What are Caper Movies and why do men like them?

Caper Movies are crime movies where smart criminals aspire to take down a big score.  They share common ground with heists and cons.  Heists because Capers are usually robberies, Cons because Capers are all about ingenuity, thinking smart and getting away clean, with violence as a last option.  Capers are high style, classy and witty.  Think the Thomas Crown Affair,, The Score, Ocean’s 11.  Capers know no boundaries, from American smart (Confidence) to French romantic (Rififi) to British cock-a-snook at authority (The Italian Job).  

  The Thomas Crown Affair 

In the movies capers require style, smarts, courage and charm to pull off.  One man, or a team, pit their wits against whatever the other side has, be it state-of-the-art alarms, watertight security, even other crooks who are as smart as they are.  I always loved capers, their gentlemen thieves are more stylish, their crimes more exciting, their long-legged society gals more sexy.   Capers even have more upscale loot, jewels, art, ancient relics or gold bars.  Even when plain old money is the loot, it’s often money with a history.    

Real men like capers.  That’s because our caper hero/villains are successful, sexy, dominant men who play by their own rules.  They are the ultimate alpha males.  They dress well, drink well and are consummate ladykillers.  Irreverent and determined, they succeed at the game of life and make fools of authority.  Some of the best movie actors have distinguished themselves in capers.  De Niro in the Score, Michael Caine in the Italian Job and Sean Connery’s magnificent bastard of a hero, Edward Pierce, in the First Great Train Robbery.  Rogues, charmers and conmen all. 

Real women like caper movies too.  They like successful, intelligent men who who know how to play the world.  They like the high style and the glamour.  Rene Russo impossibly glamourous in the Thomas Crown Affair, Audrey Hepburn timelessly classy in How to steal a Million.  A real women loves the idea of dressing to kill and being on the arm of the man who is going to break the bank at Monte Carlo, in his own inimitable fashion.  If you want to take your best girl to a movie, take her to a caper movie, its a sure bet she will enjoy it.

  How to Steal a Million 

So this series of posts is a dual celebration.  Firstly a celebration of the great capers from movie history. 

Secondly to celebrate the release of a new British caper movie, the Bank Job.    

I will post four articles over the next two days.  They are;

• A celebration of caper movies  plus movies 30-21 (this article)
• Caper Movies 20-10
• Caper Movies 10-1
• A review of the forthcoming Bank Job 

 Below are my pick of the best caper movies of all time.  I have watched them all and love each of them for their own special magic.  Enjoy.

  

No 30: Art Heist 

 

This movie takes us to new territory, art robberies in the stylish city of Barcelona.  It must have sounded like a good idea to the investors in this American-Spanish co-production and it should really have worked better than it does.

Ellen Pompeo is an art curator for rich millionaires, who is suddenly catapulted into a series of art caper thefts in Barcelona.  She is feisty and over-reaching but blind to everything except recovering her beloved stolen art.  As the only resource on hand she ends up working with the Barcelona police and goes undercover with the Russian Mafia. 

Her estranged husband, William Baldwin in sleepy cool mode, turns up and despite being 4,000 miles out of his jurisdiction, goes chasing bad guys.  Baldwin gets suckered into a chase where he really gets his lumps, but discovers that the real thieves may not be the obvious suspects.  Baldwin and Pompeo have a determination and a brashness that sets them apart from the Barcelona detectives and it is clear that they will either get the stolen art or it will get them killed. 

The wonderful thing about this movie is the heists.  They are works of art in themselves.  The screenplay hits on the wonderful idea of having the heist carried out by a team of extreme sports fanatics.   The capers/heist are daring, clever to the point of outrageous (but very believable) and use some clever tricks and gadgets.  The thieves parasail, abseil and use the most daring strategems to get the loot.  The takedown team are passionate Spaniards, fit manly men with dark good looks.   We owe a vote of thanks to whoever dreamed up these clever capers.

At times Art Heist’s direction and plot lose their way and there are some dull scenes that a good editor would have cut.  However it is worth seeing for the capers.

Art Heist is available in the UK here and in the US here
           

 No 29:  The Heist

 

This is a little known caper movie starring a very young Pierce Brosnan.  It is interesting to see Brosnan in his early career while he was still building the persona we know today from later movies like The Thomas Crown Affair.  Even back in the late 70’s when this movie was made he had a commanding presence and held the screen well.

As Neal Skinner, Brosnan is out for revenge.  Framed by his ex-partner (A sleazy Tom Skerritt) Brosnan has spent the last four years in jail, which Skerritt has used as an opportunity to take Skinner’s half of the racetrack they own and to take Skinner’s girlfriend.  Skinner wants it all back, of course. 

This is a movie which takes a long time setting itself up and for a while I thought that this was going to be a caperless caper movie.  Brosnan kicks off his revenge bid by openly telling Skerritt that he is going to take him down.  So there is a lot of time spent recruiting old buddies around the race track, with some pedestrian racetrack scenes thrown in for good measure. 

This was originally a HBO movie and the direction is not as sharp as one would like.  But The Heist is easy to watch, set in California somewhere near San Diego.  That said, the late seventies clothes, especially the tab collar shirts and the pleated pegged trousers, look really dated now.

However once this movie hits the gas, it unleashes a string of fast clever moves amounting to one crazy but crafty caper.  One striking move on Brosnan’s part is to wear a garish red Hawaiian shirt, making it easy for Skerritt’s goons to track him around the race track during the caper.  Brosnan then introduces a tour bus full of men into the track, all wearing the same shirt!  This is so similar to the end sequence of the much later The Thomas Crown affair, where Brosnan deploys men dressed like him, that you have to wonder whether Brosnan took the move to the later movie. 

So a madcap caper, followed by a switch of some hot merchandise, all the major players scrambling to be in the right place when the music stops.  From the start it is pretty clear that Brosnan is the guy who gets what he wants so you can guess the end.  Once The Heist got moving, I liked it a lot.  Lightweight but watchable.  

 The Heist is available (only in the US) here

   

No 28: Ocean’s Twelve  

After the grace and humour of Ocean’s Eleven this was a disappointment. Twelve was flabby, with a story that got lost somewhere in the middle.  However I wanted to see it because the gang that worked so well had found a place in my heart, even the acerbic Saul (Carl Reiner).

Twelve start out well, with Danny Ocean’s gang forced to reunite by Andy Garcia’s evil casino boss.  Brad Pitt is standout here; his Rusty character is too funny for words as he tries to make it in the world as a luxury hotel entrepreneur.  As you would expect, the early ensemble scenes are great and we feel like the old gang is back in town.  Andy Garcia’s Terry Benedict is demanding his money back with menaces and it is back to work for Ocean’s team.

With America too hot for them, Ocean’s team decamp to Amsterdam, where they decide to steal the world’s oldest stock certificate.  Twelve finds it’s feet here, on classic caper territory, the scenes well paced and exciting.  The certificate is held in a private house, which the paranoid certificate owner has invested with almost impregnable security.  Our gang breaches the house only to find that they have been beaten to the prize by a Frenchman, a thief called the Night Fox.   A good caper, well executed.

This leads the team into a competition with the Night Fox to see who can steal the legendary Faberge coronation egg.  Twelve gets silly here, and with no idea of how to use the team the film contrives to send them to prison one by one. This gets tedious very quickly.

In the end all is well and our guys get out from under.  Good things?  Well, our arrogant French thief (Vincent Cassel) gets his come-uppance.  This is George Clooney’s best scene and goes some way to redeeming Twelve.  The other good thing was that enough caper fans paid money to see Twelve so that it was possible to make Thirteen.     

Ocean’s Twelve is available in the UK here and in the US here     

  

No 27: The Sicilian Clan      

 

This 1969 French caper starred Alain Delon, Lino Ventura and Jean Gabin, all real stars of European cinema.  Rarely do caper movies bring together such manly men. 

The plot has Delon’s handsome killer sprung from jail by Gabin’s Italian mob in Paris.  Lino Ventura is the police inspector trying to recapture him.  Delon has the security blueprints for a traveling exhibition of jewels worth $50 million.

The film is as interested in its characters as its caper, and we get to see great actors playing their parts.  Gabin’s Vittorio Manalese is particularly good, a Sicilian godfather who all fear beacuse of his ruthlessness and cunning.  Gabin was 65 when he made the film and only had a few years to live but he moves with a Robert Mitchum-like solidity, silent and menacing. 

Director Henri Verneuil directs the caper with pace and verve, never losing his grip on the story and keeping minor but critical characters in play without losing us, the audience. He ups the ante at the end of the second act when the gang work out that the jewel heist as planned is impossible.  So how can they do it? 

From a man’s (and my) perspective The Sicilian Clan is very stylish.  This movie is a masterclass in how to dress well and a record of those far-off days when Frenchmen instinctively had style.

The movie is marred by an awful Ennio Morricone soundtrack, intrusive and silly.  Towards the end the film gets a little confused, when it cannot decide whether to be a crime caper or a mafia revenge drama.  Still this is a colourful and edgy caper, well worth watching.

The Sicilian Clan is available in the UK here and in the US here 

 

No 26:  Ocean’s Eleven (The 1960 original)

 

Frank Sinatra brings together his old world war 2 buddies (a thinly disguised Rat Pack) and on to Las Vegas to rob five casinos in one night.  We mostly know the plot of this film, so I will simply mention what I like about it.   Firstly the film does illustrate the ease and cameraderie of the Rat Pack, their easy ways and old-style manly charm. 

What I find interesting is that Ocean’s Eleven also captures the sense of a band of men, originally joined together by war, who are competent to take down five casinos.  There is a maturity about these men, ex-soldiers, who have no fear of taking on the authorities or the casinos.  Ocean’s Eleven needs enough of an edge to make the caper more than just comic.  The gang’s attitude and worldview provide it.  

Ocean’s Eleven is of course a classic caper and has a nicely comic feel.  If you have not seen it is is one for the collection. 

Ocean’s Eleven is available in the UK here and in the US here  

     

No 25: Topkapi

 

A European caper that for a while redefined the genre.  It was all here, a multinational cast, exotic location (Istanbul) and high-class loot (a bejeweled dagger) in a museum equipped with the latest security systems.  Melina Mercouri was the blonde, Maximillian Schell the gentleman thief, Peter Ustinov the bumbling everyman who becomes the vital ingredient in the plan.  All of them were big stars back in 1964. 

The great Jules Dassin directed this comedy adventure, with more than a few humourous pokes at his own Rififi.  Colourful and lighthearted Topkapi takes a while to settle down and the initial plot devices that allow the thieves to meet each other are forced and the first few scenes are noisy and overacted.  Topkapi was shot in English, which was a second language for most of its German, Greek, Turkish and French cast.  So this is one of the most touchy-feely movies around, with gestures, hugs and other body language standing in for spoken lines.   

However once the gang get to Istanbul the film settles into its groove.  The caper is in two parts.  Firstly the gang contrive to lose their police tail.  They do this by going to a Turkish wrestling festival, outwitting their plainclothes escort in the process.  Then they break into the museum and wait until dark. 

Topkapi’s museum has a wired floor which sets off an alarm if anything touches it.  So Schell’s gang send in an acrobat (Gilles Segal) through a skylight, who, suspended on ropes, works the case holding a dummy sultan and a real jewelled dagger. 

The caper is the best part of Topkapi.  Suspended in the air and only able to communicate with his fellow thieves by tugging on the rope, Segal is gradually lowered into the museum and starts the incredibly delicate process of opening the case holding the dagger.  Dassin directed a similar scene in his earlier Rififi and over time had simply got better at it.  The scene is very tense and gets tenser as the strain starts to tell on Segal.  Can the thieves get the dagger and can they get away with the caper?

Topkapi has not aged well but it put in place the model for the comedy crime capers that followed it.  Worth seeing for Peter Ustinov’s comedy Englishman for which he won the best supporting actor Oscar and of course the caper.   
 

Postscript
Topkapi has been chosen as the vehicle for Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown Affair 2, with the movie to be built around the Topkapi story.   This was originally scheduled to be released in 2008 but has been put back due to the US movie screenwriters strike.  A new date has yet to be announced.             

Topkapi is available in the UK here and in the US here  

   

No 24: The Hot Rock

A comedy caper built around Robert Redford’s cool capermeister.  Recently released from prison, Redford is talked into heisting a huge diamond from a museum by his fast-talking slightly neurotic lockpicking brother-in-law.  They round out the caper team with an oddball getaway driver and an even odder front man. 

The Hot Rock comes with quite a pedigree.  Redford is joined by George Segal as the brother-in-Law, the movie is directed by Peter Yates (of Bullitt fame) and the screenplay is by William Goldman.  With Redford underplaying to Segal’s hyperactive and nervous partner they make a funny team and the movie is consistently played for laughs. 

Redford’s caper style is to create a massive diversion at the museum and while the museum guards are otherwise occupied, spring the diamond.  It is a clever caper that relies on timing as much as technology.  The caper simultaneously succeeds and fails.  To avoid spoilers I wont reveal more here but suffice to say that Redford that to setup and execute two more capers before he is satisfied. 

The fun here is in watching Redford deal with his manic team, as they drive him to distraction.  There is a pure laughs scene where their adrenaline junkie getaway driver flies a helicopter to the site of a caper only to find he has landed on the wrong roof and Redford has to go ask directions of a bystander.  The trick is that Redford’s Dortmunder character applies lateral thing to his capers and this leads to some outrageous solutions to overcome real world obstacles. 

The Hot Rock is a movie with its own unique chutzpah that draws you in and eventually you start to believe in its slightly nutty internal logic.  Fun to watch.

The Hot Rock is available in the UK here and in the US here  

   

No 23:  Rififi

 

A classic of French cinema, Rififi has the distinction of being variously described as a heist, a film noir and a gritty French crime movie.  So describing it as a caper puts me a bit out on a limb.  Caper suggests a certain light-heartedness, an irreverent view of life and usually, protagonists who fear nothing.  Rififi is grim and its view of life uncompromising.  There is nothing lighthearted about it though it is a romantic tragedy. 

Rififi has two very important caper characteristics, style (in the form of its leading character) and a terrific jewel heist.  The first is Jean Servais, a wonderful actor who could make the crappiest film worth seeing.  In Rififi he plays the stylish crook Tony le Stephanois, our hero (or anti-hero). 

Tony really is the man, style personified, and director Jules Dassin proceeds to admire him lavishly on celluloid.  

Tony is a gambler, crook, gentleman and the man that other tough men admire.  He is the man who has seen the hard side of life and never given in, yet there is a gentleness and charm in him that his associates do not have.  Courageous, quick, clever and immaculately dressed, he is one of the great caper heroes. 

The second is the heist.  A meticulously planned jewel robbery can only be accomplished by not setting off the store’s alarms.  The alarms can be activated by sound and Dassin uses this plot device to play out a wonderful scene 32 minutes long scene, entirely without dialogue.  This is the most famous scene ever shot in a caper movie, as our three thieves move soundlessly through the jewellery store.  The scene is tense and almost unwatchable; you can feel yourself holding your breath, knowing that one slip will doom this gang.

Rififi is gritty yet still believes in the ideal of the romantic hero, the gentleman gangster.  Because of this it has a special place in my canon of caper movies.  

Classic movie.

Rififi is available in the UK here and in the US here  

   

No 22: Grand Slam

 

Grand Slam is a 60’s Italian caper, out of the steal-the-jewels-from-an-exotic-location sub-genre.  A big (for the time) budget affair, with American movie stars in key roles to boost its appeal. 

Grand Slam starts off with the unlikely premise that Edward G Robinson’s elderly professor of English has come up with the prefect jewel heist, after working opposite a precious gems exchange in Rio de Janeiro for the last thirty years.  He goes to old neighbourhood buddy Adolpho Celli, better known (in America and England) as the vicious baddie in the James Bond movie Thunderball.  As a “businessman” (code for Mafia don) Celli agrees to provide the manpower for the caper and there is a delightful scene where the two men go through several rolodexes to find the exact set of men to send to Rio to perform the caper.  Edward G goes off to recruit the men and then fades out of the movie for a while. 

Four men are chosen to go to Rio to pull the caper.  One is an Englishman, a safecracker who masquerades as a butler.  This guy is amazing; he is the perfect Englishman with incredible “Oh dear chap” manners.  The second is an Italian expert on security alarms who is a little wimpy but very smart.  The third is a French Romeo, whose job is to seduce a woman who holds a key that the caper depends on.  The fourth is a German military officer, who is tasked with leading our rather mixed bunch.  The military guy is Klaus Kinski, long before he was famous as a scenery-chewing star.  Watching Grand Slam I was happy to see that, even as a young unknown, Kinski was a scenery-chewing psycho.  This being an Italian movie, all of the men dress as if tailored by Brioni and look very cool.

Once the filling-in is out of the way Grand Slam is good, with some very clever caper devices, including the most inventive use of shaving cream I have ever seen (you have to watch the movie).  The French Romeo seduces the businesswomen (Janet Leigh) who has the special key to the vault and the caper is on, under cover of the Rio carnival.  Grand Slam is really good here and the English safecracker and the Italian alarms expert form a surprisingly stylish and adept team.  The caper is clever, using what was the latest technology for the time.  It is also very tense.  This is not the best-directed movie you will ever see but the caper is well-played and the tension is palpable.

So, the jewels are stolen and the double-crossing starts.  Where do the gems end up?  A movie that keeps you guessing, though a smart person might see a clue at the beginning of the DVD.

Grand Slam is a little dated now and the direction goes off the rails a bit at the end but I really liked it.  Good caper. 

Grand Slam is available in the UK here and in the US here   

   

No 21:   Entrapment

Entrapment has Sean Connery’s  by-the-rules gentlemen thief team up with Catherine Zeta-Jones insurance investigator.   It starts well with a very clever physics and gadgets heist, with a human fly on the windows of a modern office block.  The fly gets in, steals a Rembrandt and gets away clean.  Great visuals, slick exciting camera work.

Connery plays thief Robert McDougal as a dour ex-military type who is a stickler for rules.  He starts out unimpressed by Zeta-Jones’ Virgina Baker.  This gives Zeta-Jones something to work with and she gives a lively performance in the first third of Entrapment.  Things hot up when Virginia confesses to MacDougal that she is a thief herself and that she wants to pull a big job with him.  Still unconvinced, MacDougal starts to warm up when Virginia demonstrates her athleticism and climbing skills.  He agrees to do the first of her big capers, stealing a gold mask from a Scottish castle, whilst evading state of the art electronic security systems. 

The takedown at the castle is a masterpiece of caper moviemaking.  Zeta-Jones is sexy as hell in a skin-tight catsuit, having to use all of her gymnastic prowess to traverse a room criss-crossed with laser beams.  The camera voyeuristically locks on to Zeta-Jones sinuously sexy body as she stretches and arches around the beams in this now notorious scene.  A great caper, with Zeta-Jones returning to her mentor Connery with the mask.  At this point the movie is firing on all cylinders, our thieves love-hate love affair is throwing out real sparks.  All of the movie to this point is vintage Connery, and huge fun to watch.

Entrapment then moves to Malaysia, where Zeta-Jones intends to rob a “world bank”  by exploiting a millennium computer discrepancy at the first stroke of the new millennium.  Cue a heady and dangerous caper in the Petronas Towers, one of the tallest buildings in the world.  It looks to be successful but the deceits and lies that have been swirling around our pair since the start, begin to close in. 

This is a good but not great caper movie.  For me Entrapment fails in the third act, where too many double-crosses come out of the woodwork and the story exhausts itself trying to tie up the loose ends and still reach an ending.  There is too much of a sense that our leads are being handled by other people and playing out other people’s agendas.  It runs contrary to the first rule of capers, that smart individuals run their own games. 

The second problem is visual.  In Scotland Connery looks and dresses like a handsome middle-aged Scotsman.  In Kuala Lumpur some idiot of a design assistant dresses Connery in trendy linen, which is a style that few men can wear and retain their style or dignity.  Connery is also very badly lit in this part of the film.  As a result he looks old, tired and loses the visual authority he has in the first half of Entrapment. 

A good but not great caper, a must-see for the first half of the movie.    

Entrapment is available in the UK here and in the US here             

   

Well that is it for capers 30-21.  Later today I will post capers 20-10 and tomorrow 10-01

Feedback welcome, especially recommendations for other capers.