. To explain the plan, Ocean shows a scarf imprinted with a caricatured map of Las Vegas, including the massive hydroelectric plant that supplies the city and the five major casinos: the Flamingo, Sands, Desert Inn, Riviera and Sahara. The film is punctuated by nighttime or dusk/dawn shots of the Strip that showcase the artificial light and colour of illuminated road signs. The heist preparation sequence is bookended by dusk/dawn shots of Fremont Street, and the heist sequence itself is bookended by a composite shot of all five casino signs lit up in the same frame, split in the middle by a cut to another composite shot with each casino’s garbage can floating on the screen. The shot, then, establishes a formal equivalence between signs and refuse. The rather stolid-looking mortuary where Bergdorf is cremated could be from anywhere in small-town America, which reclaims the dead and the cash from the casinos. Yet the film’s approach betrays its encouraging tone towards this new spatial and economic world. When asked where Danny had come up with the plan, Curly (Richard Benedict) says, ‘A racetrack, a nightclub, Disneyland!’ Here the film establishes an economy

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between sites of (gambling) risk – the racetrack – and middle-class America’s ideals, both light and open (Disneyland) and dark and secretive (the nightclub). Such a claim melds all too well with Venturi’s own view of architecture. When his book appeared in 1972, he was quoted in a New York Times article as saying, ‘Disney World is nearer to what people want than what architects have ever given them. … [It] is the symbolic American utopia’ (Goldberger 1972: 41, 92). Ocean’s Eleven harnesses the utopian aspirations of escape embedded in all heists by linking them to the specific urban form of Las Vegas. Two other lessons Venturi gleaned from Las Vegas are pertinent here, and both find a structural motivation in Isasi’s They Came to Rob Las Vegas. The first has to do with the automobile and the role of mobile vision and communication for a car-based society. Venturi tells us that ‘a driver 30 years ago could maintain a sense of orientation in space… . But the driver [today] has no time to ponder paradoxical subtleties within a dangerous, sinuous maze. He relies on signs to guide him – enormous signs in vast spaces at high speeds’ (Venturi et al. 1972: 4). What the signage on the Strip implies is that Las Vegas, like Los Angeles and a host of urban plans across America in the late 1960s and 1970s, represents ‘a new spatial order relating the automobile and highway communication in an architecture which abandons pure form in favor of mixed media’ (1972: 11). And this new spatial order has an effect on the receptive apparatus of the body – ‘the moving eye in the moving body must work to pick out and interpret a variety of changing, juxtaposed orders’ (1972: 56). The new spatial order also has implications for the technology required to regulate such a complex and rather unharmonious system: ‘The order of the Strip includes; it includes at all levels, from the mixture of seemingly incongruous land uses to the mixture of seemingly incongruous advertising media’ (ibid.). The car and the highway, and the mixture of media, are thematised in They Came to Rob Las Vegas. This stars Lee J. Cobb as Skorsky, a security company owner in league with a crime syndicate; Elke Sommer as Ann Bennet, his information systems assistant and mistress; and Jack Palance as a Treasury agent on the trail of both the syndicate and thieves who rob Skorsky. Tony Ferris (Gary Lockwood) and his team hijack one of the syndicate’s high-tech armoured vehicles. By robbing Skorsky, Ferris wants to avenge the death of his brother Gino (a very aged Jean Servais,

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Rififi’s Tony le Stephanois), who had died attempting to beat Skorsky’s communications technology and military tactics. The film, then, is about ‘technological change’ and the ‘mentality of efficiency’ of a computerised world exposed to visual surveillance systems (Hardy 1998: 269). The film’s initial critical reception was icy, to say the least. Howard Thompson’s New York Times review called They Came to Rob Las Vegas a ‘dull exercise in crime’ and ‘tired claptrap’, nearly the ‘worst’ film of the year, and the result of Isasi’s confusing rather than suspenseful ‘quick-cut editing’ and the ‘hapless’ actors who performed well below their abilities (Thompson 1969: 30). Yet a recent Time Out review seems to evoke a completely different movie: ‘An audacious thriller, mainly due to the consistency of Isasi’s direction (overriding the usual hybrid problems) and to the casting of Cobb and Palance … [the film] is a thriller equivalent to Leone’s Westerns, reworking old formulas and paying tribute to them at the same time. But the parallel with Leone goes only so far: Isasi, rather than swirl his camera about, adopts the static, Zen-like posture of Ozu’ (ATu n.d.). And the Overlook Film Encyclopedia suggests that the film ‘incorporate[s] … all the main themes later taken up by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Hollywood movie Zabriskie Point: the disturbing effects of dependency on technology, the depersonalized city, the vastness and hostility of the landscape, the rebelliousness of the central characters’ (Hardy 1998: 269). Ferris recognises that he must disrupt computerised information and telecommunication systems if he is to succeed. He does so by burying the stolen truck in the remote desert, but the story ends in a bloodbath. Whatever the film’s failings, Isasi’s They Came to Rob Las Vegas, along with Milestone’s Ocean’s Eleven, show that the Strip encapsulates much of America’s technological economy and culture. The Cosmopolitan Romantic Caper One strain of the late 1960s heist film has an international dimension that is emblematic of the period’s transnational economics and tourist culture. This strain is what Vanessa Schwartz calls ‘cosmopolitan film culture’, a ‘cycle’ of filmmaking that was ‘commercially driven to create the globe as a whole in order to establish it as a marketplace’ (2007: 196). Pan American Airlines (Pan Am) began to offer overseas jet passenger service on Boeing 707s in 1958. As other airlines followed suit, location

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shooting became more desirable because it was now more affordable. The jet travel industry’s new infrastructure and middle-class pricing ‘enabled these location shoots themselves and the peripatetic quality of the cosmopolitan film production, as cast and crew could travel far distances more quickly, and daily work could be shot, developed, and sent back for evaluation’ (Schwartz 2007: 192). The stage was set for an expanding market of spectators, production companies began collaborating to a degree never seen before, and money and people began moving across borders to create and then exploit this new market. As Schwartz points out, the cosmopolitan film ‘embraced mobility across national borders and boundaries at the level of financial investment in production, in the act of filmmaking itself, in using multinational casts, and in telling stories that foregrounded both travel and the world itself as a theme and object’ (2007: 197). It is no surprise, then, that these new cultural traits found their way thematically into heist films, shaping into what might be deemed ‘cosmopolitan caper’. As a case in point, Giuliano Montaldo’s Ad Ogni Costo (‘At Any Price’; 1967), released in the United States as Grand Slam, paid homage to the ‘cosmopolitan’ conditions of its existence from its opening shot. Despite the dramatic and violent end of most of its characters, it shares transnational traits with a spate of deplorable colour romance capers from the late 1960s, mostly set in Europe. The film, a German, Italian and Spanish co-production, was shot on location in exotic locales – New York, Paris, London, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro and the interior of Brazil, and Rome – locales that were part of the era’s hip internationalism and of the cosmopolitan film culture Schwartz describes. The film’s music combined Ennio Morricone’s original compositions and samba-lounge pop pieces (the heist takes place in Rio during Carnival) of exotica and space age choruses. Grand Slam begins with an aerial shot of the New York skyline and then of the Pan Am building. An iconic postwar skyscraper in International style, the building with its sleek glass and iron form was recognisable across the globe. In Grand Slam, Professor James Anders (Edward G. Robinson), a retired American schoolteacher in Rio de Janeiro, lands on the Pan Am heliport after a quick jaunt on the JFK–Manhattan helicopter service, a sign of the new travel technologies and global commerce in the 1960s. The cast, too, reflects the emerging internationalism. Anders enlists the help of a childhood friend (played by Italian actor Adolfo

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Celi) he does not trust but who has the means to fence the $10 million in jewels Anders plans to steal from a bank in Rio during the Mardi Gras parade. Together they select a team of four specialists: an Italian electrician and toymaker (Riccardo Cucciollo), a French playboy (Austrian Robert Hoffmann), a British safecracker (Argentine George Rigaud) and a moody German military heavy (Klaus Kinski). The playboy seduces a frigid secretary, Marianne (Janet Leigh), who manages the key to the bank’s vault, and the team of specialists pulls off the job before they die in Rio while trying to escape. In the final scene, in Rome at a café near the Coliseum, Marianne has a rendezvous with Anders – she had been a part of the scheme all along – only to have petty thieves make off with her case full of the jewels unaware of its contents. The cosmopolitan caper leans towards the gentleman jewel thief film and presents a new set of characters placed in international settings, in the same spirit as Jules Dassin’s Topkapi (1964). Whereas the hero of the noir heist is ‘a thuggish prole’ after ‘grubby used bills’, a caper hero is a ‘well-dressed, impeccably cool character … after fabulously sparkling jewels’ (Newman 1997: 71). William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million, about a museum heist, was filmed in Paris and showcased the stars Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Ronald Neame’s Orientalising romance caper Gambit (1966) stars Herbert Lom as a reclusive widowed sheikh protecting an antique Chinese bust from ambitious cat burglar Harry Tristan Dean (Michael Caine), who enlists the help of a Hong Kong lounge dancer, Nicole Chang (Shirley MacLaine). In Jack of Diamonds (Don Taylor, 1967), a German-American coproduction, Jeff Hill (George Hamilton) begins by robbing Zsa Zsa Gabor of her diamonds in a New York high rise. He eventually meets up with his mentor, the Ace of Diamonds (Joseph Cotton), and teams up with a rival cat burglar and eventual lover (French actress Marie Laforet), traipsing from New York – to JFK via the Pan Am Building – to Paris and then Munich, and further to steal the blood-red ‘Zarahoft’ diamonds. There is also Carnival of Thieves (or Caper of the Golden Bulls; Richard Rouse, 1967), where a Spanish festival in Pamplona provides the backdrop for a robbery of the National Bank of Spain. Swedish director Alf Kjellin’s Midas Run (1968) stars another international cast with Richard Crenna, Fred Astaire, Cesar Romero, Roddy McDowell and Adolfo Celi. The film covers London and Italy and the countryside in between and features anachronistic undertones from the war. In Peter Hall’s Perfect Friday (1970),

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prim deputy bank manager Mr. Graham (Stanley Baker) needs Lady Britt Dorset (Ursula Andress) and her spendthrift philandering husband, Lord Nick Dorset (David Warner), to rob a bank; Lady Dorset outwits husband Nick and banker Graham and makes off with the cash and her young Swiss lover to the Alps. The aforementioned films are unquestionably in the cosmopolitan vein – hybrids such as the James Bond or Pink Panther films are as well (Schwartz 1995: 95; Altman 1999: 117–18) – but even when certain heist films from this era have domestic settings, they still engage cosmopolitanism. Michael Winner’s comedy The Jokers (1967), which pokes fun at monarchy and British media culture, features two aristocratic brothers, Michael (Michael Crawford) and David (Oliver Reed) Tremayne, who steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London for a publicity stunt. Winner inserts documentary footage of London’s sites and tourists, in alignment with the rapidly expanding tourist culture afforded by jet travel. Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (Bernard Girard, 1966) never leaves the United States, but ex-con James Coburn engineers a bank robbery to coincide with a Russian diplomat’s arrival at LAX as a diversionary tactic. Shots of the modernist architecture, the iconic ‘jet-age’–designed Theme Building, and the now ubiquitous underbelly shot of jets at lift-off, complete the international connection. The cosmopolitan caper films allow spectators to imagine themselves as part of a jet-setting global community capable of penetrating secrets and treasures. However, in its conventionalised and overused form, the cosmopolitan caper became attenuated and suffered from the same properties that define them: ‘The films are a cultural potpourri whose very incoherence underscores their attempt to represent cultural hybridity and transnationalism’ (Schwartz 2007: 197). The Violent Heist of the Post-Production Code Era The heist of the late 1960s and early 1970s was emboldened by skirting the edge of a singular phenomenon in America cinema associated with ‘post-classical’ or the ‘New’ Hollywood: the rise of ‘ultraviolent’ films following the demise of the Production Code Administration (PCA) and the creation of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Code and Rating Administration (CARA) in 1968. The turbulence of the Vietnam War had a profound effect on American media culture and opened the doors for the representation of violence onscreen. Examples of such onscreen

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violence include Arthur Penn’s couple on the rampage in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Sam Peckinpah’s take on the latent brutality of the western in The Wild Bunch (1969), and Don Siegel’s rogue cop in Dirty Harry (1971). Siegel had already challenged the PCA in his 1964 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers and later made a heist, Charley Varrick (1973). The Killers plays out against the backdrop of an expansive American corporatism that is eliminating petty workers like the hero Varrick (Walter Matthau) in Charley Varrick. When Varrick finally gets away from a contract killer after unwittingly robbing from the mob, the film revels in its hero – ‘Last of the Independents’ reads his business card – who is portrayed as yet another figure who stands for autonomy from any oppressive corporate system. Sam Peckinpah was the director most associated with New Hollywood violence, his ‘bloody squibs, slow motion, and elaborate montages of violence’ producing ‘a stylistic template for filming and editing graphic gun battles that filmmakers still employ today’ (Prince 2003: 219). Peckinpah’s 1972 action thriller, The Getaway, straddles two lines of inquiry into American culture – romance and violence – following its characters through the spaces of small-town Texas: a suburban house; a main-street bank; television, hardware and gun shops; trains and a train station; a bus; a plethora of muscle cars; a car-hop burger joint; a hotel; and a landfill. The Getaway is a tale of romance without being romantic: Doc McCoy’s (Steve McQueen) wife, Carol (Ali McGraw), gets him out of a Texas penitentiary by bedding powerful Sheriff Beynon (Ben Johnson). The couple works out its differences in the face of several threats, including Beynon’s venality and a sadistic, double-crossing crewmate, Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri). Doc and Carol are aided in the end by Cowboy (Slim Pickens), who presses them to settle down and raise a family: ‘That’s the trouble with this god-dang world, there ain’t no morals. Kids figure, if they ain’t livin’ together, they ain’t livin’.’ Peckinpah envisions social actualisation within familial life, but it requires escape from the cultural trappings of contemporary America. As the title suggests, the film is not so much about getting the money as it is about getting out and getting away. To establish the ex-con status of the protagonists, Peckinpah protracts the first twelve minutes of The Getaway to underscore Doc’s social and existential imprisonment through a series of montages showing him working at the prison or clearing growth

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Doc and Carol thrown out as refuse in the 1970s America of The Getaway

in a field under surveillance. With little or no dialogue, just the churning of machines, guards barking orders, a lawyer and parole board deciding his fate, Doc is portrayed as a subject of the system. Peckinpah also inserts shots of Doc and Carol making love, which are gentle, subjective evocations that, formally at least, are signature elements of his films. Significantly, the same techniques used to accentuate Doc and Carol’s relationship – jarring shifts in the spatio-temporal continuum or shot scale, slow-motion photography, canted angles and so on – also portray the most brutal moments and thus share comparable value in the film’s aesthetic economy. Formally the loving sequences and their violent counterparts are equal, yet semiotically they stand in contrast to one another. For example, when Doc finally gets out of jail, he and Carol go to a small riverbank with children playing, adults picnicking and teenagers swimming. This bucolic, quasi-utopian moment segues into a slowmotion montage depicting a daydream of Doc and Carol frolicking in the water with their clothes on (a shot of Doc suggests it is only a daydream). The sequence restarts with Doc jumping in, from another angle this time, and next we see the two making love in a hotel room. The question is whether Doc’s fantasy can surmount the violent reality of their situation. Later, in the final shootout at another hotel, most of the bloodletting takes place in slow-motion, as in the couple’s intimate sequences. The most blatantly symbolic of the deaths takes place when Doc shoots Beynon’s hireling. Bright red blood splatters from his torso and he slowly falls to the ground as his machine gun fires involuntarily, ripping through a rack of pornographic magazines and fiction; the slow-motion montage is quickly

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followed by a real-time shot of the hotel manager hiding under a desk with a ‘Sex for the Over 50s’ brochure visible in his back pocket. But the contrast is not simply between Edenic daydreams and aestheticised violence linked to cheap love. A decisive moment for the couple comes in the landfill. The two survive a chase by hiding in a dumpster. Doc, irritated at Carol’s betrayal with Beynon, tells Carol that all that has happened means nothing, ‘if we don’t make it together’. The sequence begins with a striking montage of the two being ejected from the back of the dump-truck, mixed in with all the other garbage. In slow-motion, and shot from several angles, they tumble out of the truck from atop a mass of detritus of all colours and fall with it some fifteen feet to the garbage pile, with Doc holding on to Carol. They are, unmistakably, figures of society’s refuse, but they manage to hold on to one another. Much of the movie is conventional: formally, the cross-cutting of the robbery, and narratively, the common semantic aspects, such as the focus on timing and technology or the double-cross. Yet the most idiosyncratic visuals of the film, the ones for which Peckinpah is known and which were, at the time, novel for their breakdown of process – a heralded aspect of the heist film – highlight American violence and its contrasting romantic potential if excised of corrupt consumerism. Conclusion I mentioned in the introduction that genre scholars observed a decline in the ‘big caper’ between 1975 and 1985. Capers continued to be made during this period and after, but they either had not found a ‘stable syntax’ (Altman 1984: 16) or were no longer a ‘significant [American] generic form’ (Kaminsky 1985: vii). How to Beat the High Cost of Living (Robert Scheerer, 1980) seemed to empty the heist film of its anti-establishment thrust by addressing middle-class suffering during the inflationary period of Carter’s presidency; it had little satirical bite to it. No matter that the film tweaked the heist’s semantics: the thieves are housewives, unfulfilled in love and material standing, who rob a mall in American suburbia. Even an auteur like the Frenchman Louis Malle, whose American films of the early 1980s are ‘thoughtful explorations of human emotions, told through small stories of ordinary individuals living in contemporary America’ (Frey 2004: 20), could not keep the heist alive. Crackers (1984), the odd American studio

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production in his oeuvre, had an excellent cast and a solid story by reprising Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, but even by Malle’s own admission was an ‘accident’ and ‘flop’ (Malle et al. 1993: 33, 142). The heist lost its audience, perhaps by losing a compelling message, and as a result it lost its place. For symptoms of the heist’s decline at this time lifted from the films themselves, it may require a trip back to the moment Kaminsky completed his landmark study of the big caper in 1974. The following year, 1975, Sidney Lumet tinkered with the genre’s semantics in his melodrama Dog Day Afternoon (1975). The film, at times darkly comic, took a thoughtful step away from convention by showing a desperate protagonist (Sonny, played by Al Pacino) botching a bank robbery intended to pay for his lover’s sex change operation. In retrospect, Clarens, measuring Dog Day Afternoon against classic noir precursors, objected to the film’s ‘wallowing humanism’ and transformation of the protagonist: ‘It is a story of failure as much as Criss Cross and The Asphalt Jungle were, but its hero is now the loser as criminal … instead of the criminal as loser, which [had] made the existential beauty of the genre’ (1997: 335). Newman, on the other hand, thought of Lumet’s melodrama and its bungling hero as ‘perhaps the ultimate critique of the caper movie’ (Newman 1997: 71). That the caper needed critiquing confirms our suspicion that the big caper had, in fact, reached a dead-end, if only to revive its ‘existential beauty’ grounded in the failure of heroic criminals. In this sense, it may be possible to measure the distance travelled by the heist film from its origins in the 1950s to the mid-1970s by the nostalgia that marks a work such as Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. In subtle ways the underlying longing in Cimino’s film is not just for a bygone America (comparable to Peckinpah’s The Getaway), but also for a situation in which the heist could still recall its generic origins, that is, a social context conditioned by war, hypermasculinity and crushing institutions. In Thunderbolt and Lightfoot a group of Vietnam veterans think they have been double-crossed by a partner, Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood), in a heist several years earlier. When they find Thunderbolt masquerading as a preacher in a rural wood-frame church, they force him to lead them to the money. The only problem is that the money had been stashed in an old schoolhouse, which has been moved to another location to make way for a modern building and designated as a historic

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monument. The film wears its connection to the western and road movie proudly – it was shot on location in Montana, which Thunderbolt and his young sidekick, Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges), cover by car, going from churches to bars and the schoolhouse. The veterans are forced to get back together for another mission. In its echo of earlier noir heists, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot yearns for a return to elemental origins that are not merely of cultural (American, school, rural life and so on) but also of filmic origins, as if sensing the genre’s potential demise due to its departure from those very origins. The nostalgic and the violent are related forces in the dramatic heist of the 1970s. I acknowledge playing fast and loose here, chronologically speaking, but the logic of these films seems evident. The nostalgia inscribed in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot articulates a desire to return to home, to a pure source. Meanwhile, a post-PCA heist like The Getaway does not merely read as a liberating form that exults in a cleansing social violence amid the riotous transformations of the late 1960s; we may also speculate that it sought to expunge the heist film of its dilatory elements predominantly in comic instantiations. In structural terms, the violent and the nostalgic heist films complete the evacuation of a tired form and thus lay the groundwork for the return to old forms in the 1990s, when conditions afforded the genre’s renewal.

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4

RETURNS : PERPETUATING THE MY TH OF ORIGINALIT Y IN THE REMAKE

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. – Jim Jarmusch

The heist film flagged across the 1980s, hinted at a comeback in the 1990s, and only reappeared with any kind of measurable regularity around 2000. Were we to look for attendant political or socio-economic factors that may have provided new terrain for the heist, the period 19802000 is bookended, on the national scene in the United States at least, by Jimmy Carter-era inflation and the tumultuous end of Bill Clinton’s second term. Meanwhile, Reagan- and Thatcher-era economic policies unleashed a heady form of capitalism that caused astonishing market fluctuations (for which international art markets, particularly for modernist works, provided a telling index). But eventually they also bred economic woes. The recession during George H. W. Bush’s presidency set up Clinton’s famous 1992 campaign catchphrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ At the other end of the decade, Clinton’s scandalous affair fostered or mirrored a morally

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ambiguous attitude about getting away with things without paying the consequences. By far the majority of heist films since the 1990s enjoy some successful outcome against society, oppressive institutions or main-stream morality. In other words, the cultural mood across the period may have invited filmmakers to reshape a genre that, at its origin, had typically ended in failure. Going hand in hand with the marked rise in heists that end in successful thefts, the last decade has also seen a noticeable increase in the number of heist productions, especially remakes. Heist remakes have not generally been part of a postmodern historical recycling of previous styles and works. Nor, as a rule, has the prodigal heist film extended the narrower tendency of 1990s crime films to resuscitate 1930s or 1940s crime fiction sources, a ‘return to the roots of the crime genre itself’ (Wilson 2000: 144). It may have been that the narrative possibilities of noir attracted filmmakers who sensed all too acutely their late arrival on the filmmaking scene. This is the argument David Bordwell makes in his assessment of contemporary Hollywood storytelling: ‘the movie-consciousness of modern Hollywood again emerges as a sense of belatedness, of coming late to several mature traditions’ (Bordwell 2006: 75). The layered film allusions and ‘adventurous plotting’ of recent Hollywood memory, feeding audiences nourished on film history, betray a desire for originality borne of this ‘belatedness’. The heist plays a role in this phenomenon. Figuring prominently among the agents of change in Bordwell’s analysis are the films Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) and The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), and director Steven Soderbergh, who ‘exemplified the resulting pluralism’ (ibid.). It is worth noting a correlation here to two components of the heist film’s history. The first is Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s 1955 study Panorama of American Film Noir, in which three of the four exemplary titles used to frame the end of a crucial moment in American cinema were heists (see chapter one); the other is to recent theoretical analyses of genre, in which the heist figures as a counter-example of generic durability (see Introduction). It is not mere coincidence that the heist appears when a crisis of conceptualisation occurs or the role of the filmmaker’s place in the industry seems up for grabs. Both have been at stake in the last twenty years during which independent cinema has grown as a partner with Hollywood and globally film industries have expanded their geographic and generic borders in all directions.

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If, as I have been arguing, the heist film offers a short-hand for directors seeking to define their work as authentic and original art while demarcating their role as creators with control over their products in a mass market, then we should not be surprised by the heist film’s resurgence. On the other hand, it should surprise us that a desire for authenticity and independence come in the form of a remake. A heist remake should be able to offer some account of its relation to the original film and the genre from which it ‘steals’ its material, as well as to the concept of originality more generally, in order to name its own status as a creation. My argument will be that the heist remake entails a subtle and problematic shift in the genre – less in syntax and semantics and more in overarching message. Contrary to the call for unabashed thievery from the respected independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch – his remarks (see the epigraph) are a general theory of poetic creation that displaces the emphasis from originality to ‘authentic’ theft – several high-profile, post-1999 heist remakes perpetuate a discourse of aesthetic originality. John McTiernan’s The Thomas Crown Affair, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven and F. Gary Gray’s The Italian Job come immediately to mind. These titles do not cover all the contemporary heist has to offer – I will trace the most significant trends at the beginning of this final chapter – but they raise questions afforded lately by the genre’s predilection for remakes. My focus in this chapter will eventually be on Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series. Given the director’s association with independent cinema and his proven track record of financially successful remakes for Hollywood (Warner Bros.), his use of the heist will be a key in determining the heist film’s audience appeal and platform for self-conscious directors in contemporary cinema. The dizzying number of heists that have appeared since the late 1990s is reminiscent of the highly productive era between 1955 and 1975. But the 1990s did more than just retain the lineaments of the heist film. There were conventional variants like John Woo’s art theft thriller Once a Thief (1991), Roger Donaldson’s remake of The Getaway (1994) and Albert and Allen Hughes’s critique of US power in the Vietnam era, Dead Presidents. But while these and Soderbergh’s The Underneath (1995) and Out of Sight (1998) fostered interest in the heist in the latter half of the 1990s, the genre’s more recent ubiquity may have benefitted from the impact of other high profile crime films, notably Tarantino’s brutal heistgone-wrong film, Reservoir Dogs; Mann’s sharp police procedural, Heat;

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and Singer’s narrative pirouette around multinational corporatism, The Usual Suspects. All three foreground the competitive, violently tragic and mimetic relationships (in both psychology and craft) of the hyper-masculine worlds of police and professional thieves, and all three relish process – particularly the process of thoughtful storytelling and dialogue – while skirting conventional aspects of the heist genre (see T. Anderson 2007 on Tarantino; James 2002 on Mann; and Larsen 2002 on Singer). These films did not revive the most conventional aspects of the heist per se. But they did reawaken spectators to the pleasures of (criminal) process and narrative experimentation, and invited others to step into the vacuum left by the heist’s extended leave of absence at a time when a rehabilitated heist might have something relevant to say again. Across the 2000s several filmmakers, some on the margins of Hollywood, found critical acclaim, if not financial success, with the heist. The flashback structure of the noir heist provided Scott Frank (who wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Out of Sight) an opportunity for examining narrative sequencing through the troubled memories of an accident victim-turned-robber (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in The Lookout (2007). Wes Anderson, for his first feature film, teamed up with Luke and Owen Wilson on the indie caper Bottle Rocket (1996) and more recently adapted a Roald Dahl book into the eccentric stop-motion animated heist The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) (perhaps not wanting to be outdone by the stop-motion animation of Nick Park’s The Wrong Trousers, 1993). With more of an edge than these comedies, David Mamet’s Heist provided a venue for the director’s ongoing moral critique of American economic vices; crewmember Blane (Delroy Lindo) wonders aloud to the gang leader Joe Moore (Gene Hackman): ‘Some people say love [makes the world go around].’ Moore replies: ‘It is love. It is love of gold.’ Other directors have made a living off the heist as part of their crime repertoire and creatively reshaped it in their own image. This is certainly true in the United Kingdom, where Guy Ritchie’s exhilarating depictions of lad culture in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), not to mention Jonathan Glazer’s abrasively intelligent gangster showcase Sexy Beast (2000), rejuvenated the genre and marked the heist lexicon along with Roger Donaldson’s pseudo-historical heist, The Bank Job (2008). The aforementioned heist directors are keenly aware of their relation to mainstream audiences and production limitations, and one cannot

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fault them for invigorating a form that has hardly been the sole domain of indie, or idiosyncratic, filmmakers. With money to be made on the heist again, rather predictable comedies (for example, Mad Money or, Tower Heist, Brett Ratner, 2011) and conventional dramas (such as Flawless, Michael Radford, 2007, or Man on a Ledge, Asger Leth, 2012) appear every year. Established filmmakers of widely different backgrounds, as well as star actors, have been swept into the current. Consider Frank Oz’s departure from his usual comic fare in The Score (2001), starring Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Edward Norton; Barry Levinson’s media-circus caper Bandits (2001) with Bruce Willis, Cate Blanchett and Billy Bob Thornton; Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006), starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer and Willem Defoe; or Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me (2013) starting Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg. Everyone seems to want some of the action, and for now the genre shows little signs of losing its momentum. One of the most significant facts about the heist in the 2000s is its globalisation. It continues to be a mainstay in Europe: in France with a Jean Reno vehicle like Ultimate Heist (Le premier cercle, Laurent Tuel, 2009) or Cédric Klapisch’s Ni pour ni contre (2003); and Germany, where Run, Lola, Run (1998) director Tom Tykwer made Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000; The Princess and the Warrior). In Latin America, Cuban director Fabrizio Prada’s Tiempo reel (2002; Reel Time), filmed in Mexico, experimented with an 86-minute robbery filmed in a single take, and Fabián Bielinsky’s ethereal Argentine production El Aura (2005; The Aura) put the actor Ricardo Darín to good use as an epileptic taxidermist bent on carrying out the perfect crime. The Chinese-language films Am zin (1999; Johnnie To, Running Out of Time) and Tian xia wu zei (2004; Xiaogang Feng, A World Without Thieves), as much con-artist or police procedural films, respectively, barter in heist motifs and motives, while South Korea’s recent violent crime films, typically procedurals and serial killer films, have left room for a critically acclaimed film Dodookdeul (2012, Dong-Hoon Choi, The Thieves). Do we read in this trend a globalisation of socio-economic conditions that encourage the heist – free markets, even in non-democratic states, that produce new kinds of marginalisation in their consumer societies with a concomitant desire for a piece of the economic pie? Whatever the case, it appears the heist has mutated into an

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Gun-wielding nuns in Ben Affleck’s The Town, revising the surreal mask and gun of Kubrick’s The Killing

idiomatic shorthand in new cultural and economic contexts that demands scholarly attention. To round out this survey, it must be said the heist film has been able to fall back on its footing for expressing social dissatisfaction, or even utopian aspirations. The former is at work in Ben Affleck’s heist about professional thieves in hardscrabble working-class areas of Boston, The Town, or Spike Lee’s Inside Man, one of only a few heist films to register the aftershocks of 9/11. Lee’s hostage/heist hybrid set in Manhattan pits a savvy police negotiator (Denzel Washington) under administrative scrutiny as a rising African-American against an equally clever bank robber (Clive Owen). In the end, both get away with what they want. The film holds no punches in indicting politics, high finance and the media (though it falls too easily into a recombinant discourse of Nazi blood money and theft). The presence of one character, a Sikh suspected of complicity in the crime robbery, unmistakably registers Lee’s ongoing critique of racist America in a post-9/11 New York, given the setting (the financial district), Muslim suspect and racially-charged dialogue. More inclined to dramatic bombast, Christopher Nolan’s Inception projects the architectural and utopian impulses seeded into the genre from its origins. In the film’s psycho-technological universe, corporate spies penetrate the dreams of their victims and parasitically ‘extract’ information. The film both inverts the prison film’s spatial breach (breaking in to take vs. breaking out to escape) and toys with heist semantics: instead

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of stealing from someone’s mind (‘extraction’), a professional thief, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his crew attempt to plant a thought in a competitor’s head – ‘inception’. Crews penetrate banks, payroll trucks, museums, private villas, casinos, jewellery stores, even dowagers’s apartments, so why not an individual’s cognitive vault, the subconscious? One character names Cobb’s faculty for converting dream space into believable illusion, ‘imagination’; another calls the imaginary worlds the crew creates for their subjects ‘pure creation’. Inception casts the filmmaker as a master thief and formulates the ‘shared dreaming’ of its thieves as an allegory of cinematic creation and reception. It is the film’s architectural and spatial imagination that holds our attention here more than the dreamscape per se (see David Kyle Johnson 2012 and Thorsten Botz-Bornstein 2011). Where the train is a signal transport technology of the nineteenth century, the jet aircraft is the late twentieth century’s upgrade. The film’s in-flight heist, in the secondary dream, suggests an intertext with Fritz Lang’s silent thriller Mabuse in which the henchman feigns sleep on a train to steal a commercial treaty. Inception exploits this dilated threshold of the international flight. It recalls what Marc Augé calls the ‘non-places of supermodernity’, the troubling archetypes of which are airports and airplanes – the very spaces in which the film’s travellers carry out their central heist; spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really makes any sense; spaces in which solitude is experienced as an overburdening or emptying of individuality, in which only the movement of the fleeting images enables the observer

Cobb and Ariadne stroll through the imaginary city Cobb and Mal built

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‘to hypothesize the existence of a past and glimpse the possibility of a future’ (Augé 1995: 87). The heist’s success depends upon the evacuation of identity during the flight, both for the crew posing as travellers and for the mark, Fischer (Cillian Murphy). The flight also figures in concert with the physics of the rest of the film. The flight time calibrates its relativity (hours to days to years) with regards to the first dream frame’s action in an urban centre and luxury hotel that has all the nondescript appeal of downtown Los Angeles, and then again with the descent into the unconscious in the second dream frame’s snowy mountain sequence. The two dreams are measured intermittently by the suspended time of the ‘kick’ montage in which the crew’s druggist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), drives the van of team members, all in shared sleep, off a bridge in protracted slow-motion. The speed of the in-flight heist and torpor of the van’s fall fits with Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘suspension of existence’ whereby the effect of speed reduces the world to ‘an image’, ‘ushering one into a state of sublime immobility and contemplation’ (1996: 70). Finally, the film’s architectural imagination literalises the utopian impulses of the heist film, just as it underscores the malleability of space. Cobb and Mal’s imaginary dream city, though thoroughly contemporary in one sense, evokes the uncannily antiseptic feel of Ideal City paintings of the Italian Renaissance. The crumbling dream city is as eerily geometric and evacuated of humanity. The city’s oppressive design reconstructs elements of the world imagined by twentieth-century urban planning, from the International Style to the Postmodern. The warm colours, wood panelling and lush green yard of Cobb’s homey domestic space contrast sharply with the monochromatic style of public and corporate spaces. In all these senses, Inception revives the zeitgeist and urban spirit of the original noir heist – down to the use of architectural plans and Los Angeles in Siodmak’s thrillers. Theft and Creativity: The Remake as Heist The aforementioned films suggest the heist has extended its lifespan and perhaps even refreshed its conventions. But the salient story of the contemporary heist in the first decade of the twenty-first century, is the dual predominance of the remake and what might be called the franchise series. I will turn my attention to a narrow set of mainstream heist films of the last decade that offer fodder for interpreting the potentialities of

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the genre along these lines, namely Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, a veritable franchise, and F. Gary Gray’s The Italian Job. Gray’s dramatic comedy relies on the inherited semantics and syntax of the heist genre, but also makes a claim about reuse and originality in this age of resurging heist remakes that requires our attention. Ocean’s Eleven, on the other hand, draws inferences about film art in relation to high modernist painting, originality and commercialism. As these films revolve around so many forms of thieving, doubling and copying, they emblematise the most salient problematic of the heist remake since 2000, and give us some purchase on the genre as a selfreflexive statement about film as art and commerce. Contemporary heists do not conceal their thievery, yet they do perpetuate the myths of originality and autonomy from institution in their films – without disavowing a commercial interest that may at times be in conflict with those myths. It is not that commercial interest has not always been a part of the heist; it is that the failure that so often capped heist movies afforded a certain humility in the face of an impossible desire for absolute freedom or transcendence. What does it mean for the heist film to find renewed success in the form of remakes? The question is not innocent. The idea of reusing materials – stealing – is built into the story structure of the heist, so the genre must be aware of its proprietary theft. Thomas Leitch argues that ‘true remakes’ entertain an ambivalent relation to their original films by referencing them, treating them ‘as forerunners instead of true originals’ (1990: 148). The intention behind this ‘ritual invocation/denial’ is to elevate the copy above the original (1990: 146), an effect at work in both Gray’s The Italian Job and Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series. Though Leitch determines that the stakes of this ‘competition’ are overtly economic rather than philosophical, Verevis counters that Leitch overstates the extent of competition between a remake and its original. Original and remake, in contemporary Hollywood, ‘generally enjoy a (more) symbiotic relationship’ (Verevis 2005: 17) from which remakes strategically accrue value by drawing on their models’ own value for marketing purposes. The remake doubles as a production or commercial strategy and an aesthetic challenge that does not exclude the possibility of creative takes on previous films, as Verevis surmises: ‘As instantly recognizable properties, remakes (along with sequels and series) … satisfy the requirement that

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Hollywood deliver reliability (repetition) and novelty (innovation) in the same production package’ (2005: 4). On the other hand, the very film on which Verevis bases his gentle corrective is Gray’s The Italian Job, a film organised around a violent competition among thieves and which posits rather baldly the difference between an imitator and an original genius (Verevis 2005: 17). Though not specific to the remake, another commercial strategy that has a place in this discussion is that of the auteur: studios profit from the ‘cult status’ of a filmmaker, the auteur, a designation frequently attributed to Soderbergh, who ‘remakes himself and his earlier remakes’ (2005: 10). How, then, do the films of Gray and Soderbergh deal with issues of commercial and aesthetic value, and of copy and original, in their heist remakes – how do they heist material for their own purposes? The Italian Job, which grossed more than $106 million in the US alone, encodes in its two thefts a theory of aesthetic and mimetic activity. Early on John Bridger (Donald Sutherland) mentors his protégé Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg), explaining that his life philosophy is to steal in order to live well, and that stealing is not about the money, that is, merely accumulating wealth: ‘There are two kinds of thieves in this world. The ones who steal to enrich their lives, and the ones who steal to define their lives. Don’t be the latter. Makes you miss out on what’s really important in this life.’ Bridger is apparently thinking of his estranged daughter, Stella (Charlize Theron), much of whose life he has missed as a result of being in prison. His definition nevertheless applies to the film’s core opposition between Croker and a rival thief, Steve/Frizelli (Edward Norton). Their respective views of theft equate to two models of imitation or mimesis: either as a creative poetics or mere mimicry. Late in the film, when Croker’s plan to rob his nemesis has been unmasked by accident, Steve mockingly underscores their similarities as thieves and questions the prospects of Croker’s ‘play’: ‘I mean that’s very poetic and all, but I just don’t see it.’ Pointing to Steve’s inability to use the stolen gold creatively, Croker spits back: ‘You got no imagination. Couldn’t even decide what to do with all that money, had to buy what everybody else wanted.’ Steve’s consumption habits derivatively mimic those of Croker’s team. The audience remembers the beginning of the film, where the driver Handsome Rob (Jason Statham) says he wants an Aston Martin (‘I’m just thinking about naked girls and leather seats’) and Lyle (Seth Green) a ‘NanG17 decoder with 70-watt amps (they’ll ‘blow women’s clothes off’), while Left Ear (Mos

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Def) shows himself to be something of an aesthete (if not a fetishist): ‘I’m going to Andalusia, Spain. Get me a house, library full of first editions, a room for my shoes.’ When Steve’s turn to pitch in comes, he shrugs and replies, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet… I like what you said, I’ll take one of each of yours.’ He shows the card he is about to play, his plan to kill the team off and steal the gold for himself. Once Steve thinks he has succeeded in that, he moves to LA, acquiring exactly what everyone else intended to buy. Steve’s crass, derivative imitation confirms his lack of ‘creativity’ or ‘imagination’. The film thus implies a hierarchy of imitative modes that places creative, inventive activity – understood as ‘poetry’ and ‘imagination’ – at the top and mere mimicry or copyist activity at the bottom. By characterising originality and imagination in this way, the film links the criminal to art and the heist to creative production, and in turn invites one to read other heist films according to the same themes. More specifically, it establishes a hierarchy of imitative modes that organises other elements of the film, at times in problematic ways, and in turn appears to formulate a model for reading the film (against) itself, if not the recent spate of remakes that rob from their forbears. One subplot defines a more significant instance of imitation or doubling with Lyle, the geeky computer hacker and stereo aficionado. His skills are called upon in the final getaway sequence when he hacks into the LA computer system to reroute traffic. Throughout the film Lyle insists on being called ‘Napster’, claiming to no avail that it was he who had invented the peer-to-peer file-sharing program, only to have it stolen. In a flashback to Lyle’s time at Northeastern University, Charlie relates his story. Shawn Fanning, the real-life creator of the sharing program in 1999, makes a cameo appearance to steal the program from Lyle, who is caught napping at his computer screen. Napster’s real-life troubles – Fanning’s business was assailed by musicians and the music industry – evoked the legal troubles of artistic production and consumption in ways that open onto the question of copyright and originality in a digital era. In one sense, it is one form of contemporary concerns around mimesis – sharing without poetic ‘license’. To rephrase the problem in terms akin to the late German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, what are the consequences of ‘copying’ for a work of film or any other art ‘in the age of its [digital] reproducibility’ (1939: 251)? Can one speak of originality, at least with the same aesthetic connotations, in an age of reproductions, facsimiles, digital ‘sharing’? I

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do not take the film to be deeply pensive about it, but it does engage the question of copying in meta-generic terms. The Napster subtext is just another instance of the copy/original problematic raised by the film and countered by the notion of a generational transmission of creativity – from John Bridger to Stella, and to Charlie. The film develops other sets of original thief types, including a sentientaesthetic one and a prosthetic one. When Bridger is mentoring Charlie on the two opposing categories of thieves early in the film, the camera cuts to a close up of an elegant Bulgari diamond necklace in a Venice boutique. Having missed out on his daughter Stella’s most important years because he was in jail, the doting father buys her a gift, then phones her in Philadelphia: Bridger: I just wanted to let you know that I’m sending you something. Stella: Hmm, does it smell nice? Bridger: No … but it’s sparkling! Stella: Does it have a receipt? Bridger: I’m sending it to you from the store… Stella: Don’t break my heart, daddy. You told me you were through. Bridger: After this, I am, I swear to you. Of course, Stella questions the gift’s provenance – has her father broken the law again? Bridger assures her he has obtained the gift through the proper economic rules of exchange. But Stella’s first question was whether the gift smells nice, implying it might be flowers or perfume. Bridger responds that it is ‘sparkling’, a precious stone, perhaps a diamond. Stella’s immediate preference is for something fragrant, colourful, layered, maybe exotic – something vegetal and sensorial. Bridger loves what glitters – Stella is Italian for ‘star’ – he opts for an object devoid of the associated senses of smell and taste, preferring the cold, hard, edgy, angled and polished – something geometric and mineralogical. Natural, yes, but crafted through work to reflect and manipulate light – not unlike the filmmaker. The difference here may be read as an allegory of valid competing aesthetic models and of their respective figures of valuation, which are still superior to Frizelli’s mimicry. Stella seems more invested

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in the vegetal and sensory, but she is technologically savvy. She opposes her father’s criminality but has inherited his professional skills, working as a ‘safe and vault technician’ for the Philadelphia police. ‘I do it for the money,’ she says. Her safecracking does not derive from any deep moral conviction regarding society’s needs. Nor does it correspond to her father’s aesthetic criminality, a desire for life ‘enrichment’ rather than self-definition or pure accumulation. It is just a job. Her interests are pecuniary, purely capitalistic. She is in it for the monetary value of the work that requires her special skillset. The emphasis on technology, on using machines and devices to perform a job, says something of the investment in techne thematised in many a heist. It is a crucial factor in reading Stella’s motivations. Pure and proper revenge would straightforwardly dictate killing Steve for the brutal murder of her father. The screenplay puts a great deal of emphasis on competition and rivalry within the revenge story. Charlie wants revenge. One could ask why they would not simply choose to kill Frizelli. They do not simply kill him precisely because that would mean reverting to his actions, mimicking him. Charlie’s team will punish him, but it will first exact revenge by stealing back from him in an exceptional, even exacting, poetic fashion. Stella’s motivation for cracking Steve’s safe will be to avenge her father’s death, but it will also shift her investment in technology, showing her transformation from a reliance upon technique to an intellectual and sensorial enterprise. The team steals Steve’s safe only to discover it is a model Stella does not know. She discards her tools and relies upon her tactile abilities to crack the safe. There are no prosthetics here; she succeeds by assuming her father’s prowess. Stella’s success rests upon extra-technological and exceptional sensory capacities that define her genius (like that of her father). She had represented a new school of safecracker that relied upon technology as opposed to a more primary form of sensibility. If both modes depend upon mediation, they are certainly not equal; the one is aesthetic, the other technical. F. Gary Gray follows a long literary and cinematic tradition of linking theft with aesthetic activity (and more generally the criminal with the artist), and with filmmaking in particular. After the initial ‘Italian job’ in Venice, when Bridger sums up the successful execution of Croker’s plan, Charlie replies: ‘You could have pulled this off with your eyes closed.’ Bridger: ‘No, you saw the whole picture, covered all the angles.’ This

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emphasis on visual composition from a filmic standpoint underscores Gray’s implicit claim of superiority. Croker is an obvious stand-in for the filmmaker. But Croker may not be the only one. Stella’s ability to crack the safe for the Philadelphia police required not just any technology – she used a special camera to visualise the electrical system of the safe. For the job of cracking Steve’s safe, she must be attentive to the signs that break the code. In what could be considered a paradoxical gesture in a film work – especially since Charlie has been positively identified as a visual genius by his paternal mentor Bridger – she sacrifices new-school dependence on visual technology in order to crack the safe. For her transformation to be complete, it is not about seeing but listening or feeling. To cast it in terms of transgression, she has traded her loyalty to the police and is now on the opposite side of the law; what the story shows is her transformation into a being like her father. By standing on the other side of the law, by transgressing the law – and by transcending a mere monetary motivation and pure revenge – her safecracking eschews economic endeavour in favour of one that is coded as aesthetic. The Italian Job thus constructs several categorical oppositions, most notably between Croker’s genius as aesthetically superior to Frizelli’s copying. In so doing, we come upon the double bind of the heist film in the age of the remake: the contemporary heist operates in which a compromised economy according to which it aspires to show that the pure genius and poetry of the criminal act – echoing an innovative aesthetic – do not merely amount to the sought-after economic gain. This amounts to a curious metageneric position: the individual heist film is bound to its generic formula yet owes its existence to the claim of originality. It thus becomes axiomatic that the recent heist remake, especially if it ends with a successful theft, achieves success only by diminishing an irresolvable tension between its claim of uniqueness and its generic re-inscription. This contrasts with an earlier instantiation of the heist film, which was not based so much on its mode as comedy or tragedy (itself an interesting topic), but, rather, on its aspirations being achieved through the failure of the heist. Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Series: Heist as Fine Art Steven Soderbergh occupies a relatively unique place in American filmmaking today. Admired by critics and audiences of studio and independ-

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ent cinema alike, Soderbergh has been able to bridge the two worlds in ways few directors have, producing an ‘eclectic’ or ‘hybrid’ oeuvre (Baker 2011: 2; 12) and managing to retain ‘authorial’ command over his work, engage social questions even in his more overtly commercial fare and still achieve fantastic commercial success – most notably with his Ocean’s heist series. It is not a stretch to say that Soderbergh is a key figure in the theorisation of the Hollywood-Independent film and festival relationship in the last two decades. Chuck Kleinhans (1998) and Geoff King (2005 and 2009) both use Soderbergh as a primary illustration for explaining how the indie scene has evolved in an interdependent relationship with Hollywood, rather than existing in stark opposition to it. Drawing on their work, Aaron Baker argues that Soderbergh’s ‘relational independence’ (2011: 15) with Hollywood ‘gave him the commercial viability to continue directing and preserved a large measure of creative control, while at the same time reaffirming his reputation as a filmmaker dedicated to the social impact of movies, knowledgeable of the medium’s history, and yet open to innovation’ (Baker 2011: 12). The road through his particularly ‘hybrid’ work was not without effort – it required collaborative associations with Clooney and other, lesser-known team players who regularly work with him. Soderbergh has succeeded in the ‘seam’ between the two worlds (King 2005: 261–2). As the heist remake idealises the motives of its criminals into a hierarchised structure that sets commercial interest below others, Steven Soderbergh’s success in the genre necessarily draws our attention. Perhaps more than any other American director at work today, Soderbergh has tried to cut through an incredibly resistant binary between high and low culture as it relates to its film correlates: commercial/serious and studio/independent. After bursting onto the scene with sex, lies and videotape in 1989, he has gradually forged enough industry means to be able to alternate between what are viewed as polar opposites: experimental and independent works, and mainstream projects. Soderbergh has repeatedly been taken to task for disregarding the distinction between detached artistic creation and commercial production. Forcefully, and quite sincerely, he argues that despite ‘a lot of questions about commercial films and non-commercial films’, he has ‘never really made that separation in [his] mind’ (Andrew 2003). Not long after his independent neo-noir The Underneath, a remake of Siodmak’s Criss Cross produced by

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Soderbergh’s own Populist Pictures, the director turned to another heist story in Out of Sight. He considered the latter a turning point in his career but was wary of becoming ensnared in large-scale commercial projects: ‘It was a very conscious decision on my part to try and climb my way out of the art house ghetto which can be as much of a trap as making blockbuster films’ (ibid.). Soderbergh was not looking for a way to break free from the industry per se, but for a means of accessing industry resources and gaining the upper hand in production and directorial decisions. (The Underneath cost $6.5 million; by contrast, Out of Sight, produced by Jersey Films and Universal Pictures, cost an estimated $48 million, and the budget for Ocean’s Eleven, a Warner Bros. production, ran to $85 million.) Soderbergh’s thinking on this matter is complex, but making a blockbuster is in essence what he did with the most successful of the heist films to come out in the 2000s, the Ocean’s Eleven series. The question is whether Ocean’s Eleven actualises his idea that there is no separation but finds a way to join the commercial and the non-commercial aspects of the criminal endeavour while also tackling the issue of originality. At best, the heist promotes a dual economy in which art and commerce live happily together. At worst, the heist remake dissimulates its monetary motives beneath a mask of aesthetic creation and originality. Soderbergh resides between the poles. Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve equate stealing with fine art. They use museums and galleries as targets (e.g., the Bellagio Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas) and drop big name artists. Twelve eyes an objet d’art, the Fabergé gold Coronation Egg, but Impressionist and Modernist paintings from France predominate in each film – Monet, Magritte, Renoir, Degas and Picasso – functional stand-ins for the volatile and excessive values of the art market over the last thirty years that appear to elude everyday economic principles. Soderbergh’s heists reassert their generic links to the gangster film, that ‘central paradigm for investigating the contradictions of the American dream’ (Thompson 2007: 19), its underlying greed and mis-valuation of human capital. The heist retains the gangster film’s interest in a transgressive, entrepreneurial form of capitalism and links it to art, asking where objects derive their value. Art, for all of its excesses, becomes a double metaphor in the heist film: first, as a figure for a collaborative aesthetic feat that provides an analogy for film itself; and second, given the volatilities and eccentricities of art markets, as a relay for other

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systems of value often siding with art, including the spiritual, social, historical, symbolic or authentic (Throsby 2001: 84). Over and above money and power, Soderbergh values the aesthetic, which shares its pride of place with ‘teamwork’, ‘loyalty’, ‘friendship’ and performative ‘creativity’ (Baker 2011: 6, 26). Soderbergh is taking his cue from the vicissitudes and excesses of the international art markets by incorporating Modernist painting into his film’s themes in a manner that affects all heist films, since all are ultimately about value in some societal sense. In the last few decades a number of economists and sociologists have reconceptualised the idiosyncrasies of art markets (Velthius 2005a and 2005b; Throsby 2001; Heilbrun and Gray 1993; Frey 1997, 2000; Frey and Pommerehne, 1989; Grampp, 1989; Bourdieu 2010, 1993; Abbing 2002; Robertson 2005; Smith 1988). They recognise at least two separate systems of value at work in these markets, the economic on the one hand, and the cultural or symbolic on the other (Throsby 2001: 33; Bourdieu 1993; Smith 1988). While the two at times correlate – the cultural value of an object might enjoy analogous economic value – the reverse is just as true (Throsby 2001: 34). At times Soderbergh’s films presuppose that art and money operate according to incompatible ends, yet in the same breath in which they say that their thefts resemble art, injecting them into an exceptional market, or that the value of certain objects or exploits differs from mainstream markets, they are all the while asking to be players in that market dominated by pure business interests, and enjoying the profits all the same.

Tess is associated with modernist art in Ocean’s Eleven

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The allusions to fine art in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven revolve around Julia Roberts’ character Tess Ocean, Danny’s ex-wife. A curator, she is drawn to Terry Benedict’s (Andy Garcia) apparent appreciation of fine art as the CEO of the Bellagio. The Bellagio’s Gallery of Fine Art regularly exhibits in cooperation with museums around the globe. The film extends this equation when Benedict discusses with Tess a Picasso painting, Woman with a Guitar (1914). Yet the discussion – a kind of exchange – is never fully consummated, since Benedict refuses to be kissed in view of his hotel’s surveillance camera. For Benedict, art is exchangeable in the restricted sense that it is subject to exchange-value; it can be bought and sold, but also disregarded, not looked at, appreciable without any aesthetic sense and bearing only monetary value. When Tess asks him what he likes about the Picasso, he cannot respond because he lacks aesthetic sensibility. He can only reply imitatively that he likes that she likes it. Danny, presumably, values his Tess differently. Tess, as a curator and linked through Benedict to the Picasso, is a metonym for fine art, specifically modernist art. A brief but important sequence confirms this when Linus and Rusty track her routine at the Bellagio. The first time we see her is as the object of their gaze while she descends a staircase. Soderbergh may be alluding to an axial modernist work, the heralded Marcel Duchamp painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. The controversial canvas surprised even Duchamp’s fellow Cubist painters during the Salon des Indépendents in Paris in 1912, as well as the American public and critics who ridiculed it at the groundbreaking New York Armory Show in 1913. The painting’s fragmented depiction of what may be a human form seemingly in motion recalls the proto-filmic photographic studies made by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge entitled a series of photographs of a nude subject in his book The Human Figure in Motion, Woman Walking Downstairs (1887). Soderbergh may be indulging himself in this allusion to the birth of cinema and its overlooked alliance with modernist art in Duchamp’s painting, and with the same tongue-in-cheek tone of much of Duchamp’s work. Julia Roberts is not nude, much to Linus’ chagrin, but in a red dress, shot from a low-angle and coupled with a shift in music – she is framed as a work of art. In trying to steal his ex-wife back from the clutches of Benedict, Danny is not only interested in robbing Benedict’s money, but is also after an exceptional work of art. Danny’s own creative energies are channelled towards the production of an image – but his medium is film. This makes Danny a visual artist-

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thief, a stand-in for a film director. We have already seen Danny and Rusty constructing a replica of Benedict’s vault in plain view of the Bellagio, so the temptation is to perceive the collective efforts of the crew, notably the acrobat, Yen (Shaobo Qin), practicing to evade the security sensors, as preparation for what happens once they break into the vault. In fact, it is a film set that will be used to get into the vault. Danny directs his simulated video surveillance film so artfully that it fools Benedict. Benedict unwittingly invites Danny’s crew, disguised now as the SWAT team, into the actual, untouched vault to take the money without any trouble at all. Their performances in the casino and in the fake video film work, and Danny takes Benedict’s money through film artistry. As Aaron Baker points out, the Ocean’s team’s ‘storytelling, performative, and guerilla-technological skills … symbolize the independent-film sensibility’ (2011: 22). Soderbergh is obviously fond of this kind of simulated play or visual trickery, and uses it to cheaper ends in Ocean’s Twelve. The actual heist of the gold Fabergé Coronation Egg turns out to have taken place long before a rival thief, the wealthy French thief Baron Toulour (Vincent Cassell), the ‘Night Fox’, thinks he has beaten the Ocean team by getting to it first and getting them captured. We never get direct access to the theft, it only appears as an afterthought in a flashback montage to wrap up the bet between Ocean and Toulour. Ocean’s Twelve turns the museum into a space of declined simulations: the egg is replaced by a holograph, Bruce Willis plays himself in cameo, Tess (Roberts) pretends to be the actress ‘Julia Roberts’, with Catherine Zeta-Jones playing the Europol crime specialist Agent Lahiri. To return to the persistent division between high modernist art and commercialised mass art, the scholarship that has managed to collapse the divide has also consistently pointed to the ugly popular underbelly of high modernism – modernism has always incorporated mass art into its creations (see Huyssen 1986). Inversely, I am throwing into relief how a popular movie genre like the heist film relies just as much on the ostensible distinction between high and low. The Ocean’s films embrace the commercial aspect of their enterprise even as they hint at an alliance with values attributed to high culture that supposedly stand above or in opposition to sheer financial interest. In this scenario, the binary persists because it is not only modernism’s, but also mass art’s, little secret. The heist genre deploys this same opposition while dissimulating its own interest in it.

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Likewise, originality remains a prime concern in these films. It is possible to imagine a remake that is not so beholden to its original material that it cannot in absolute terms achieve some form of originality – this runs counter to my preceding critique of The Italian Job’s conventionality. If Soderbergh sought to make his Ocean’s film better than the original, then the key to its aesthetic superiority, Baker suggests, is its conscious recognition of the tradition through its use of allusion and film history, its allusive ‘density’ in Bordwell’s term (2006: 60). By deftly incorporating film ‘connoisseurship’ into its reception, Soderbergh managed to create something original. But he himself might be hesitant to claim as much, even as his Ocean’s series lays claim to original craftsmanship. Soderbergh feels the weight of history and of predecessors (Godard in particular) while recognising the limits of innovation and experimentation in the contemporary market: In terms of the grammar of cinema, I haven’t seen anything made since the late 70s or early 80s that I felt was really pushing the ball forward… Some of the recent Godard stuff is pretty extraordinary, Notre Musique (2004) was really, really beautiful… But what’s the audience for that...? This is not an inexpensive hobby – it’s not something that you make and then hang on your wall. It’s a public art form. I’m frustrated by what’s going on in the business, in terms of what’s getting made, and I’m frustrated by my own inability to break through to something else. (White 2009) Soderbergh’s counter-example to mass art is painting, one of the privileged metonyms for aesthetic (vs. commercial) value in Ocean’s Eleven. Alongside other movie-conscious filmmakers faced with their ‘belatedness’ in the film tradition, Soderbergh has strategically embraced a ‘pluralistic’ form of theft (à la Jarmusch) as a means for revitalising film narrative. As mentioned above, ‘adventurous plotting’ (Bordwell 2006: 75) may be a hallmark of all of Soderbergh’s ventures, but it works in conjunction with the meta-filmic dimensions of the Ocean’s series – the team’s ‘storytelling, performative, and guerilla-technological skills’ (Baker 2011: 22) – to energetically allegorise the potential of film art for a broader audience than his indie work. The heist film is not the sole or even primary locus of that innovative, independent or ‘daring’ cinema (ibid.) of the 1990s and

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2000s. Yet it clearly provides a structure that affords filmmakers a chance to express their aspirations, just as directors have done since the inception of the genre. Judging by the number of times Soderbergh has gone back to the well of the heist form, particularly the role he granted to Out of Sight for escaping the ‘art house ghetto’, Soderbergh has been one of the key forces behind the heist’s return, which in turn has shaped other genres and modes of filmmaking in the last two decades. Soderbergh’s nearly compulsive return to the heist thus far in his career shows that he has, perhaps more than any other contemporary director, understood the stakes of the heist as a mainstream genre with the continual capacity to acknowledge film’s natural existence, holding commercial interest and the pleasures of craft and art in cooperative suspension. In Soderbergh’s ‘State of Cinema’ talk delivered at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (27 April 2013), he made a plea for more thoughtful filmmaking that registers with the terms and history we have explored in our study of the heist film genre. The speech came shortly after the release of Side Effects (2013) and amid a swirl of rumours that the film might be his last directorial effort — that one last job. Soderbergh’s critique of the moviemaking industry lays out in expository fashion what his own production gambles and heist films express implicitly, by raising two interdependent problems: the lack of directorial independence and the difference between ‘cinema’ as an art form and money-making ‘movies’; and the debility of the studio system’s particular monetary incentives, including its faulty data-driven methodologies yet growing market share against independent productions. Few independent filmmakers have Soderbergh’s insight into Hollywood or the credibility to mount such a critique. ‘State of Cinema’ is primarily concerned with business practices, but it requires, as Soderbergh well understands, an aesthetic definition of film. He defines ‘cinema’ as ‘a very elegant problem-solving model’ with a capacity for disseminating ideas, information and explanation through narrative. Conversely, he savages the studios for avoiding or eliminating ‘things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, God forbid, ambiguity’ in their productions. I am certain he would admit to collaborative artistry (as opposed to studio creation by ‘committee’), in the spirit of his heist films, but his stated position is decidedly auteurist. The best films, he argues, bear a ‘specificity of vision’: ‘cinema’ is the ‘polar opposite of generic’ activity, the result

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of a creative ‘signature or fingerprint’. Soderbergh’s films do bear his signature and are marketed by a brand recognition dating from his early independent successes — he left his fingerprint (note the criminal connotation) on all of them. Thus, they cannot be seen as generic in the sense of being mass-produced. Yet his heist films are generic in another sense. They consciously and creatively exploit the genre’s syntax and semantics, inheriting those social stakes and valences I have discussed throughout this book. This leads us back to my observation about the internal contradiction of the contemporary heist, namely, that it imagines escaping from the conventionality imposed (in this case) by the studio system and achieved through aesthetic genius, but its yearnings are part and parcel of the conventional form itself. Soderbergh’s multiple heist films speak to this desire to get out of the system, to escape its mind-numbing effects, to get away with art without the commercial pressures or disappointment with the industry — to pursue the aesthetic without want of money. Soderbergh’s ‘State of Cinema’ speech is another formulation of this desire. Perhaps it is in the films that we encounter a measure of ‘ambiguity’ — or more precisely, ambivalence — regarding this phenomenon in particular. In ‘State of Cinema’, Soderbergh claims there remains an auteurist trend doggedly pursuing ‘cinema’ — ‘you have filmmakers out there who have that specific point of view’. For them, he insists, ‘it’s not about money, it’s about good ideas followed up by a well-developed aesthetic’. It does seem odd, then, when he winds up his speech by noting the $25 million in revenues that marked the unexpected success of Christopher Nolan’s Memento — a film that meets his criteria of a signature, ‘problem-solving’ work of film art. It is hard not to see that it is about both money and good film aesthetics. Soderbergh’s non-heist films certainly meet his own criteria for ‘cinema’, as creative works that build on cultural specificity, narrative complexity and ambiguity. But it is in his heist films that he allegorises the tension between the two competing impulses. Conclusion In terms of the heist film’s social function, the community of structure that links heists across time turns out to be a common, perhaps unoriginal, yet very important pursuit: the heist explores what film’s role is as

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a mass-market art in a consumer society. In terms of the heist’s social message, on the other hand, that message is susceptible to difference between filmmakers and to broader patterns of change over time. My own view of the genre’s evolving message is that the noir heist and earliest comic capers foregrounded sublime failure, in the context of a search for freedom or independence from societal constraints – surrogates for the poetic search for transcendence – before more recent heists have given in to an unproblematic relation between art and commerce in the usually successful robberies we see nowadays. Where the first phase of heists (stemming from a modernist origin) reject success in favour of an untenable but idealised dichotomy (art vs. money) – an either/or proposition in which you fail, where there is heroic failure but aesthetic success – the latest phase of the heist accepts that art and money go hand in hand – a but/and proposition in which you can pull off an artistic feat without losing the money – one that, paradoxically, still mythologises individual genius and exploits the art/commerce dichotomy for its own ends. The troubling aspect of the contemporary heist – represented by so many remakes – is that it perpetuates the binary notion that art is pure, original and liberated from pecuniary interest, while business is base, corrupt, derivative and serial. The problem is not that filmmaking, and genre films in particular, are business; it is that the contemporary heist, as a potentially thoughtful genre on this topic, appears to be saying one thing while doing another. If, as I have argued, the contemporary heist film promulgates a myth that the film artist can make a pure, autonomous art that would not be subject to market forces or commodification, then it builds this myth on tenuous ground, arguing for the originality or exceptionalism of its criminal feats – yet it does so via remakes from within generic conventionality. It remains to be seen how long the heist will remain on the marquee. As with all genres, its endurance will depend on its adaptability. So long as a perceived or real struggle between the commercial and the aesthetic captivates filmmakers and audiences, it will likely endure. In terms only slightly different from these, the Cahiers du cinéma critics came to a comparable conclusion with regards to Hollywood filmmaking while debating a series of ‘Questions about American Cinema’ in 1964. Revisiting their theory of the auteur, they made the following corrective in the very terms of freedom, institutional constraint and collaboration that define the

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heist formula’s search for escape, using a heist craftsman, Jules Dassin, to make their case: François Truffaut: We used to say that we liked the American cinema but its filmmakers were slaves; what would it be like if they were free men? Well, the moment they become free they make lousy films. The moment Dassin is free, he goes to Greece and makes Celui qui doit mourir. In short, we liked assemblyline cinema, where the director was an operative for four weeks of shooting, where the film was edited by someone else, even if it was the work of a big director … we didn’t reckon how vital it was, for the American cinema, to work in these conditions… Claude Chabrol: People were prisoners and tried to escape. They’ve become a lot more cautious and timid than they were before. It’s a crazy thing. I’m sure today Dassin couldn’t even imagine doing Thieves’ Highway. Truffaut: It’s not a film that a free man wants to make. You have to be on the payroll to make this film – it was good payroll cinema. (Hillier 1986: 176–7) Truffaut and Chabrol identified the underlying institutional oppression that generates the industrial context for the heist film – it inspired directors to imagine a world in which a group breaks free from economic oppression. The Cahiers critics argued, on the contrary, that the studio auteur’s prowess arises from the very constraints inherent in the institutional enterprise, and that by necessity this explains how the filmmakers who made early heists recognised implicitly that that dream of escape must end in failure.

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SELECT FILMOGR APHY

The following list, by no means complete, comprises films discussed in this book or analysed during its writing.

$ (Richard Brooks, 1971, US) 11 Harrowhouse (Aram Avakian, 1974, UK) Ad Ogni Costo / Grand Slam (Giuliano Montaldo, 1967, Italy/Spain/West Germany) The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet, 1971, US) Armored Car Robbery (Richard Fleischer, 1950, US) Art Heist (Bryan Goeres, 2004, Spain/US) The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950, US) Assault on a Queen (Jack Donohue, 1966, US) Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Nanni Loy, 1960, Italy) Aura, El / The Aura (Fabián Bielinsky, 2005, Argentina) Bandits (Barry Levinson, 2001, US) The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson, 2008, UK) Bank Shot (Gower Champion, 1974, US) The Big Caper (Robert Stevens, 1957, US) Big Deal on Madonna Street / I Soliti Ignoti (Mario Monicelli, 1958, Italy) The Big Job (Gerald Thomas, 1965, UK) Bob le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956, France) Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996, US) The Brinks Job (William Friedkin, 1978, US)

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The Caper of the Golden Bulls (Russell Rouse, 1967, US) Ca$h (Eric Besnard, 2008, France) Casse, Le / The Burglars (Henri Verneuil, 1971, France) Cent mille dollars au soleil / Greed Under the Sun (Henri Verneuil, 1964, France/Italy) Le Cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970, France) Le Cerveau / The Brain (Gérard Oury, 1969, France) Une Chance sur deux (Patrice Leconte, 1998, France) Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973, US) Le Clan des Siciliens / The Sicilian Clan (Henri Verneuil, 1969, France) Classe tous risques / The Big Risk (Claude Sautet, 1960, France/Italy) Cool Breeze (Barry Pollack, 1972, US) Cops and Robbers (Aram Avakian, 1973, US) Crackers (Louis Malle, 1984, US) Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949, US) The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (John Guillermin, 1960, UK) Daylight Robbery (Paris Leonti, 2008, UK) Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (Bernard Girard, 1966, US) Dead Presidents (Albert and Allen Hughes, 1995, US) Derailed (Mikael Håfström, 2005, US/UK) Le Dernier Tunnel (Erik Canuel 2004, Canada) Diamonds (Menahem Golan, 1975, Israel/US) Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988, US) Dodookdeul / The Thieves (Dong-Hoon Choi, 2012, South Korea) Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975, US) The Dr. Mabuse Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922, Germany) Duffy (Robert Parrish, 1968, UK/US) Égoûts du paradis (José Giovanni, 1979, France) Entrapment (Jon Amiel, 1999, US/UK) Family Business (Sidney Lumet, 1989, US) The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009, US) Feng kuang de shi tou / Crazy Stone (Hao Ning, 2006, China) Five Against the House (Phil Karlson, 1955, US) Flawless (Michael Radford, 2007, UK) Foolproof (William Philips, 2003, Canada) The Front Line (David Gleeson, 2006, Ireland/Germany/Sweden) Gambit (Ronald Neame, 1966, US)

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Le Gang (Jacques Deray, 1977, France/Italy) The Getaway (Roger Donaldson, 1994, US) The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972, US) The Good Die Young (Lewis Gilbert, 1954, UK) The Good Thief (Neil Jordan, 2002, France/UK/Ireland) The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903, US) Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (Edward L. Cahn, 1959, US) The Happy Thieves (George Marshall, 1961, US) Heat (Michael Mann, 1995, US) Heist (David Mamet, 2001, US) High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941, US) The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, 1972, US) Hot Thrills and Warm Chills (Dale Berry, 1967, US) House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955, US/Japan) How to Beat the High Co$t of Living (Robert Scheerer, 1980, US) How to Steal a Million (William Wyler, 1966, US) Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010, US/UK) Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006, US) The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969, UK) The Italian Job (F. Gary Gray, 2003, US) Jack of Diamonds (Don Taylor, 1967, US/West Germany) The Jokers (Michael Winner, 1967, UK) Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952, US) Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970, US) The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946, US) The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956, US) Der Krieger und die Kaiserin / The Princess and the Warrior (Tom Tykwer, 2000, Germany) The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955, UK) The Ladykillers (Joel and Ethan Cohen, 2004, US) The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951, UK) The League of Gentlemen (Basil Dearden, 1960, UK) Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931, US) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998, UK) The Lookout (Scott Frank, 2007, US) Mad Money (Callie Khouri, 2008, US) Man on a Ledge (Asger Leth, 2012, US)

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Max et les ferrailleurs / Max and the Junkmen (Claude Sautet, 1971, France) Mélodie en sous-sol / Any Number Can Win (Henri Verneuil, 1963, France/ Italy) Midas Run (Alf Kjellin, 1969, US) Money Movers (Bruce Beresford, 1978, Australia) Ni pour ni contre (bien au contraire) (Cédric Klapisch, 2003, France) No Road Back (Montgomery Tully, 1957, UK) Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960, US) Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001, US) Ocean’s Thirteen (Steven Soderbergh, 2007, US) Ocean’s Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004, US) Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959, US) Once a Thief (John Woo, 1991, Hong Kong) Once a Thief (Ralph Nelson, 1965, France/US) Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998, US) Perfect Friday (Peter Hall, 1970, UK) Plunder Road (Hubert Cornfield, 1957, US) Le Premier cercle / Ultimate Heist (Laurent Tuel, 2009, France) A Prize of Gold (Mark Robson, 1955, UK) Quick Change (Howard Franklin and Bill Murray, 1990, US) Raffles (Sam Wood, 1939, USA) The Rebel Set (Gene Fowler, Jr., 1959, US) Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992, US) Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955, France) Rififi à Tokyo (Jacques Deray, 1963, France/Italy) Robbery (Peter Yates, 1967, UK) Rough Cut (Don Siegel, 1980, US) The Score (Frank Oz, 2001, US) Set It Off (F. Gary Gray, 1996, US) Seven Thieves (Henry Hathaway, 1960, US) Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000, UK) Six Bridges to Cross (Joseph Pevney, 1955, US) Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000, UK) Sneakers (Phil Alden Robinson, 1992, US) Les Spécialistes (Patrice Leconte, 1985, France) The Split (Gordon Flemyng, 1968, US)

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The Squeeze (Antonio Margheriti, 1978, Italy/West Germany) Swindle (K.C. Bascombe, 2002, Canada) Takers (John Luessenhop, 2010, US) The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Joseph Sargent, 1974, US) The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Tony Scott, 2009, US) They Came to Rob Las Vegas (Antonio Isasi, 1968, Spain/Italy/France/ West Germany) Thick as Thieves (Mimi Leder, 2009, US) The Thomas Crown Affair (John McTiernan, 1999, US) The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison, 1968, US) Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999, US) Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Michael Cimino, 1974, US) Tian xia wu zei / A World Without Thieves (Xiaogang Feng, 2004, China) Tiempo reel / Reel Time (Fabrizio Prada, 2002, Mexico) Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964, US) Touchez pas au grisbi (Jacques Becker, 1954, France) Tower Heist (Brett Ratner, 2011, US) The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010, US) Two-Way Stretch (Robert Day, 1960, UK) The Underneath (Steven Soderbergh, 1995, US) The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995, US) Violent Saturday (Richard Fleischer, 1955, US) Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, 1993, UK) The War Wagon (Burt Kennedy, 1967, US) Welcome to Collinwood (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2002, US/Germany) White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949, US)

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Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McArthur, Colin (2000) ‘Mise-en-Scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967)’, in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds) French Film: Texts and Contexts. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 189–201. McFarlane, Brian (2001) ‘The More Things Change… British Cinema in the 90s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book. Second Edition. London: British Film Institute, 273–9. Michelson, Annette (1979) ‘Dr Crase and Mr Clair’, October, 11, 30–53. Moine, Raphaëlle (2002) Les genres du cinema. Paris: Nathan. Moullet, Luc (1985 [1959]) ‘Sam Fuller: In Marlowe’s Footsteps’, in Jim Hillier (ed.) Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 145–55. Munby, Jonathan (1999) Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster Film from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Musser, Charles (1990) The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. New York: Scribner’s. Naremore, James (2007) On Kubrick. London: British Film Institute. _____ (2008 [1998]) More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Neale, Steve (2000) Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge. Newman, Kim (1997) ‘The Caper Film’, in Phil Hardy (ed.) The British Film Institute Companion to Crime. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 70–1. Nogueira, Rui (ed.) (1971) Melville on Melville. London: Secker and Warburg/ British Film Institute. Perry, George C. (1981) Forever Ealing: A Celebration of the Great British Film Studio. London: Pavillion. Phillips, Gene D. (ed.) (2001) Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi. Philips, Gene D. and Rodney Hill (2002) The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Checkmark. Porfirio, Robert G. (1996) ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir’, in R. Barton Palmer (ed.) Perspectives on Film Noir, 115–28. Porter, Dennis (1981) The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Prince, Stephen (2003) Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pulleine, Tim (2001) ‘A Song and Dance at the Local: Thoughts on Ealing’, in Robert Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 79–84. Rivette, Jacques (1985 [1955]) ‘Notes on a Revolution’, in Jim Hillier (ed.) Cahiers du Cinéma. The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 94–7. Robertson, Iain (ed.) (2005) Understanding International Art Markets and Management. London: Routledge. Robertson, James C. (1999) ‘The Censors and British Gangland, 1913–1990’, in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds) British Crime Cinema. London: Routledge, 16–26. Rolls, Allistair and Deborah Walker (2009) French and American Noir: Dark Crossings. Baskingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosow, Eugene (1978) Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America. Oxford: Oxford Univerisity Press. Ross, Kristin (1996 [1995]) Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rubin, Martin (1999) Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schatz, Thomas (1981) Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House. Schwartz, Vanessa R. (2007) It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Senelick, Laurence (1987) The Prestige of Evil: The Murderer as Romantic Hero from Sade to Lacernaire. New York: Garland. Shadoian, Jack (1977) Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/ Crime Film. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein (1988) Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Murray (1995) Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Soderbergh, Steven (2013) ‘State of Cinema’, delivered at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival.

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Spicer, Andrew (ed.) (2007) European Film Noir. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stam, Robert (2000) Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Street, Sarah (1997) British National Cinema. London: Routledge. _____ (2002) Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA. New York: Continuum. Taylor, Mark C. (2004) Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Russel (1959) ‘Encounter with Siodmak’, Sight and Sound, 28, 3/4, 180–2. Telotte, J. P. (1989) Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. _____ (1996) ‘Fatal Capers: Strategy and Enigma in Film Noir’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 23, 4, 163–70. Temple, Michael and Michael Witt (2004) ‘Introduction: A New World’, in Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds) The French Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 183–93. Thompson, Howard (1969) ‘“They Came To Rob Las Vegas” Opens’, New York Times, 6 February, 30. Thompson, Kirsten Moana (2007) Crime Films: Investigating the Scene. London: Wallflower Press. Throsby, David (2001) Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Truffaut, François (1985 [1954]) ‘The Rogues are Weary’, in Jim Hillier (ed.) Cahiers du Cinéma. The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 28–30. Tulard, Jean (2005) Guides des films. Vol. 1 A–E. Paris: Laffont. Uricchio, William (2008) ‘Imag(in)ing the City: Simonides to the Sims’, in Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (eds) Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. London: Wallflower Press, 102–12. Velthuis, Olav (2005a) Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. _____ (2005b) Imaginary Economics: Contemporary Artists and the World of Big Money. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (1972) Learning From Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Verevis, Constantine (2005) Film Remakes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vincendeau, Ginette (1992) ‘Noir is also a French Word: The French Antecedents of Film Noir’, in Ian Cameron (ed.) The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Studio Vista, 49–58. _____ (2003) Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris. London: British Film Institute. Walker, Michael (1992) ‘Robert Siodmak’, in Ian Cameron (ed.) The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Studio Vista, 110–45. Webber, Andrew (2008) ‘Symphony of a City: Motion Pictures and Still Lives in Weimar Berlin’, in Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (eds) Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. London: Wallflower Press, 56–71. Westlake, Donald (1970) The Hot Rock. New York: Simon and Schuster. White, James (2009) ‘Steven Soderbergh Takes the Bitter Pill’. The Empire; www.the empire.com. November. Accessed 6 July 2013. Wilson, Ron (2000) ‘The Left-Handed Form of Human Endeavor: Crime Films During the 1990s’, in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.) Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 143–60.

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Affleck, Ben 2, 97 Affleck, Casey 5 Aldrich, Robert 3 Allen, Woody 5 Alpi, Deborah 27–9 Altman, Rick 4–7, 11, 13, 86, 89 Anderson, Wes 95 Andrew, Dudley 17, 37 Andrew, Geoff 106 Augé, Marc 98–9 Auric, Georges 47, 49, 68 auteurism 40–1, 73, 75–6, 89, 101, 112–15 Baker, Aaron 8, 106, 108, 110–11 Balcon, Michael 62–4, 68 Barsam, Richard 67 Baudrillard, Jean 99 Becker, Jacques 18, 38 Benjamin, Walter 17–18, 102 Bergfelder, Tim 37 Berthomé, Jean–Pierre 45

big caper 1–13, 16–7, 73, 89–90 Bondanella, Peter 69–70 Bonnot, Monique 56 Borde, Raymond 15, 21, 93 Bordwell, David 39, 93, 111 Boyle, Danny 3 Brosnan, Pierce 1 Brunetta, Gian Piero 69 Burnett, W. R. 12, 21–3, 31, 34–5, 78 Caan, Scott 5, Caine, Michael 1, 85, 96 caper vs heist 2–4 Celli, Carlo 69–70 Champion, Gower 74 Chaumeton, Etienne 15, 21, 93 Cimino, Michael 3, 90 Civil Rights heist film 74–8 Clair, René 67 Clarens, Carlos 23, 25, 30, 90 Clarke, T. E. B. 64–5

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Clooney, George 1, 79, 106 Coen, Ethan and Joel 1 Collinson, Peter 1, 74 Comolli, Jean–Luc 40 copy vs. original 99–105 cosmopolitan caper 74, 83–6 cosmopolitan film 83–4 Cottino-Jones, Marga 69–70 Crichton, Charles 14, 39, 62–3, 67–8 criminal as artist 10, 21, 61, 104 Damon, Matt 1 Dassin, Jules 5, 13, 15, 21, 36, 39, 41–9, 55, 58, 63, 69, 75, 85, 115 Dearden, Basil 3, 19, 73 Decaë, Henri 56 De Palma, Brian 3 Deray, Jacques 75–6 Dimendberg, Edward 29–30, 35–6 Donaldson, Roger 94–5 Duchesne, Roger 56–8 Dunaway, Faye 1 Ealing Studios 61–2 Feuillade, Louis 17 film noir 2–3, 8, 12–13, 15, 23, 29–30, 35–41, 59, 61, 74, 93 film policier 55 fine art 36, 63, 65, 105, 107, 109 Fleischer, Richard 38 Flemyng, Gordon 78 France 17, 41–2, 65–6, 74–6, 96, 107 Fuller, Samuel 38, 76–7

gambling 18, 60, 78–80 Garcia, Andy 1, 79, 109 genre 2–15, 19–21, 23, 26, 29, 35–40, 45, 48, 53, 55, 61–2, 68–9, 72–7, 89–91, 93–7, 100, 106, 110–14; comedy 12, 55, 61–71, 79, 86, 100, 105; Ealing comedy 62–71; gangster 50; Hollywood 11, 29; romantic comedy 13; science fiction comedy 67; sub–genre 6, 11, 38, 41, 61, 70, 72; western 11, 19, 22, 83, 87, 91; gentleman thief film 19–21, 58, 85 Giovanni, José 75 Girard, Bernard 86 Glazer, Jonathan 95 Gould, Elliot 1, 79 Grant, Barry Keith 9 Gray, F. Gary 1, 5, 94, 100–1, 104–5 Guillermin, John 72 Gunning, Tom 17–8 Hall, Peter 85 Hall, Sara 19 Hamilton, Guy 3 Hanks, Tom 1 Hansen, Miriam 29, 37 Harper, Sue 62–3, 68 Hathaway, Henry 73, 75 Hayden, Sterling 5, 31, 50, 54 Hayes, Graeme 47–8, 75 heist film, definition of 2–11 Hellinger, Mark 21–3, 34 high vs. mass/low culture 29, 41, 80, 106–10

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Hill, George Roy 3 Hitchcock, Alfred 3 Hollywood vs. independent film 22–3, 40–1, 49, 106, 110, 112 Hughes, Albert and Allen 3, 53, 94 Huston, John 5, 13, 15, 21–3, 29–39, 49, 51, 54, 60, 68 Hutton, Brian G. 3 imagination 9, 36, 41, 59, 64, 92, 97–9, 102, 115 Isasi, Antonio 79, 82–3 Jaffe, Sam 5 Jameson, Fredric 80 Jarmusch, Jim 92, 94, 111 Jewison, Norman 1, 74 Jordan, Neil 1 Kaes, Anton 18 Kaminsky, Stuart 3–11, 13, 16, 18–20, 33–5, 41, 73, 89–90 Karlson, Phil 38 Kavanagh, Thomas 60–1 Kennedy, Burt 3 Khouri, Callie 5 King, Geoff 106 Kjellin, Alf 85 Krutnik, Frank 19 Kubrick, Stanley 9, 13, 39, 41, 49–55, 63, 97 Lacourbe, Roland 1 Lang, Fritz 18–9, 98 Las Vegas heist 74, 78–83 Le Breton, Auguste 42–5, 55–6

Lee, Spike 2, 96–7 Leitch, Thomas 22, 100 Levinson, Barry 96 Lumet, Sidney 90 Mackendrick, Alexander 1, 38, 62, 68 Mamet, David 1, 95 Mann, Michael 3, 5 Marsh, James 2 Mason, Fran 6, 8, 38 mass culture 29, 80 McArthur, Colin 58–9 McFarlane, Brian 64 McQueen, Steve 1, 87 McTiernan, John 1, 94 Melville, Jean-Pierre 1, 14, 39, 41, 55–63, 75–6 Milestone, Lewis 1, 14, 19, 39, 79–80, 83 modernism 27–30, 35–7, 39, 40–3, 45, 49–52, 57–8, 66–72, 80, 86, 92, 100, 107–10, 114 money 10, 21, 42–3, 51, 54, 61, 75, 80, 84, 87, 90, 96–7, 101, 104, 108–14 Monicelli, Mario 61, 68–72, 90 Montaldo, Giuliano 84 Munby, Jonathan 23–4 Musser, Charles 16 Naremore, James 33–4, 40–1, 50, 52 Neale, Steve 11, 19 Neame, Ronald 85 Neue Sachlichkeit; see New Objectivity

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Newman, Kim 3, 5–7, 12, 19–20, 61, 85, 90 New Objectivity 27–30 Nogueira, Rui 55–6 noir heist film 15–37, 38–71, 73–4, 76, 85, 91, 95, 99, 114 Nolan, Christopher 2–3, 97, 113 Norton, Edward 9, 96, 101 Oz, Frank 1, 96 Peckinpah, Sam 3, 87–90 Petrucci, Antonio 63–4 Philips, Gene 55 Pitt, Brad 1, 79 Pollack, Barry 78 Porfirio, Robert 24 Porter, Edwin S. 16 Porter, Vincent 9, 62–3, 68 Prince, Stephen 53, 87 process film 7, 51–2 Production Code (PCA) 33, 53, 74, 86 Pulleine, Tim 62–3, 68, 86 Ritchie, Guy 95 Roberts, Julia 1, 109–10 Rolls, Allistair 39, 41–5, Rosow, Eugene 11, 16, 19, 20, 78 Russell, David O. 3 Russo, Rene 1 Schatz, Thomas 19, 72–3 Scheerer, Robert 74, 89 Schwartz, Vanessa 83–4, 86 self-reflexivity 20, 41, 56, 55, 81, 70, 72

Servais, Jean 43, 82 Shadoian, Jack 24–6, 29–30, 36–7 Shear, Barry 78 Singer, Bryan 93–5 Siodmak, Robert 12–15, 21–32, 37, 49, 67–8, 99, 106 Slocombe, Douglas 68 Smith, Murray 48, 59, 108 social message 4, 8, 10, 42, 62, 72–3, 114 Soderbergh, Steven 1, 5, 8, 79, 93–5, 100–1, 105–13 speculation 18, 75 Stam, Robert 72 Sutherland, Donald 5, 101 Tarantino, Quentin 93–4 Taylor, Don 19, 85 Taylor, Mark 23, 79 technology 48, 79, 82–4, 89, 98, 104–5 Telotte, J. P. 6, 39, 73 Temple, Michael 75 Thomas, Gerald 74 Thompson, Howard 5, 20, 83, 107 Thompson, Kirsten Moana 6 Throsby, David 108 transatlanticism 40–1 Trauner, Alexandre 45 Truffaut, François 40, 48, 56–8, 115 utopia/utopianism 8, 29, 30–1, 68, 78, 82, 88, 97, 99 Venturi, Robert 79–82

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Verevis, Constantine 100–1 vernacular modernism 29, 37, 71, 80 Verneuil, Henri 3, 75 Vincendeau, Ginette 41–2, 56, 58, 75 violence 16, 38–9, 42–3, 52, 64, 86–91 Wahlberg, Mark 5, 101 Walker, Deborah 39, 41–3, 45 Walker, Michael 24, 26

Walsh, Raoul 12, 21–2, 30 Webber, Andrew 28 White, Lionel 49, 111 widescreen format 38–9, 77 Wilson, Ron 11, 93 Winner, Michael 86 Wise, Robert 72, 77–8 Witt, Michael 75 Wyler, William 19, 72, 85 Yates, Peter 72

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