Swagger of geezers
Three new heist films, ostensibly dealing with the real-life offending of audacious senior citizens, prove that in crime and cinema, age is just a number.
Three new heist films, ostensibly dealing with the real-life offending of audacious senior citizens, prove that in crime and cinema, age is just a number.
Michael Caine has been committing daylight robbery for half a century. He’d already made a few heist movies before his most famous one, The Italian Job, in 1969 (altogether now: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”). Now at 85, he’s made another.
His King of Thieves is a dramatisation of the Hatton Garden raid of Easter 2015. A crew, mostly of pensionable age (tabloid headline: “the Diamond Wheezers”), made off with an official estimate of £14 million of loot having spent the long weekend boring into a safety deposit vault in the London jewellery district.
Once the vintage and identity of those arrested for the raid was known, Caine tells the Listener, he remembers thinking: “It’s done by an old Cockney and if they ever make a movie of this I am going to get to read it first.”
It appears Caine is part of a celluloid senior-citizen crime wave. Across the Atlantic, an 82-year-old Robert Redford is playing a real-life bank robber in The Old Man & the Gun. Redford’s criminal history on screen dates back just as far as Caine’s – The Old Man uses a couple of frames of the thirtysomething golden boy escaping from a prison truck in The Chase from 1966. When, in the new film, he puts on a fedora, it’s hard not to be reminded of his 1973 great caper The Sting. In Thieves, there’s a flashback to a shot of Caine in The Ipcress File (1965).
The Old Man & the Gun is based on the later life and crimes of Forrest Tucker, whose final arrest for bank robbery came at the age of 78. He died in prison, aged 83, in 2004.
The film is based, tangentially, on a
2003 New Yorker profile of Tucker by David Grann, the author of The Lost City of Z (also a movie) and last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
The charming film is written and directed by David Lowery, who directed Redford in the made-in-New Zealand Pete’s Dragon. Shot in grainy 16mm and looking like it could have been made in the 1970s, it follows a final spree of bank robberies by Tucker and his elderly cronies in “the Over-The-Hill Gang” played by Tom Waits and Danny Glover.
Between his politely executed stick-ups, the gentlemanly Tucker romances Jewel (Sissy Spacek). Her horse ranch allows the one-time Sundance Kid (altogether now: “Think ya used enough dynamite there, Butch?”) to get back in the saddle, possibly for one last time – Redford has said it will be his last screen performance. If so, he’s going out riding high.
Heist films and westerns are made of similar stuff, says Lowery. “It goes beyond movies to being intrinsic to how America was formed. A bunch of rebels rising up against the institutions that held them down. So, there’s something very appealing about one guy going up against a bank.
“I don’t approve of what this guy does,” he tells the Listener at the Zurich Film Festival. “If this story was set in 2018, I would not romanticise Forrest Tucker at all. He would be a villain. He would be someone who’s fairly despicable. But something about the gauzy haze of history allows us to romanticise him.
“In America, there’s a cultural fascination with outlaws that I’ve always accepted and lately I’m wondering if that’s a negative thing. This movie is … engaging with the myth of the outlaw on its own level, as opposed to being critical of it.”
Hollywood has often bundled its actor senior citizens into last-hurrah caper movies. But King of Thieves and The Old Man & the Gun are a cut above. And with the imminent arrival of American Animals, a third ripped-from-the-headlines heist film featuring a gang who look like they’ve escaped a retirement home, the spree of real-life thieving geezers on the big screen continues.
Unlike the westerns that have influenced them, heist movies have never really gone out of fashion. They’ve kept returning, wearing different masks. This
Michael Caine is part of a celluloid senior-citizen crime wave. Across the Atlantic, an 82-year-old Robert Redford is playing a real-life bank robber.
year’s all-women Ocean’s 8 was a spin-off of a noughties trilogy, which itself spun off the 1960 Rat Pack film. The past two decades have seen other remakes, such as The Thomas Crown Affair and The Italian Job. Recently, heist movie tropes have figured in everything from superhero flicks ( Ant-Man) to highconcept sci-fi ( Inception) – a movie that featured the ubiquitous Caine.
Caine is on the line from a posh London hotel where there’s a media day for the King of Thieves. It must resemble quite the old boys’ club. Alongside Caine in the film are fellow thespian knights Tom Courtenay (81) and Michael Gambon (77), as well as relative youngsters Jim Broadbent (69) and Ray Winstone (61). “These are all great actors. And most of them are friends of mine.”
Tim Bevan, the New Zealand-born boss of British film giant Working
Title, thought that to make a successful Hatton Garden movie, he needed Caine. He got him, even before there was a script or a director attached. “I thought, whoever gets Michael Caine to do it is probably going to win this race.” Two earlier films of the case disappeared without trace when they were released in the UK. A television miniseries starring Timothy Spall is due out later this year.
As Guardian crime reporter Duncan Campbell, whose work King of Thieves adapts, observed: “A whole generation of British actors will have profited far more from that Easter weekend than their larcenous contemporaries who did all the heavy lifting.”
The “king of thieves” played by Caine is Brian Reader, a London career criminal who was 76 when he masterminded the break-in. So he’s a little younger than the actor. “I used a lot of makeup, so it was all right,” chuckles Caine.
“When I receive a script, if there’s any scenes on a horse, I turn it down. I don’t do horse riding. I don’t do running. I don’t do fast car driving.”
Reader, who has prostate cancer and suffered a series of strokes, was released from prison in July having served just over three years of his six-year sentence. He’s appealing a £6.5 million confiscation order for the unrecovered loot.
Caine hasn’t played many real-life characters before. He’s never met Reader. When the film’s writer talked to his daughter, she said she thought Caine was a “bit common” to play her father, which amuses the actor. “I mean, he actually sounds like me: someone who made some money and then decided to have a good life.”
Caine has done a few heist movies. Any theories about what makes a good one?
“Well, not knowing what’s coming next, that’s what makes a good one,” he replies, making the bleeding obvious sound convincing in that voice of his. “That’s what makes a good one, but in the case of this one, it was the age of the perpetrators that attracted everybody to it. Especially me. Because, at 83, I wasn’t expecting to play bank robbers, you know.”
Unlike Redford, Caine has no intention of retiring, just yet. He’s got three more films on the go, though there are some things he won’t do these days.
“When I receive a script, if there’s any scenes on a horse, I turn it down. I don’t do horse riding. I don’t do running. I don’t do fast car driving.”
None of the above were required in Thieves, which is directed by James Marsh, who also directed Man On Wire – the dramatisation of wire-walker Philippe Petit’s 1974 stunt between the towers of the World Trade Center, a feat that required meticulous heist-like planning.
Marsh thinks his new film is “as close as you can get to the truth at this moment in time” about the case, which is still working its way through the British courts – the trial of co-conspirator Michael “Basil” Seed has been postponed until after the film is released.
Other than the vintage of their stars and the characters they are playing, King of Thieves and The Old Man & the Gun have something else in common.
Both Tucker and Reader and his cronies have got their wish – they wanted films made of them.
David Grann’s New Yorker story says the real Tucker wrote unpublished books about his exploits, including his many prison escapes, hoping they would be turned into movies. Marsh says transcripts from police surveillance of the Hatton Garden crew has them saying they thought their exploits would one day become a film. Just maybe, it happened sooner than they hoped.
Every good heist film should have a twist at the end: here’s this story’s. The aforementioned retirement home escapees in American Animals are actually college students. But they are real and did disguise themselves as old folk so they could steal rare books from the library of their alma mater, Transylvania University, in Kentucky, in 2004. They figured no one takes notice of anyone elderly.
The ingenious genre-bending film interweaves interviews with the now-paroled quartet and their disappointed parents, while also being a heist movie about some young guys who have seen way too many heist movies.
“Reservoir Dogs isn’t even my favourite Tarantino film,” whines one after the four binge their way through a stack of DVDs in preparation for the robbery.
Director Bart Layton says he did something similar before he made the film. He went back to the 1950s likes of The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi (two movies Lowery cites, too) and Stanley Kubrick’s racetrack robbery classic The Killing, a clip of which appears in his movie.
But American Animals, a name taken from one of the stolen books, is also a heist movie that shows that Hollywood isn’t good training for the real thing.
The gang in American Animals may have been young amateurs compared with the old pros played by Caine and Redford, but all shared a certain narcissism.
As Layton says, his college guys stole the books for the money but also to prove they could. “It’s a story, really, about the pressure to live a so-called special life that you’re taught is your right. It’s particularly interesting because this was 2004 and it predated Facebook, Instagram, social media, where I think there’s now a sort of metric for your place in the world.
“I thought a lot of what this is about, this need to somehow find this so-called interesting life, this identity they were in search of – but in all the wrong places.” Additional reporting by Helen Barlow in Zurich and at the Sundance Film Festival. King of Thieves, in cinemas October 18, American Animals, October 25, The Old Man & the Gun, November 15.