ACCORDING to its official pedigree, The Bank Job (Sunday, 8.30pm, Showtime) is a co-production between the US, Britain and Australia; and certainly the director, Roger Donaldson, was born in this country.
But in every respect that matters, this is a full-on British movie starring Princess Margaret (uncredited and unseen), Louis Mountbatten and various real or imagined members of the London underworld. It’s a rattling good yarn that may or may be true. And since most of the characters are dead, we will probably never know if it’s true or not.
It’s true that one night in September 1971 thieves broke into a London bank and stole a large quantity of cash and jewellery. But that was not, the filmmakers assure us, the true story. The real story is that while the robbers were pinching the cash, a secret agent of MI5, who had infiltrated their gang, was recovering from a safe-deposit box some embarrassing photos of Princess Margaret in compromising sexual positions.
What the producers have called an “amazing untold story of murder, sex and corruption” has one of the best bank-heist sequences since Rififi, a convoluted and largely unbelievable plot and solid performances from Jason Stathan, Saffron Burrows and David Suchet (as a Soho vice lord).
The makers of The Bank Job enjoy themselves thoroughly. In the absence of witnesses, they embellish their story with whatever details they please in the interests of a hair-raising climax, and on the whole they succeed.
Peter Hyam’s 2010 (Wednesday, 8.30pm, TCM) is an intriguing sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and better than any sequel I expected in 1984, when the original was fresh in memory. Roy Scheider is the US space agency boss trying to discover what happened to Keir Dullea’s ill-fated Discovery mission (last seen in what looked like a time-warped French restoration dining-room). Helen Mirren plays a Russian astronaut, and we actually get some spooky glimpses of old 2001 interiors, with the unseen presence of HAL brooding over everything like a malevolent spirit.
To my knowledge, the first appearance of a computer in a Hollywood film was in Desk Set (Wednesday, 10.30pm, Fox Classics), a comedy with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn set in the research department of a television network. Technology is threatening the jobs of the all-female team. Did anyone have office computers in 1957? Hollywood seemed to think so.
Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child (Saturday, 8.30pm, World Movies) is the story of two brothers growing up in a neighbourhood near Rome in the 1960s. Accio (Elio Germano) is unhappy, short-tempered and jealous of his siblings, and these days would probably be diagnosed with ADHD and subdued with medication. In the film he finds an outlet for his passions by becoming a fascist.
His more charismatic brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) joins the Communist Party. Manrico is worldly, passionate, idealistic, and aspires to political power. In the end (we gather) he achieves it. In one bitterly hilarious scene, communists stage an outdoor performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, replacing the words of the Ode to Joy with Marxist slogans on cue-cards.
The characters are engaging, though driven by such maverick and contradictory impulses that I felt I hardly knew them. Brotherly love endures, despite a shared love for the beautiful Francesca (Diane Fleri). If the climactic tragedy strikes with less force than it might have done, this is nevertheless a richly enjoyable film, a revealing portrait of its time executed with a revelatory, almost light-hearted spontaneity in odd contrast with its darkest moods.
There were two notable films called Heaven Can Wait (Friday 11.15pm, Fox Classics): one made by Ernst Lubitsch in 1943, and this one, a remake starring Warren Beatty of another Hollywood classic, Here Comes Mr Jordan. Beatty plays a Los Angeles footballer who is prematurely sent to heaven after a car accident (the result of some celestial stuff-up) and finds his way back to earthly life in the body of a murdered industrialist.
The plot has echoes of another of my favourite films, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life of Death from 1946, but Beatty never looks comfortable in a world of fantasy.
