Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

The League of Gentlemen

(UK, 1960)

As I probably say before the review of any movie about a caper or a con game (I’m not going to check them all) I love movies about capers and con games. I find that most of them are labors of love, too. Someone has a clever story to tell, and wants to tell it as fairly as possible, setting it up, starting the caper, and then pulling a reverse or two on your unsuspecting ass. True, there are dishonest ones, and ones that didn’t quite make it to where they intended to go, and a few actual turkeys. But mostly, they are good.

This is a great one. Jack Hawkins is an ex-Colonel who feels he was short-changed for 30 years of service by a niggardly pension. He assembles a crew of seven ex-soldiers, every one of them a fuck-up in civilian life, most cashiered from the army for one transgression or another, but every one of them very good in his particular field. Jack has read a book that outlines a bank robbery that he thinks just might work, with some refinements …

… and I must digress a moment here to mention that the great Donald E. Westlake, 22 years later, wrote a similar story: Jimmy the Kid. (Great book, from which they made a pretty bad movie.) In it, his motley crew led by John Dortmunder pull off a kidnapping, following the plot of a book one of them has read, called Child Heist, by Richard Stark. I don’t know if Westlake ever saw this movie, but either way, they are hardly similar at all other than that detail. A great inside joke is that Richard Stark is Westlake, he wrote about 20 hard crime books under that name, though he never wrote Child Heist. Back to the movie …

… The best caper movies start by assembling the cast, as this one does. We get to know a bit about them, and what sort of hold Jack has on each one. They all agree to be in on it. Jack’s idea is that they will plan and execute the robbery as a military operation, complete with officers and a barracks in his big house, and fines for disobeying orders. Another thing this does right is to show some of the planning. First they must pull off a robbery of an army depot to get the guns and other equipment they need. They do this as a Big Con, using guile and impersonation, and it’s flawless. Then …

You can’t say much about the end of a caper movie without spoiling the fun of it, but I will issue a minor SPOILER WARNING here, though I don’t really think it’s necessary. These stories almost never end with the robbers getting away clean, do they? Very seldom. So you go in expecting they will be caught. The fun is trying to spot what will go wrong. It’s usually a tiny detail, as in one of the best, Topkapi, where a little bird foils the grand plan. All I will say is that the fuck-up here is something that could never have been believable in the US. It could only have happened in a country where legions of people are engaged in the ridiculous practice of “trainspotting,” where they try to collect the serial numbers of every locomotive in the UK. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Me, neither, but they do it.