Heists have been a part of cinema since its inception, over 100 years ago. Sam Moore wonders why this seminal theme endures through filmic history.
The Great Train Robbery (Photo: Picture Post)
1903 saw the release of The Great Train Robbery, a 12 minute silent picture driven by ground-breaking action scenes and – at the time – shocking depictions of violence. The result was a remarkable commercial success with the print being distributed across the US to packed out vaudeville theatres.
Made in the days before copyright was established for films, there were several almost shot for shot remakes and parodies made of the picture in the immediate aftermath of its release.
The Great Train Robbery’s most iconic scene, of the actor Justus D Barnes, turning to the camera and firing his gun, is the clear inspiration for the James Bond gun barrel credit sequence, and also paid homage to by Martin Scorsese in Goodfellas.
Indeed, over a century later, and many of the motifs in The Great Train Robbery have become staples of the heist genre. It’s a tale of men and violence, greed and need, of action as drama, of outlaws that live and die outside the set parameters of the social contract.
It’s a tale … of outlaws that live and die outside the set parameters of the social contract.
The genre has experienced something of a diverse resurgence of late. There’s Zack Snyder’s zombie-heist hybrid thriller, Army of the Dead, Steve McQueen’s female-led Widows, Guy Ritchie’s brutal noir Wrath of Man and Edgar Wright’s quasi-musical Baby Driver. That’s as well as the unapologetically pulp Den of Thieves, Trumpian parable Logan Lucky and the enduring Triple Frontier. Even Marvel got in on the act with a main plot line in Avengers: Endgame.
They come from a long line of influential classics: Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Le Cercle Rouge, Thief, Heat, Band of Outsiders, Reservoir Dogs, The Getaway, Dead Presidents, Bottle Rocket, Ocean’s 11, The Sting, Three Kings, Set it Off, Sexy Beast, Out of Sight and The Italian Job. Those are some of the best, most influential movies ever made, some stick to certain formulas of the genre (The Sting, Out of Sight) whilst others deconstruct and recontextualise it within a director’s own personal style (Bottle Rocket, Sexy Beast).
Rififi, 1954. (Photo: Picture Post)
The film that helped establish the genre conventions of the heist movie more than any other is John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. With its secretly soft macho men and consequentialist moralism it is also a template for heist movies to come with its desperate thieves, get rich quick schemes, impossible to resist booty and ultimately how the quest for riches ultimately falls violently apart.
A young Marilyn Monroe also has a minor (if memorable) role and it’s hard to imagine the heist movie existing as it does today without The Asphalt Jungle.
The Killing
Using Huston’s film as a jumping off point, Stanley Kubrick, with the assistance of noted crime writer, Jim Thompson, put together The Killing – a film that would cement Kubrick’s name as a prodigiously talented young director. It has the same stems in terms of plot: a misfit bunch of thieves led by a hard-boiled and charismatic lifer, untrustworthy women, an intricate plan to swipe an extortionate amount of money and a large unravelling through chances of fate and bad luck. Kubrick even borrowed Sterling Hayden as his leading man from Huston’s earlier classic.
It wasn’t just the Americans who became enamoured with the heist. The sub-genre soon found its way flying to Europe, where France in particular, embraced this complex criminality and the revering love of the outlaw. Jules Dassin’s Rafifi from 1955 became a standard bearer for the genre. Dassin – blacklisted by Hollywood – moved to France after his Communist affiliations became public and Rafifi was his first film in five years – an eternity for a filmmaker in the 1950s.
The centrepiece of the film is a 30 minute long heist conducted in near silence without any dialogue and without any score. The resulting effect is one of mute tension with an almost cinema vérité feeling: like the audience is voyeuristically watching the theft, live. It’s the kind of flashy precision that would be a hallmark of Michael Mann’s heist movies – Thief, Heat and Public Enemies – decades later.
Rafifi was also much less restrained by censorship compared to its American cousins, which were governed by the Hays Code. The lack of the overseeing Code meant the film came with an additional, bluntly displayed brutality just not possible in the US at the time.
Sexy Beast, 2000
Jean-Luc Godard went heist-y in the mid sixties with Bande a Part. After establishing himself with the girl and a gun movie A Bout de Souffle in 1960, he moved on to the bold and beautiful Bande a Part, which doubled as a deconstruction of the crime movies and was an early hint of the director’s later radicalism. The film, in typical Godard style, is loose, free flowing, meditative and divergent. There’s irresistible café dances (which Tarantino later blatantly aped for Pulp Fiction), dashes through the Louvre and Anna Karina being charming and completely irresistible at the heart of a love triangle.
The heist in Bande a Part is no big thing and certainly no intricately plotted plan by seasoned professionals. It’s a tale of kids playing gangsters, it’s a Godardian oddity enthralled by the gangster pictures of years past yet determined to subvert expectations and create a heist movie that couldn’t be less about the heist.
The Asphalt Jungle, 1950
Stripped of narrative, dialogue and even to a degree, colour, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge is an austere, slow and deliberate film, almost serving as a response to reactions of his earlier crime films which were labelled “cool”. Featuring a silent robbery like Rififi, Le Cercle Rouge contains many of the hallmarks you’d associate with the genre – criminals, wonderfully dressed, doubling as philosophers, cops with a singular, rigid purpose to catch them, the film ending in a blitzkrieg of death, it’s hard not to see the film as the climax of French noir and a precursor to Heat.
“Drop of a hat these guys will rock and roll” says Al Pacino’s intensely thorough Detective Vincent Hanna whilst observing a cash truck heist turned scene of execution near the beginning of Michael Mann’s seminal film, Heat.
Heat, 1995
Three security guards lie dead – needlessly so – and Hanna interprets the ruthless precision as a sign of the thieves’ professionalism and gains insight into the cerebral nature of the heist crew. These are serious men, not a petty thief in sight, they know the stakes, a murder charge makes no different if they end up in handcuffs but seeing eyes and loose lips can quickly put them in jail.
Mann’s film is a meticulously literate and poetic epic about America, its justice system, its unrepentant capitalism and brutish institutions. It is also a fable on the dying days of traditional masculinity and the melancholy of macho loneliness. It’s the saddest heist film you’ll ever see, made up of a cast of broken souls, defined by their own complex moral codes, at war with themselves and the world, destined to go out to a rattle of bullets – and okay with it.
Ocean’s 11, 2001
Heat is the quintessential heist movie, the one to which all are now compared, it contains the bombastic thrill of the robbery and the internalised anguished at a solitary life on the margins but it wasn’t Mann’s first exploration of the genre that came with his debut 1981 movie, Thief.
Starring James Caan as icy jewel robber, Frank, who is as emotionally distant as he is skilled at safecracking, Thief is a Marxist critique of Capitalism and really marked by a signature line that comes about halfway through the film: “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labour.”
Thief, 1981
It’s an answer to the hierarchal struggles of the criminal underworld and a sombre reflection on honour amongst thieves and the immolation Capitalism wreaks on lives. It shows order within sub-sections of society breaking down when the rules are broken, there are moral codes shredded as the rational and emotional collide and ultimately Thief is a film about labour value and exploitation of the worker and the powerlessness of said worker to fight back against the institution of ‘the boss’.
It’s hardly a secret that Quentin Tarantino is a vociferous cinephile, pulling from a thousand different influences for his array of films but with his debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, a heist movie without a heist, he wears his inspirations loudly. The plot comes from the Hong Kong classic City on Fire, the colour aliases of the robbers is pinched from The Taking of Pelham 123, the torture scene is lifted from Django and the structure is purely The Killing and yet Tarantino, as he often does, throws it all in a blender and pours out something that is quintessentially his.
…yet Tarantino, as he often does, throws it all in a blender and pours out something that is quintessentially his.
With the small budget, Tarantino allows his pulpy, rhythmic dialogue to do most of the talking with the help of a cast of heavyweights (Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen) and the result was a heist movie for the American indie cinema era that influenced a whole new generation of would be filmmakers.
Seeing the heist movie alive and well, thriving in very diverse ways, on an indie level with the dark hearted Dragged Across Concrete to the blockbuster with Christopher Nolan’s Inception shows just how the sub-genre can be anything and everything and does not have to be defined by simplistic parameters. All you need is someone robbing something from someone else and you have a heist movie. A writer can throw in zombies, the Mafia or even time travel and you still have a heist movie. That’s why the heist endures.
