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 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 lower-budget noir towards more mainstream studio fare inevitably leads to a persistent contradiction within the genre between the exceptionalist 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 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 point of making Le Cercle Rouge ‘overdetermined’ – but he turned the film into a ‘cinema of attractions,’ the whole robbery sequence ‘standing [self-reflexively] 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: 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.

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

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 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 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).

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

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 published in Learning From Las Vegas (1972). It was a heady time for the counter-cultural movements of the decade, whose anti-authoritarian, anti-corporatist 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 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.

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

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 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, 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 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 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), 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 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 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.

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

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 slow-motion 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 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 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 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.