{"id":37995,"date":"2017-10-12T09:01:53","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T14:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=37995"},"modified":"2020-03-26T17:45:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T22:45:20","slug":"one-last-big-job-how-heist-movies-tell-their-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2017\/10\/12\/one-last-big-job-how-heist-movies-tell-their-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"One last big job: How heist movies tell their stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Underneath<\/strong> (1995).<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

The announcement of Ocean\u2019s Eight<\/em><\/a> (premiering, when else?, on 8 June next year) reminded me of the staying power of the heist genre, also known as the big-caper film. I discuss it a bit in Reinventing Hollywood<\/em>, my book on 1940s storytelling, but it developed and spread out most vigorously from the 1950s on.<\/p>\n

In its origins it relies on masculine roles; if women are present they\u2019re likely to be at best helpers, at worst traitors. The big job is likely to be endangered by a man telling his wife or mistress too much, and then the police or rival gangs may interfere. So the news that Ocean\u2019s Eight<\/em> will center on a female gang constitutes an intriguing wrinkle. (Will a boyfriend try to spoil the caper?) \u00a0\u00a0Warners’ ambitions for another trilogy seem evident:\u00a0presumably the entry is\u00a0Eight<\/em> because Warners hopes for a Nine<\/em> and a\u00a0Ten<\/em>. Commenters are already worried that a \u201cfeminized\u201d version runs the risk of flopping the way\u00a0Ghostbusters<\/em> did last year, but I\u2019m more hopeful. The reason is that clever storytelling is encouraged in this genre. There\u2019s a chance that the film, produced though not directed by Steven Soderbergh, will show us that this old dog has new tricks.<\/p>\n

Because I\u2019m interested in the storytelling strategies of popular cinema, the heist film is a natural thing for me to consider. Refreshing the genre may involve not just adjusting the story world\u2014giving men\u2019s roles to women\u2014but also considering ways of handling two other dimensions of narrative: plot structure and cinematic narration. I argue in Reinventing<\/em> that Hollywood filmmaking uses a sort of variorum principle, a pressure to explore as many narrative devices as possible within the constraints of tradition. For this reason, the prospect of Ocean\u2019s Eight<\/em> prodded me to think about how convention and innovation work in the caper movie. It\u2019s also a good excuse to go back and watch some skilful cinema.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From the fringes to the core<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Asphalt Jungle<\/strong> (1950).<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s useful to think of a genre as a category having a core and a periphery. At the core are prime, \u201cpure\u201d instances: prototypes. Stretching out from it are less central, fuzzier cases. Prototypical musicals are Footlight Parade, Shall We Dance?, Meet Me in St. Louis, <\/em>and My Fair Lady<\/em>. Somewhat less central are concert films and musical biopics like Lady Sings the Blues<\/em> and Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter<\/em>. At the periphery are movies with a single song or dance number. Of course the category changes across history; a critic in 1960 might have picked North by Northwest<\/em> as a prototypical spy thriller, but ten years later a Bond film would have probably held that place.<\/p>\n

The prototypical heist film, critics seem to agree, doesn\u2019t just include a robbery. There are robberies in films about Robin Hood and gentleman thieves like Raffles and the Saint. The outlaw or bandit film like They Live by Night<\/em> and Bonnie and Clyde<\/em> contains a string of robberies, but they wouldn\u2019t be at the center of the heist category.<\/p>\n

Donald Westlake proposed a concise characterization: \u201cWe follow the crooks before, during, and after a crime, usually a robbery.\u201d This indicates two things. First, the plot is structured around the big caper, though there might be lesser crimes enabling it, such as stealing weapons. Second, the viewpoint is organized around the criminals, not the detectives who might pursue them, as in a police procedural. By these criteria, High Sierra<\/em> (1941), although allied to the bandit tradition, fits because most of the film concerns a single robbery, its preparations and aftermath.<\/p>\n

Westlake shrewdly goes on to note that the interest of a heist plot inverts that of the traditional locked-room detective story. Instead of wondering how something difficult was<\/em> done, we wonder how something difficult will be<\/em> done. \u201cThe puzzle exists before the crime is committed.\u201d To fill in the how<\/em>, crooks with specific skills (safecracking, demolition, getaway driving, and so on) are recruited. Because the process matters so much, Westlake adds that heist plots focus on details of time and physical circumstance, and they draw attention to impediments such as \u201cdogs, locks, alarms, watchmen, and complicated traps.\u201d Most of these features are missing from High Sierra<\/em>; we\u2019re not encouraged to speculate how the job will be pulled, there\u2019s little meticulous planning and no division of labor by expertise, and the only dog is friendly. So it\u2019s unlikely to be a core instance of the genre as we now consider it.<\/p>\n

Most critics consider The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> (novel, 1949; film, 1950) a solid prototype. In fiction and film it\u2019s not the very earliest instance, but it displays what we might call the \u201ccompleted arc\u201d of a heist plot. A gang of varying talents is assembled and funded to pull off a jewel robbery, which succeeds partly at first and eventually fails.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A less famous example comes from 1934, Don Tracy\u2019s novel Criss-Cross<\/em>. Here an alienated loner finds that his long-ago girlfriend has married a local crook. To get her back, the hero agrees to be the inside man in a robbery of the armored truck he drives. The heist goes badly, with the hero shooting the gangster and getting shot himself. He\u2019s acclaimed as a hero, but fate catches up with him when a blackmailer who knows the truth starts putting the squeeze on him. Where The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> ranges across many characters\u2019 knowledge in a fairly tight time span, Criss Cross<\/em> restricts its point of view to the protagonist but traces his life over a long period. These storytelling options, ingredient to any narrative whatsoever, will shape how the heist plot is handled.<\/p>\n

Criss-Cross<\/em> and The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> show that we\u2019re dealing with an exceptionally schematic plot pattern. For convenience we can distinguish five parts.<\/p>\n

Circumstances lead one or more characters to decide to execute a heist (robbery, hijacking, kidnapping).<\/p>\n

The initiators recruit participants.<\/p>\n

As a group they are briefed and prepare their plan. They study their target, rehearse their scheme, or take steps to make it easier.<\/p>\n

The heist itself begins and concludes.<\/p>\n

The aftermath of the heist, failed or successful, shows the fates of the participants.<\/p>\n

There are other conventions, nicely laid out by Stuart Kaminsky in 1974 and more recently by Daryl Lee. But I\u2019ll just concentrate on this structure and how it governs narration, because these aspects show very clearly the constant dynamic of schema and revision in the filmmaking tradition.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Four capers, mostly unhappy<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Criss Cross<\/strong> (1948).<\/em><\/p>\n

Four films in the period covered in my book point toward the heist genre, though only one became a core instance. The presence of a \u201cconsolidating\u201d film might be one way genres emerge.<\/p>\n

The earliest candidate is an unlikely one. In 1941 Laura and S. J. Perelman mounted a notably unsuccessful play called The Night Before Christmas<\/em>, a farce in which crooks buy a luggage store in order to tunnel from its basement into the bank vault next door. Although Paramount was a backer of the stage show, Warners bought the rights and revamped it for Edward G. Robinson, who had had success in gangster comedies like A Slight Case of Murder<\/em> (1938). The adaptation, Larceny, Inc.<\/em> (1942) maintained the premise but revised the plot, multiplying the complications that face the leader Pressure and his two minions. The twist is that thanks to Pressure\u2019s daughter, who\u2019s unaware of the scheme, business starts booming and the crooks find themselves prosperous businessmen. Woody Allen swiped the premise for his Small-Time Crooks<\/em> (2000).<\/p>\n

Just as we don\u2019t expect a comedy to be the initial entry in a genre mostly associated with drama, we might expect that the early entries in the genre would be the tidiest, with complex variations building on them. Actually, two precursors of The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> display remarkable complexity.<\/p>\n

The simpler one, Criss Cross<\/em> (1948), starts late in the preparation phase: the night before the caper, when the gang is holding a party to distract a local cop who has his eye on them. We learn that Steve is working with Slim\u2019s wife Anna to double-cross the gang. The next day, Steve is driving the armored car and recalling how he got into this situation. A flashback provides the circumstances for the robbery\u2014Steve\u2019s pursuit of Anna, her marrying Slim, and Steve\u2019s impulsive proposal of a robbery to protect Anna from Slim\u2019s punishment.<\/p>\n

Next comes the planning phase. The robbers assemble and the task is reviewed by a mastermind they hire. This second flashback ends and, back in the present, we see the heist itself. The aftermath of the bloody robbery shows Steve in the hospital, honored by the community. A thug kidnaps him and takes him to Anna. Slim has survived the gun battle and finds the couple; he kills them before he is mowed down by the police.<\/p>\n

Early as Criss Cross<\/em> is in the history of the film genre, the plot components are already being scrambled. Thanks to 1940s Hollywood\u2019s commitment to flashbacks and character subjectivity, the novel\u2019s linear action gets fractured, compressed, and stretched. Moreover, in most films, the decision to pull the heist is made fairly early. Here and in the novel, circumstances slowly force Steve to rescue Anna from the man who mistreats her. The buildup to this decision consumes nearly fifty minutes of an 87-minute movie. Similarly, the aftermath of the heist is quite protracted, running about twenty minutes. And whereas other films (and novels) dwell on the recruitment of thieving talent, here this is elided. That\u2019s because the other members of the gang are less significant than the central triangle of Steve, Anna, and Slim.<\/p>\n

The Killers<\/em> (1946) is even more complex because it clamps the block construction of Citizen Kane<\/em> onto the heist schema. We start with one bit of the heist aftermath: the death of the gas-station attendant Ole. Like Kane, who also dies in his bed at the start of his film, Ole is the protagonist of the past-tense story. We next meet the protagonist of the present-time story, the insurance investigator Riordan, who functions like the reporter Thompson in Kane, <\/em>and sometimes even gets the same silhouette treatment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The rest of the film splits up the basic parts of the heist schema, rearranges their order, and presents them through a series of several flashback blocks, anchored in six characters\u2019 testimony.<\/p>\n

The heist itself is very brief, running only about two minutes, and the planning phase is only a little longer. As in Criss Cross<\/em>, the leadup and the aftermath constitute the bulk of the film, but these phases are broken up into many bits, and these are often shuffled out of chronological order. We see Ole\u2019s discovery by Big Jim years after the heist and then we see Ole, days after the heist, distressed that his lover Kitty has betrayed him. Similarly, a crucial event after the heist\u2014Ole\u2019s stealing the loot from the gang\u2014precedes a scene before the heist in which he learns the gang is planning to double-cross him. We have to reconstruct the canonical sequence, from circumstance to aftermath, out of fragments revealed in testimony taken by Riordan.<\/p>\n

Critics haven\u2019t taken Criss Cross<\/em> and The Killers<\/em> as the first core instances of the heist film, perhaps because these movies complicate the classic plot template. In addition, they downplay the planning and execution phases. The heist scenes are relatively minor compared to the time devoted to other phases, particularly the circumstantial buildup. Moreover, the robber teams aren\u2019t vividly characterized and don\u2019t display a range of expertise. The emphasis falls on Steve and Ole, both played by Burt Lancaster, as the beautiful losers who become suckers for treacherous women and their brutal men.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the linearity of The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> throws the plot template into crisp relief. Both novel and film offer a full-blown enactment of central features picked out by Stuart Kaminsky. The gang, despite low social standing, has many skills. They\u2019re held together by a leader who may also be a brainy planner. The robbers\u2019 plan requires \u201cskill, practice, training, and above all, perfect timing.\u201d The gang\u2019s resourcefulness is tested by accidents. The caper is partly successful but largely a failure, often through sexual weakness on the part of some players.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>W.R. Burnett\u2019s book opens up the wide narrative possibilities of the genre, thanks to an expanded group of characters. Where Don Tracy\u2019s novel Criss Cross<\/em> confined itself to relatively few figures, Burnett innovates by developing no fewer than eighteen distinct individuals, all somehow connected to the jewel robbery. New roles are assigned that will be staples of the genre\u2014financier, go-between, bent cop, owner of a safe house. We see policemen of all ranks, a news reporter, the master mind Dr. Riedenschneider, the fixer Cobby, the bankroller Emmerich (who has a wife, a mistress, and a hired detective), and the four men on the team, two of whom have women attached.<\/p>\n

The novel lays out the canonical action phases with surgical efficiency. But as in the films I\u2019ve just mentioned, the planning and the heist itself take relatively little space. Given so many characters\u2019 contribution to the action, their gradual convergence and their dispersed fates dominate the book. Over a hundred pages are devoted to setting up the circumstances and recruiting the gang. The aftermath, tracing the outcome for all involved, runs another 140 pages.<\/p>\n

The film adaptation retains the novel\u2019s scope, trimming only a couple of minor characters. It moves briskly among the ensemble, attaching us to several in turn, so we know more than any one character does. The narration creates parallels among the team members and their affiliates (such as four women of different classes, with varying commitments to their men).<\/p>\n

The result is something of a network narrative, a cross-section of several people whose lives change because of the robbery. There\u2019s no clear-cut protagonist like Steve in Criss Cross<\/em>. Dr. Riedenschneider has the most screen time, but the film begins and ends with the hooligan Dix, and the fate of both men dominates the climax. I point out in Reinventing Hollywood<\/em> that a multiple-protagonist film often gives extra weight to one or two characters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

50s and 60s stylings<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Violent Saturday<\/strong> (1955).<\/em><\/p>\n

With The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> as a robust prototype, writers and filmmakers developed the heist plot throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Despite his clumsy style (\u201dHe nodded with his head\u201d), Lionel White became known as \u201cthe king of the caper novel\u201d for his tireless variants on robberies, hijackings, and kidnappings. The other major figure was the far superior Donald Westlake, who \u00a0wrote brutal heist tales as “Richard Stark” and comic ones under his own name.<\/p>\n

In the comic register, Westlake was beaten to the post by heist films from England. The Lavender Hill Mob<\/em> (1951) showed a timid clerk engineering the theft of gold bullion, which he disguises as kitschy miniature Eiffel Towers. The Lady Killers<\/em> (1955) centered on a gang fooling their landlady into thinking that their planning meetings are actually string-quartet sessions. In Italy, the classic Big Deal on Madonna Street<\/em> (I soliti ignoti<\/em>, 1958) showed five incompetents trying to break into a pawnshop safe.<\/p>\n

Big Deal<\/em> was considered a parody of a much more serious film, one that was by then a landmark: Rififi<\/em> (Du rififi chez les hommes<\/em>, 1955). It did a great deal to consolidate the genre in France, along with Touchez pas au grisbi<\/em> (1954) and Bob le flambeur<\/em> (1956). (Both The Killers<\/em> and Criss Cross<\/em> had been imported in the Forties.) In England, the heist drama was seen in The Good Die Young<\/em> (1954), while in the US there were 5 Against the House <\/em>(1955), Violent Saturday<\/em> (1955), Plunder Road<\/em> (1957), The Big Caper<\/em> (1957, from a White novel), and Odds Against Tomorrow<\/em> (1959). The year 1960 saw a remarkable number of releases, with The League of Gentlemen (U.K.), The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, Seven Thieves,<\/em> and most famously Ocean\u2019s 11<\/em> (all U.S.).<\/p>\n

Through the 1960s the genre proliferated, including a remake of The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> (Cairo<\/em>, 1963), Jules Dassin\u2019s near-self-parody of Rififi <\/em>(Topkapi<\/em>, 1964), and a string of heist films that mixed in romantic comedy (e.g., Gambit<\/em>, 1966; How to Steal a Million<\/em>, 1966). The Italian Job<\/em> (1964) became a cult movie, with tourists visiting the sites of shooting in Turin. The genre has remained robust throughout world cinema ever since.<\/p>\n

The very rigidity of its format and the constraints it lays down, have allowed for ingenious innovations. I\u2019ll sample some of those from the genre\u2019s first dozen or so years, concentrating on three areas: the differing emphasis given to the plot phases; variants of point-of-view; and manipulations of time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Where\u2019s the action?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rififi<\/strong> (1955).<\/em><\/p>\n

The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> offers a fairly pure geometry: the heist, lasting about eleven minutes, ends just before the film\u2019s midpoint. On the other side of that is another big scene: a gunfight initiated by Emmerich\u2019s henchman Brannom when Dr. Riedenschneider and Dix bring in the loot. That confrontation takes another seven minutes, so the heist and its immediate wrapup sit at the center of the running time. What led up to the heist, the circumstances, recruitment, and planning phases, consume the first forty-five minutes of the film, and the aftermath of the heist, affecting the surviving characters, will take just about as long. This balanced geometry, putting the heist snugly at the center of the plot but devoting most time to showing many lives leading up to and away from the crime, suits the extensive characterization of all involved.<\/p>\n

This is a neat structure, but not the only possibility. Any phase of the action can be given great weight. The first half hour of Bob le flambeur<\/em> is an episodic introduction to Bob\u2019s routines and associates. It\u2019s the circumstantial phase\u2014he\u2019s running out of money\u2014presented at low pressure, emphasizing instead the fascinating milieu Bob coolly drifts through. Only when Roger points out a croupier at the Nantes casino does Bob formulate \u201cthe job of a lifetime.\u201d Then crew assembly and planning can begin. As the plot develops, characters and relationships presented casually in the exposition become crucial to the heist and its unraveling.<\/p>\n

Other phases can be stretched out. Ocean\u2019s 11<\/em> dwells on the phase of gathering the talent. Before the start, Danny Ocean has already conceived the heist, but we aren\u2019t told the plan. Instead we watch his team members converge on Las Vegas. Not until the film\u2019s midpoint, at 53:00, is the plan revealed in a briefing. The dawdling exposition suits a film about cool guys hanging out.<\/p>\n

The formation of the crew is exceptionally protracted in Odds Against Tomorrow<\/em>, because here two members hesitate about participating. The racist Earl Slater, wracked by the shame of not providing for his wife, finally gets her to agree to let him join. Not until twenty-three minutes from the end does the African-American musician Johnny Ingram finally accept a role in the heist, which immediately becomes the film\u2019s climax.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The source for Odds Against Tomorrow<\/em> (one of the better heist novels) handles the basic pattern very differently, putting the heist just before the midpoint and devoting the second half of the book to the increasingly hopeless getaway, where the interracial tensions play out at length.<\/p>\n

The planning phase sometimes includes a rehearsal for the heist, and that may require a subsidiary crime, such as stealing keys or a vehicle. The League of Gentlemen<\/em> has an unusually long planning phase, in which the gang masquerades as soldiers in order to seize weapons from a military post. This robbery, running nearly twenty minutes, takes longer than the film\u2019s main heist but serves to demonstrate the team\u2019s resourcefulness and esprit de corps<\/em>. The men\u2019s precision and resourcefulness (based on their wartime experience) lead us to expect a successful main event.<\/p>\n

Kaminsky suggests that the big-caper genre resembles the soldiers-on-a-mission movie, which centers on the details of a process executed by skillful specialists. That display of process comes to the fore in The Asphalt Jungle<\/em>\u2019s central robbery, which initiated the convention of detailing the mechanics of the heist. Other films expanded the heist sequence to larger proportions than was evident in The Killers<\/em> or Criss Cross<\/em>. Rififi <\/em>became the model; its heist runs twenty-five minutes without any words being spoken. (That sequence is part of an even longer wordless stretch that runs over thirty minutes.) Dassin\u2019s film meticulously breaks down the steps of a complicated robbery, allowing us to appreciate the men\u2019s clever planning while, as usual, ratcheting up moments of suspense when it appears they might fail.<\/p>\n

After Rififi<\/em>, heist scenes got longer and more intricate. The one in Big Deal on Madonna Street<\/em> runs twenty minutes, those in Seven Thieves<\/em> and The Day They Robbed the Bank of England<\/em> run thirty minutes, and those in Topkapi<\/em> and The Italian Job<\/em> approach forty minutes. To motivate these long, virtuosic passages, there need to be many obstacles, many ingenious ways around them, and many characters concentrating on their assigned duties.<\/p>\n

Long or short, the heist can be shifted off-center. The heist can be the climax, as in The Big Caper<\/em>, or it can be virtually the film\u2019s entire second half, as in The Italian Job<\/em> (which arguably doesn\u2019t complete the heist and so never provides a proper aftermath). Topkapi<\/em>\u2019s flamboyant robbery, involving elaborate subterfuges, dominates the film\u2019s latter stretches, leading to a quick reversal in its epilogue. The heist is finished early on in The Lady Killers<\/em>, since the crucial action is the long aftermath in which, contradicting the title, the crooks dispose of one another. By contrast, the heist dominates nearly all of Larceny, Inc.<\/em> Most of the film is devoted to the crooks\u2019 slowly deepening tunnel, as the process is interrupted by breaks in the water main, a geyser of furnace oil, and their decision to abandon their plan in favor of going straight\u2014before another crook comes along to continue the caper.<\/p>\n

Or the heist can launch the film. In Plunder Road<\/em>, after the train robbery is completed, the rest of the film is the aftermath, consisting of chases and suspense sequences. The circumstances, recruitment, and planning phases are alluded to in dialogue, as suits a low-budget production. The plot of Touchez pas au grisbi<\/em> starts the morning after the caper and shows thieves trying to protect their loot from a treacherous drug dealer. It was probably inevitable that somebody would make a heist movie that keeps the heist offscreen and makes the action one long aftermath.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Steering the moving spotlight<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Topkapi<\/strong> (1964).<\/em><\/p>\n

Many films based on mystery rely on restricting a character\u2019s range of knowledge, as in detective novels told in the first person. But suspense, Hitchcock and others recognized, relies on greater access to story information. If there\u2019s a bomb under the table, <\/a>Hitch advised, tell the viewer but don\u2019t tell the characters. The heist film, as an account of how a crime is committed, depends more on suspense than mystery. So we\u2019d expect a constant shuttling from character to character, filling us in on how the scheme is going and letting us worry about impending dangers.<\/p>\n

This is generally what we find. Criss Cross<\/em> is unusual in confining us to what Steve knows about Anna’s and Slim\u2019s real agendas, and this confinement is what yields the surprises that pop up in the film\u2019s final stretches. Mostly, though, heist movies and novels use omniscient narration. Employing what I call in Reinventing Hollywood<\/em> the \u201cmoving spotlight\u201d approach, the film shifts us from attachment to one character to another.<\/p>\n

The moving spotlight permits us to understand the choreography of the crime, in which many characters play a part, and to feel suspense when matters of timing or accident intrude. Indeed, the convention of the unforeseen accident that spoils the heist relies on our breaking attachment to the crooks and getting privileged access to the off-schedule night watchman, the passing witness, or the failed piece of machinery. In Topkapi<\/em> we and not the thieves learn how a stray bird will upset their getaway.<\/p>\n

This omniscient narration (which need not tell us absolutely everything) can be deployed in a range of ways. One option is chapter titles, as in Big Deal on Madonna Street<\/em> (and revived by Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs<\/em>). A more common resource is the non-character narrator, present as an authoritative voice-over. In Bob le flambeur<\/em>, a worldly male voice introduces us to Bob\u2019s daily routine and comments somewhat cynically on his place in his milieu.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A similar all-knowing voice introduces us one by one to the heisters in The Good Die Young<\/em>; there it eases the transition into expository flashbacks. Topkapi<\/em> treats this convention, as others, with self-conscious playfulness. At the beginning the beguiling woman in the gang addresses the camera and explains that the heist aims to get the emerald she covets. She doesn\u2019t take this narrating role again until the very end, in a brief epilogue that replays the gathering of the gang in stylized form.<\/p>\n

Heist films must often choose whether to widen the field of view to include either the cops or civilians. Armored Car Robbery<\/em> (1950), for me a peripheral instance of a heist film, alternates the gang\u2019s activities\u2014which do pass through the phases I\u2019ve outlined\u2014with the detectives\u2019 investigation. The result is balanced between heist film and police procedural. Something similar happens in Violent Saturday<\/em> (1955), which devotes most of its plot to a gang\u2019s scheme to rob a mining town\u2019s bank. Crosscut with the gang\u2019s gathering and planning are scenes showing several members of the community, each with domestic problems. These scenes, typical of small-town melodrama (dissolute rich people, sexy nurse, repressed librarian, lovelorn bank manager), not only pad out the film but show us characters who will be affected by the heist. Some become witnesses and bystanders during the robbery, one is killed, and one, a local mining manager, will be forced to fight the gang at the climax.<\/p>\n

The timing and selection of the shifts among characters can build up specific effects. For instance, in Big Deal on Madonna Street<\/em>, the heist is conceived by Cosimo, a hardheaded crook doing time. A handful of would-be crooks decides to execute the robbery without him. We know, as the gang does not, that he has been released and is conspiring to interfere. The filmmakers could have made Cosimo\u2019s return a surprise revelation, but instead our expectation that he\u2019ll start meddling intensifies our interest.<\/p>\n

Similarly, we know, as the Topkapi<\/em> gang does not, that Arthur is a police spy. But then he confesses to them, so we know, as the Turkish police do not, that he is to be a double agent. The film milks suspense during the scenes in which Arthur relays information to the authorities, and then it makes us wonder how the gang will use their new knowledge of police surveillance. This is the sort of fine-tuned choice about \u201cwho knows what when\u201d that heist films must make at every turn.<\/p>\n

At a more granular level, when the spotlight is on one character, the filmmakers must choose whether to make those moments, shot by shot, highly restricted or not. In The Killers<\/em>, Nick Adams\u2019 account of Ole\u2019s reaction to the stranger stopping for gas is more or less plausibly limited to Nick\u2019s ken. But the precise exchange of glances between the driver and the Swede signal to us that Ole has been recognized. Nick doesn’t register this, since he’s standing at the rear of the car (barely visible in my first still, over Ole’s right shoulder).<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In effect, this is a narrational aside to the audience. Nick can’t see this significant exchange of glances, and his voice-over doesn’t specify it, so we can’t assume Riordan learns of it. But this privileged moment primes us to see Big Jim as a major menace in scenes to come. This sort of deviation from what a character could plausibly know or notice is common in cinematic narration and differentiates it from literary narration, which is more tightly restricted in handling \u201cpoint of view.\u201d Classical Hollywood is biased toward unrestricted narration; radical restriction is rare. The heist genre can exploit many fine gradations between attachment to a character and more wide-ranging knowledge.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What\u2019s our clock?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Killing<\/strong> (1956).<\/em><\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve seen, two early instances of heist films break with a linear layout of the story. Criss Cross<\/em> presents what Reinventing Hollywood<\/em> calls a crisis structure, beginning just before the turning point and flashing back to show what led up to it. The Killers<\/em> has a refracted narration, with all of the past events passed to the investigator Riordan and us through witnesses\u2019 testimony. The flashbacks in Criss Cross<\/em> are chronological, but those in The Killers<\/em>\u00a0are drastically out of order.<\/p>\n

Time-scrambling, then, seems to be especially welcome in the heist film (as not, say, in the Western). The basic plot pattern is such a simple one that shuffling phases or parts of phases doesn\u2019t create confusion. Yet few films of the 1950s I\u2019ve found display the complexity of the Forties examples. Indeed, a time-juggling heist novel, The Lions at the Kill<\/em> (Simon Kent, 1959) was ironed into straightforward linearity in the film version, Seven Thieves<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Good Die Young<\/em> displays a more complicated structure. It begins at a point of crisis, with four men driving in a car to the site of the caper.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The voice-over narrator introduces each man in turn, and then a long flashback explains his backstory. Deprived of information about the heist, we have to wonder how the narration will bring the men together and create their plan.<\/p>\n

After the long section explaining each man’s circumstances, all involving women and money, the flashbacks meld. The men gradually come to know each other through frequenting the same pub. Their desperation pushes them toward accepting one man\u2019s proposal that they rob a post office. With so much time spent on preparation and assembly, the actual planning is necessarily brief. Eventually the final flashback flows seamlessly into the present-time situation, initiating a brief replay of the dialogue in the car that opened the film. The heist (devolving into a disastrous gun battle) initiates the climax, and an airport aftermath concludes the film.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The most ambitious 1950s recasting of the nonlinear efforts of the 1940s films is The Killing<\/em> (1956). The source novel, Lionel White\u2019s Clean Break<\/em> (1955) consists of interwoven threads. A crook, his pal, a cashier, a bartender, and a crooked cop conspire to rob a racetrack. They will employ helpers to start a fistfight and shoot a racehorse. The early chapters devote short stretches to following each one, already recruited, through the circumstances phase of the heist template. The men assemble at their planning meeting, which is invaded by the snoopy wife of the weak cashier. She then tells her boyfriend about the heist, so another strand involving other characters is introduced.<\/p>\n

On the day of the robbery, White\u2019s narration again attaches itself seriatim<\/em> to each man as he executes his role in the scheme. While the early part of the book had a few mild jumps back in time to follow each heister, the day of the job creates extreme back-and-forth shifts. We follow the bartender, for instance, going to the track on the fateful day, before the next subchapter skips back to the cashier waking up and then going to the same train. In a later section, we skip back to the previous day and attach ourselves to the sniper who will shoot the racehorse. Because of the overlapping lines of action, the shooting of the horse and the starting of the bar fight are presented twice. Everything eventually converges on Johnny Clay, the mastermind, who breaks into the money room and steals the day\u2019s revenue.<\/p>\n

These temporal overlaps emerge partly from the description of the action, but they\u2019re also marked by either characters looking at clocks or watches, or by explicit mention in the prose, such as \u201cIt was exactly six forty-five when\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The film version makes these overlapping schedules much more explicit. A detached voice-over describing police routine or criminal behavior had become a commonplace in the 1940s, in both \u201csemidocumentary\u201d films and in radio drama, notably Dragnet. In The Killing<\/em>, apart from lending an aura of authenticity, the voice-over exaggerates the time markers of the novel by introducing scenes crisply. The\u00a0first five scenes are introduced with these tags:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt exactly 3:45\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAbout an hour earlier\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAt seven PM that same day\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA half an hour earlier\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAt 7:15 that same night\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

These lead-ins remind us of the ticking clock, set up parallels among the characters, and get us acclimated to the film\u2019s method of tracking one character, then jumping back in time to track another. This is moving-spotlight narration on markedly parallel tracks. The same method will be applied during the heist, when ten consecutive scenes and several others will be tagged in the same way. (\u201cMike O\u2019Reilly was ready at 11:15.\u201d)<\/p>\n

It’s not just the repetitions that exaggerate White\u2019s jagged time scheme. When the sniper Nikki is shot after plugging the racehorse, the narrator reports drily: \u201cNikki was dead at 4:24.\u201d Cut to Johnny leaving a luggage store, and the voice-over announces: \u201cAt 2:15 that afternoon Johnny Clay was still in the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The time jumps more or less buried in White\u2019s prose are made dissonant in the film. Here the juxtaposition heightens the likelihood that Johnny’s robbery won’t go according to plan.<\/p>\n

The replays are no less sharply profiled. As the scenic blocks move from character to character and skip back in time, they include actions we\u2019ve already seen. The most persistent is the repetition of the track announcer\u2019s calling the start of the crucial seventh race, but we also get replays of the wrestler Maurice starting a fight, the downing of the horse, and glimpses of Johnny waiting to slip into the cash room.<\/p>\n

Instead of shuffling flashbacks in the manner of The Killers<\/em>, The Killing<\/em> offers brief time chunks stacked in slightly overlapping array until they all square up in a single moment, the consummation of the robbery. This structure allows for the sort of character delineation we find in The Asphalt Jungle<\/em> while also offering the audience a formal game to enjoy. Kubrick\u2019s film can be seen as pointing in two directions\u2014revising the flashback format of the 1940s entries, but becoming a point of reference for later filmmakers eager to innovate games with time and viewpoint that would remain comprehensible to the audience.<\/p>\n

The Killing<\/em> helped make Clean Break<\/em> White\u2019s most famous novel. It was often republished under the film\u2019s title. Perhaps in a grateful spirit White\u2019s 1960 novel Steal Big<\/em> (1960) included this scene.<\/p>\n

Donovan didn\u2019t look at the half-dozen worn, barely legible signs in the dingy lobby of the building. He went at once to the elevator and asked for the fifth floor. Getting out of the elevator, he turned left, took a dozen steps and knocked on a pebbled-glass door. The door bore the legend, KUBRIC NOVELTY COMPANY.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mr. Kubric, it turns out, supplies illegal guns and explosives.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Art for artifice\u2019s sake<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Inside Man<\/strong> (2006).<\/em><\/p>\n

White\u2019s in-joke, along with The Killing<\/em>\u2019s gamelike approach to structure, reminds us that whatever its claim to realism, this is a highly artificial genre. The strict template and the ritualistic steps in it\u2014recruiting the crew, casing the target, checking watches\u2014invite filmmakers to tinker with self-conscious narration that lets the viewer in on the joke.<\/p>\n

One convention, that of the rehearsal for the big job, is flaunted in Bob le flambeur<\/em>, when the narrator simply breaks into the film with the line, \u201cHere\u2019s how Bob pictured the heist,” and we get a stylized, hypothetical enactment of the job carried off perfectly. In these films, when the rehearsal goes well, you know the real thing will face problems.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Something similar, though suited to light comedy, takes place in Gambit<\/em>. Here we think we\u2019re seeing the heist as executed (across twenty-three minutes), but it proves to be no more than the fantasy of the crook hatching it. Again, everything that succeeds in the fantasy goes wrong in reality.<\/p>\n

As it gained a profile, the genre got reflexive. In the novel that was the source for The League of Gentlemen<\/em>, the heisters explicitly model their plan on the one in Clean Break<\/em>. The film version likewise sets its heisters mimicking a pulp novel, though it didn’t specify the title. And in The Wrong Arm of the Law<\/em> (1963), Peter Sellers\u2019 cockney mastermind promises to show his henchmen \u201ceducational films and training films\u201d like Rififi, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England,<\/em> and The League of Gentlemen.<\/em><\/p>\n

The opportunities the genre provides for experimenting with story stratagems, sometimes in very self-conscious ways, seem to have been part of the reason later filmmakers tried their hand at it. In the 1990s and 2000s, writers and directors drawn to neo-noir and narrative experiment took up thriller conventions generally, and the heist film was one option.<\/p>\n

In Reservoir Dogs<\/em> (1992), Tarantino revived the shuffling of time and viewpoint that was ingredient to the genre. Although the film pays homage to Clean Break<\/em>, its form is no less indebted to Criss Cross<\/em>. Like that film, it flashes back from the day of the heist in order to run through the canonical phases of action. And as in The Killers<\/em>, those phases are scrambled out of order. Brian Singer\u2019s The Usual Suspects<\/em> (1995) brings the (very \u201840s) device of the lying flashback to the genre, within the template of police questioning after the heist. Inside Man<\/em> (2006) mixed to-camera narration, flashbacks, and flashforwards to interrogations after the crime.<\/p>\n

Among Americans it\u2019s Steven Soderbergh who has returned to the caper film most frequently. The Underneath<\/em> (1995) is a remake of Criss Cross<\/em>, with an extra layer of flashbacks. Logan Lucky<\/em> (2017), with its deadpan redneck losers, joins the tradition of comic heist movies. Most strikingly, the Ocean\u2019s <\/em>series makes a virtual fetish of the male camaraderie and playful plot tricks typical of the genre. The films pepper the action with voice-overs, cunning ellipses, and flashbacks within flashbacks. The plots hide key information about the plan. They fill the action with in-jokes, such as a star cameo by Bruce Willis commenting on box-office grosses. Like 1960s films, they incorporate romantic comedy. In Ocean\u2019s Eleven<\/em> ((2001) Danny and Tess arrange a post-divorce reconciliation, and in Ocean\u2019s Twelve<\/em> (2004) Danny\u2019s pal Rusty gets involved with police agent Isabel.<\/p>\n

Piling up obstacles, reversals, bluffs, and double-bluffs, the films form a kind of anthology of the genre\u2019s tricks. By the time we get to Ocean\u2019s Thirteen<\/em> (2007), the early phases of the standard plot schema can be given short shrift. We know the gang and its modus operandi, so the bulk of the film becomes a mind-bogglingly intricate heist including everything from planting bedbugs in a hotel room to manufacturing loaded dice in a Mexican factory under threat of strike. The network of rules and roles laid out in the 1950s\u2014master mind, aged expert, financier, crooked helpers, allies and rivals and go-betweens and stooges\u2014are given baroque elaboration and treated with an almost self-congratulatory panache.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So am I looking forward to Ocean\u2019s Eight<\/em>?\u00a0It\u2019s directed by Gary Ross, so I don\u2019t expect Soderbergh’s casual sheen. And the target of the heist, a fashion show at the Met, may be a bit too on the nose; why can’t the ladies tackle a payroll or a munitions factory? Still, like a butterfly collector looking for new specimens, I\u2019m quite curious. When it comes to narrative strategies, I\u2019m a sucker for a fresh con.<\/p>\n

\n

Thanks to Jim Healy and Geoff Gardner for discussion of the genre.<\/p>\n

Stuart Kaminsky\u2019s American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film<\/em><\/a> (Plaum, 1974) is a trailblazing study, and the chapter on the \u201cbig-caper\u201d film is an indispensible starting point for studying this kind of movie. Later editions of the book eliminated this chapter. A wide-ranging recent survey is Daryl Lee\u2019s The Heist Film: Stealing with Style<\/em><\/a> (Wallflower, 2014). Alastair Phillips offers an in-depth analysis of a classic in Rififi<\/em><\/a> (Tauris, 2009).<\/p>\n

My quotations from Donald Westlake come from Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories<\/em><\/a> (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1 and 126. I also found the entry on Lionel White in Brian Ritt\u2019s Paperback Confidential: Crime Writers of the Paperback Era<\/em><\/a> (Stark House, 2013) helpful. The \u201cKUBRIC\u201d passage in White\u2019s Steal Big<\/em><\/a> (Fawcett, 1960) is on p. 47. White much influenced Westlake, as I hope to show in a future entry, but Westlake was a far superior stylist, as I discuss a little in this entry<\/a>. See also this note<\/a> on Levi Stahl’s anthology <\/a>of Westlake nonfiction.<\/p>\n

For more on analyzing narrative see \u201cThree Dimensions of Film Narrative\u201d<\/a> and \u201cUnderstanding Film Narrative: The Trailer.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Tarantino’s debts to the 1940s are reviewed in this entry<\/a>. See as well my recent entry on thrillers<\/a>. I analyze the convoluted narrative of The Killers<\/em> in Chapter 9 of Narration in the Fiction Film<\/em>. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies<\/em> discusses 1990s filmmakers\u2019 relation to the Forties. Multiple-protagonist plotting is considered in Chapter 3 of Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The concept of schema and revision is considered here<\/a>\u00a0as applied to style; this entry, like Reinventing<\/em>, applies it to narrative principles. My Dunkirk<\/em> entry<\/a> points out affinities between the overlapped time frames in The Killing<\/em> and the three-track scheme Nolan gives us. Unlike Kubrick,\u00a0Dunkirk\u00a0<\/em>applies the principle to the entire film and assigns each timeline a different duration, but it generates a back-and-fill organization and clusters of replays reminiscent of The Killing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Burt Lancaster is considered here<\/a>, and why not?<\/p>\n

P. S. 26 March 2020:<\/strong> Thanks to Adrian Martin for correcting two slips in my account of Criss Cross<\/em>!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ocean’s Eight<\/strong> (2018).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Underneath (1995). DB here: The announcement of Ocean\u2019s Eight (premiering, when else?, on 8 June next year) reminded me of the staying power of the heist genre, also known as the big-caper film. I discuss it a bit in Reinventing Hollywood, my book on 1940s storytelling, but it developed and spread out most vigorously […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,241,7,84,57,33,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1940s-hollywood","category-directors-kubrick","category-film-and-other-media","category-film-genres","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-national-cinemas-france","category-national-cinemas-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37995"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44081,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37995\/revisions\/44081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}