In short: The Italian Job (1969)

Freshly out of prison, small time-ish yet highly aspirational criminal mastermind Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) inherits a plan for stealing a whole lot of gold in Turin from a friend murdered by the Mafia. It’s a bit of a crazy undertaking, but Charlie manages to talk hilariously posh underworld king (you can take that literally) Mr Bridger (Noël Coward – yes, that Noël Coward) into financing the somewhat crazy plan. So it’s off to Italy with a bunch of people mostly without personality to outfox the police as well as the mafia and get rich.

Even in 1969, films about cars that go really fast had a bit of a problem with filling the parts that were not about car chases. Peter Collinson’s film decides to go around that particular problem by being a car chase caper movie, which is a decent enough idea at its core. Alas, in this concrete case, the non car-chase parts – aka two thirds of the movie – are just not a terribly good caper movie.

For one, the quality of the jokes – even if you forget contemporary sensibilities and pretend it is still 1969 – is highly variable, tending to the unfunny, and for every actually funny bit like Caine’s bone-tired facial expression after he has bedded the half a dozen or so prostitutes his girlfriend gifts him as a “coming out present” (I did mention we need to forget our contemporary sensibilities, right?), there are two that fall down flat with an audible “thud”. Though I’m sure Benny Hill’s (sigh) pervy Professor with a weight fetish would have been hilarious once, in the music hall. The film also has the tendency to drag jokes that are funny for the first two or three times out way too often, and at first genuinely funny business like Mr Bridger’s royal poshness is getting just a bit tedious through the power of repetition, though Coward seems to amuse himself just fine.

As a caper movie, the film suffers under a particularly slow middle act, with planning and experimentation that never feel like anything but a way for the film to fill out the running time. Adding to the plight of this tedious part of the film is the inexplicable decision to surround Caine – who is cool even when he’s silly, fortunately – with a large amount of helpers who have no discernible character traits that could make things more interesting whatsoever, so apart from Caine, Mr Bridger, the self-explanatory Camp Freddie (Tony Beckley) and the unfortunate pervy prof, there are a dozen or so completely interchangeable guys around, doing little but take up screen space.

On the plus side, once the heist finally, after a long long long long time, starts, it’s actually pretty damn fun, with some ingenious moments and direction by Collinson that finally gets the tone of light but actual excitement the first two acts were crying out for right.


That’s car chase movies for ya.