“We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell. Making enemies of our own future.”

Winter, 1969. Two young actors take a trip to the country to escape from London. Their careers are going nowhere and they’re broke. Getting away might relieve the boredom of hanging around their freezing Camden digs so they answer an ad in the Times offering a cottage in the Lake District for £8 a week. When they get there they find it’s a mess. Water pours through the roof when it rains and it never stops raining. There’s no fuel. They didn’t bring food with them either. It’s a nightmare. Now the city seems comfortable. They can’t wait to return. When they do get back one of them has an acting job waiting for him and leaves. Now 24- year old Bruce Robinson finds himself alone in a big house he once shared with other bright young things. So he begins to write a screenplay based on his experiences as a struggling actor and the bittersweet result forms what many years later would become Withnail & I.

Robinson sets aside his writing though when he finally starts working again. Sure he’d been in a big movie before playing Benvolio in Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo & Juliet (68) but most of his time on that film was spent dodging the sexual advances of the film’s flamboyant director. Safer ground then working with Ken Russell on his Tchaikovsky biopic The Music Lovers (1970). Russell may be an eccentric but he has little interest in buggering his cast. Robinson’s beauty leads to his biggest role in Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele (75) as the emotionally cold army officer who becomes the object of Adele’s (Isabelle Adjani) infatuation. Though he cuts a dash in his officer’s uniform it becomes clear to Robinson and audiences that he is a terrible actor.

So Robinson starts writing again. The success of his screenplay for The Killing Fields (84, Roland Joffe) allows him to pitch Withnail to Handmade Films. A film company set up by musician George Harrison and American businessman Denis O’Brien initially to distribute Monty Python’s controversial Life of Brian (79, Terry Jones), but which would become one of the most successful production companies of the 80’s financing among others The Long Good Friday (80, John Mackenzie), and Time Bandits (81, Terry Gilliam). There’s trouble though with O’Brien who can’t see the subtle humour in the screenplay and hates its end of an era melancholy. He wants uncle Monty be more monstrously comic in his predatory pursuit of Paul McGann’s narrator, whereas Robinson and actor Richard Griffiths affecting performance create a sympathetic if slightly mad figure trying to alleviate his own loneliness. Robinson has to fight to film key scenes and spends his own money obtaining the rights to certain songs in the film.

Withnail & I did decent enough if unspectacular business on its initial release. Reviews were mixed Handmade even let Robinson and star Richard E. Grant make another film, the anti-Thatcherite satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising (89). The experience of directing a Hollywood serial killer movie called Jennifer 8 (92) caused Robinson to retreat from the film industry altogether. Yet the cult of Withnail & I was growing steadily and by the mid-90’s the film found a new lease of life with the ‘Cool Britannia’ generation. Robinson became bankable again selling screenplays for US studio films Return to Paradise (98, Joseph Ruben) and In Dreams (98, Neil Jordan). However he hated both films so much he gave up on the movie business again and quit to write a novel. It’s doubtful he would have directed again had Johnny Depp not personally sought out Robinson to adapt Hunter S. Thompson’s novel The Rum Diary. No studio interference this time. Everything went well during shooting film came out in 2011 to undeservedly poor reviews and died at the box-office. Shame. Maybe in twenty years people will learn to like it. Until then as Withnail would say, “chin chin." 

 

“How was  your marriage Nick?”

Bar owner Nick (Ben Affleck) arrives home to find his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing, furniture overturned, and blood on the floor. As the police investigate Nick becomes the prime suspect. Especially in the court of public opinion when his poor handling of media appearances make him seem unsympathetic. Perhaps a man with something to hide. In contrast Amy is already a public figure thanks to a beloved series of books her father wrote based on her childhood called Amazing Amy. She is the beautiful, lost, perfect wife, while he is the mooch living off her money and sleeping around.

Director David Fincher’s films can often feel like stylistic exercises, see the clockwork tension of Panic Room (2003), or his disturbing but empty adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). At his best however his work moves beyond efficiency and incorporates grander themes. The religious overtones of the unfairly maligned Alien 3 (92), the anarchic anti-consumerism of Fight Club (99), or the implication in the Aaron Sorkin scripted Facebook movie The Social Network (2010) that technology only provides the illusion of being close to other people. Zodiac (2007), arguably his best film is a haunting procedural about the doomed search for one of America’s most notorious serial killers and the effect it had on those involved. Comfort is rarely found in Fincher’s movies making him the perfect choice to Gillian Flynn’s pulpy 2012 novel Gone Girl.

The film moves between the past and the present as we see their relationship deteriorate over a five year period. From the early days as a loved-up couple to the growing resentment of two people who have surrendered their futures to each other. Gillian Flynn adapts her own novel here and her screenplay makes this story darker and more satirical targeting the media circus which surrounds cases like these and presenting a nightmarish vision of a marriage gone awry. Affleck is adept at playing hopeless douches who are confused by women and Nick feels like a middle-aged version of the geek who begins a doomed romance with a bisexual comic book artist in Chasing Amy (97, Kevin Smith). Yet much angrier. Affleck can switch from calm to rage quicker than any actor around. Prior to Gone Girl Pike was best known for appearing in the Bond movie Die Another Day (2002) and since then has been largely wasted in workmanlike period dramas until now. The biggest revelation though is comedian Tyler Perry as a Johnny Cochran type lawyer at once shocked and amused at the behaviour of these rich entitled white people. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at the age of 44 after years of heavy drinking took their toll. His friend Edmund Wilson edited together a draft version of Fitzgerald’s final work ‘The Last Tycoon’ for publication. In the foreword Wilson wrote about the people in Fitzgerald’s stories living for ‘big parties at which they go off like fireworks and which are likely to leave them in pieces.’ Traditionalists balked when the flamboyant director of ‘Strictly Ballroom’ (1992) Baz Luhrmann announced his plans to make a version of Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece ‘The Great Gatsby.’ Fitzgerald is a subtle writer, while Luhrmann’s movies are gaudy coloured confections which move at a breathless pace. They do not at first sight seem a good match. Yet Wilson’s comment about wonderful ruinous parties suits Luhrmann too. ‘William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’ (1996) and ‘Moulin Rouge’ (2001) set up their doomed love affairs during lengthy and elaborately designed set-pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in an old-fashioned Hollywood musical. Fitzgerald and Luhrmann may have differing approaches to their respective crafts but both men clearly know how to party.

For all Luhrmann’s showiness though this is still at heart Fitzgerald’s story. 1922, young writer Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) attends a lavish party thrown by mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Luhrmann’s visually spectacular approach to filmmaking is evident in how he arranges the first meeting between Carraway and Gatsby. In the novel the two men happen to stand next to each other at a party and begin talking. Luhrmann’s encounter is a seismic moment, there are fireworks in the sky. Music soars. DiCaprio’s movie star smile lights up the screen. Like Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly Gatsby is a fake but a genuine fake. The parties are a ruse intended to attract the attention of the love of his life Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) who lives across the bay and is now married. As with ‘Moulin Rouge’ Luhrmann uses contemporary music which in a period piece should feel anachronistic but instead comments on either a particular scene or a character’s emotional state. Lana Del Ray’s joyously melancholic song ‘Young and Beautiful’ reappears throughout as a refrain as Gatsby and Daisy attempt to rekindle their love affair behind the back of her ruthless businessman husband Tom (Joel Edgerton).

Station regulars will remember F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda appearing in ‘Midnight in Paris’ as bright young things partying with the Lost Generation of writers and artists. Later they drank their fill, too many gin rickey’s and late nights did for them both but Fitzgerald seems to have known this would happen. In his novels the comedown from the parties and the damage done afterwards was always irreparable. Luhrmann maintains this undercurrent of loss. Gatsby is a difficult part and requires a movie star with enough presence to catch the attention at first glance and DiCaprio delivers. Not just in terms of beauty but in his easy charm and vulnerability. It is a great performance, anchoring this wild ride of a movie with the yearning of a man who wants the unattainable. 

Kind of appropriate to be showing Brief Encounter in a cafe restaurant which at one time was part of a railway station. 

Brief Encounter is the fourth and final collaboration between Noel Coward and director David Lean having previously worked together on the war films In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1945) as well as the comedy Blithe Spirit (1945). An adaptation of a one-act play by Coward called ‘Still Life,’ the film takes place in and around a railway station as two people consider having an affair. While Brief Encounter is thematically similar to Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz) the latter is the kind of Hollywood escapism Alec (Trevor Howard) and Laura (Celia Johnson) would go and see on the Thursday afternoons they spend together. Laura is certain such grand passion couldn’t happen to somebody who shops in Boots the chemists. Alec and Laura are blindsided by their emotions as their casual acquaintance develops into something much deeper. It is all too easy now to make fun now of the perfectly clipped accents in Brief Encounter and its old-fashioned sense of decency, but the film has lost none of its power.

Sound is important in Brief Encounter. The haunting musical score is Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 2 and it counterpoints Alec and Laura’s restraint in public with the emotional turmoil they feel. The noises heard at the station; the trains arriving and departing, the announcements, the whistles, all recurring in the background are a reminder of the possibilities of escape. David Lean often uses odd camera angles and films the lovers in shadow, a technique more common in thrillers than in romances yet it adds to the feeling they are somehow transgressing. Bear in mind Coward was a closeted homosexual so forbidden love, clandestine meetings, and being very careful not to attract attention would almost certainly have been part of his romantic life.

There is an argument Brief Encounter represents a genteel and timid form of British cinema though this seems largely reductive. It is rare to find a British film from this period which is so emotionally open or poetic. It also has a complex narrative structure which begins at the end and then shows us through Laura’s memories and her accompanying voice-over events filtered through her own sensibilities before we again see the beginning/end with the added pathos of knowing what we are seeing this time around. Lean would later turn towards large-scale epic productions like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr Zhivago (1965) but this small intimate movie about lives thrown out of kilter by romantic longing is his most extraordinary work.

‘malt whisky epitomises the inherent dichotomy of the Scottish psyche – at once passionate and rational, romantic and ironic, mystical and sceptical, heroic and craven, full of laughter and despair.’

                                                   Charles Maclean Malt Whisky (1998) 

Scottish cinema can generally be divided into two categories – gritty urban dramas (Trainspotting, Neds) or charming escapism (Local Hero). Ken Loach’s The Angel’s Sharemanages to cover both territories with this tale of a young tearaway who finds redemption through a developing interest in Malt whisky. Robbie (Paul Brannigan) is a bright lad but never far away from trouble. Unable to extricate himself from a long-time feud with a local gang and hated by his pregnant girlfriend’s family he is running out of chances until kindly community services leader Harry (John Henshaw) takes him under his wing and introduces him to the pleasures of malt whisky.

Loach and Glaswegian writer Paul Laverty have collaborated on fourteen other films several of which have been set in Scotland including Carla’s Song (1994), My Name is Joe(98), and Ae Fond Kiss (2004). Always sympathetic to the plight of the underprivileged their work together particularly when dealing with Scots working class life has a great deal of humour present. The Angel’s Share is one of Loach’s warmest films, avoiding his tendency for didacticism but still managing to pass social commentary while being extremely entertaining. 

“I have a reason for working at night…”

Regarded by some as being merely an artier version of that most dubious of sub-genres, the Nazi sexploitation flick, The Night Porter still makes people uneasy. Yet it was made at a time when filmmakers were beginning to reflect on events leading up to the rise of the Nazi’s to power and it has more in common with The Damned (1969), Luchino Visconti’s operatic study of a prosperous German family falling apart as the Nazi’s begin their rise to political power than trash like Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975). Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling both worked together on the Visconti film and with Bogarde also appearing in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lovely ruin Despair (1978) The Night Porter forms part of an unofficial trilogy about the Third Reich. While The Damned and Despair are set before the war The Night Porter takes place in 1957 in a grim sunless Vienna where the past clearly still has a hold on people. 

Former SS officer Max (Bogarde) works as the night porter in a hotel. Though he keeps a low profile lest his activities during the war are discovered Max likes it that way. Max wants solitude, to live like a “church mouse” as says at one point. Like Rick in Casablanca(Michael Curtiz, 1942) Max is cynical, isolationist, but also a fixer for the inhabitants of his establishment. Max has subtly recreated his role in the camps as a man who can be relied on for discretion and getting things done. Max pimps a younger member of staff to an ageing opera singer, helps a former colleague who was a professional dancer before the war to perform ballet in private, and generally has the run of the place. Then his perfectly ordered existence is shattered when Lucia (Rampling) walks in. Now married to a successful composer she seems to have moved on with her life but Lucia recognises Max immediately. Though initially fearful, she begins to reminisce about her time in the camps where Max went from being her abuser to her self-appointed protector and her memories seem to excite her. 

So is it Stockholm Syndrome recurring or genuine romantic feeling? Max and Lucia need each other but don’t seem to understand why. Cavani knows people can behave in ways that are destructive and can long for oblivion. During a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute conducted by Lucia’s husband where Cavani cuts between the past and the present. Max is sitting a few rows behind her and both seem to be thinking in tandem. Lucia no longer wishes to leave Vienna but instead submits to Max though now she is older she is his equal, as capable of inflicting pain as taking it. Lucia’s presence their puts them both in danger from a group of ex-Nazi’s led by Hans (Gabrielle Ferzetti) who believes guilt is an aberration of the psyche and conducts mock trials so any evidence or witnesses of their past can be found and erased.

The Night Porter then sounds like a romance and to a certain extent it is, albeit a bleak and destructive one which works as a study in guilt and corruption. The main charges levelled against  The Night Porter are that it is exploitative. It kind of is but only in the way that any film which utilises history to tell a fictional story is exploiting human tragedy. The Night Porter is expressionistic in its use of lighting and has a lucid dream-like quality. Cavani is able to convey in cinematic terms ideas associated with German Romanticism; a movement which aimed for transcendence but ended up influencing the twisted idealism of National Socialism and its destructive attempts at purifying Europe. The Night Porter is about this ruin and Cavani offers a union which epitomises Goethe’s belief romanticism is a form of sickness.

The casting is perfect. Since Victim (1961, Basil Deardon) Bogarde’s default setting was playing men who struggle within themselves and he is powerful and moving here humanising a man we should really be repelled by. Rampling too is a haunting presence, strikingly beautiful, but oddly asexual, she looks like a doll that has come to life and would rather become a toy again. Rampling’s famous dance scene for the concentration guards is more akin to a surreal parody of a 20’s Berlin cabaret performance than the provocative tease the film’s poster seems to promise.

There is a recurring theme in Cavani’s work of outsiders clashing with authority, of going their own way regardless of what harm they bring to themselves. Cavani’s early films focused on historical figures who defied the social conventions of their time in Francis of Assisi (1960) and Galileo (1968). I Cannibali (1970) turned the Greek tragedy ‘Antigone’ into a contemporary allegory about a police state. She has a better grasp of Patricia Highsmith’s amoral worldview than Anthony Minghella with her 2002 adaptation of Ripley’s Game. Her best films are ambiguous, haunting, and offer no easy answers. In The Night Porter even the Nazis, history’s ultimate freaks, cannot contemplate why Max and Lucia should want to be together.  

“Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.”

Loosely based on a fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson, The Red Shoes is a lavish drama about a ballerina (Moira Shearer) torn between two men. Impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) demands she makes the most of her talent and gives everything up for her art including the affections of composer Julian Craster (Marcus Goring). Early on Lermontov asks her “why do you want to dance?” and she replies “why do you want to live?” Eventually she must make a choice between what she loves and whom she loves.

The work of writer/director team Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell has proven influential over the years. You can see their hand in the work of Baz Luhrmann while the recent Black Swan (2010, Darren Aranofsky) owes much to The Red Shoes.Pressburger was a Hungarian émigré who moved to Berlin to work as a journalist before turning to screenwriting. After the Nazi’s rise to power Pressburger leftGermany for England finding work in the film industry with Alexander Korda’s studio. Michael Powell worked prolifically in the 30’s providing quickly made features to meet the British film industry’s quota for home grown films. However The Edge of the World (37), loosely inspired by the evacuation of St. Kilda showed a developing style and an interest in mysticism.

Korda put Powell and Pressburger together on the war film The Spy in Black (39) and they became friends. Forming their own production called The Archers and working with total autonomy within the Rank Organisation they began to make highly distinctive and idiosyncratic films often in Technicolor, a process which saturates the frame with bright colours and would later become synonymous with the musical. During the 1940’s they created a series of classics, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp(43), I Know Where I’m Going! (45), A Matter of Life and Death (46), and Black Narcissus (47).

Despite its success The Red Shoes went over budget bringing them into conflict with Rank who cut them loose. They returned to low-budget filmmaking for the underratedThe Small Back Room (49), about a troubled bomb disposal expert, and then back to Technicolor for the opera Tales of Hoffman (51) but neither made much impact at the box-office. Their films became increasingly compromised by studio interference and they separated in 1957. Powell effectively destroyed his career with the haunting serial killer film Peeping Tom (1960) which caused outrage in Britain on its release. In the 60’s British cinema tended towards realism and Powell and Pressburger’s movies with their love of the fantastical, high emotions, and bright gaudy colours fell out of fashion.

A critical reappraisal of their work began in the 70’s when Martin Scorsese began to champion Michael Powell and cited The Red Shoes as being his favourite film.

 

Anticipating the aimless troubled protagonists of the late 60’s and early 70’s in American films like Midnight Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger), Five Easy Pieces (1970, Bob Rafelson), and Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese), The Graduate is a darkly comic movie about a young man’s affair with an older woman. Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) has just graduated from college as an award-winning scholar and track star. Everybody wants to know what he plans to do next but Benjamin has no idea. His parents are pressurising him to go to Grad school but Benjamin would rather just take it easy for a while. Drinking her way through a bad marriage, whatever dreams Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) may have had are long gone. Cynical and embittered she may be but Mrs Robinson is still a very attractive woman and she seduces Benjamin despite his weak attempt at preserving his innocence. But their secret relationship becomes awkward when her pretty daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross) returns from university

The clash between the younger generation and the establishment was playing out across Americawith anti-Vietnam protests, civil rights demonstrations, and an emerging counter culture which rejected many of the ideals their parents believed in. Director Mike Nichols and his screenwriters Buck Henry and Calder Willingham present this generational conflict in The Graduate. Though the story is told from Benjamin’s perspective he is as flawed as his elders. The older generation are presented as being decadent and burnt out, yet they do at least know what they believe in. Benjamin is drifting, terrified by the lightness freedom can bring.   

Nichols won a Best Director Oscar for his work on The Graduate. Having tasted success with his adaptation of the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Nichols work here is more formally daring often foregoing narrative for observing Benjamin as he wanders around looking lost or hangs out by the pool. Simon and Garfunkel’s music is an integral part of the film. Though only the track ‘Mrs Robinson’ was written specifically for The Graduate the songs taken from their album ‘The Sound of Silence’ lend a haunting atmosphere to the film. 

The Double Life of Veroniquesaw Krysztof Kieslowski (1941-1996) moving away from the social concerns of films like A Short Film about Killing(1988), and focusing on the supernatural elements that often touched his work. There was always an otherness to Kieslowski’s films; the suggestion of something beyond our understanding. No End(1984) is the most obvious example, with a ghost watching over his ex-wife during a period of political unrest. Tellingly the living and the dead both seem as sad and lost as each other. The Double Life of Veroniqueis an enigmatic tale of two identical women, Weronika and Veronique, living uncannily similar lives.

Kieslowski claimed not to be interested in politics, but making films under an authoritarian and censorious regime meant there were always restrictions placed upon him. The Double Life of Veronique is Kieslowski’s first film made without fear of outside interference. At one point Weronika walks in a different direction from a political march in Krakow, oblivious to the protesters. Kieslowski seemed to be taking a similar journey, towards something broader and more universal.

Two physically identical women in two different cities; both are singers, both have weak hearts. There is a moment when they almost meet. Weronika (Irene Jacob) is astonished to see a woman who looks exactly like her amongst a group of French tourists. As her doppelganger boards a bus Weronika runs after her and Veronique (Jacob) inadvertently takes her photograph. Kieslowski and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak make the world seem far more beautiful than it normally isbathing it in a permanent golden haze. Photographs, reflections, twin dolls; doubles haunt the film. Often images are distorted by glass, to add to the feeling of otherness.

Weronika is full of life. First seen singing in a choir, she keeps singing long after her colleagues have stopped and sought shelter from the rain. She experiences a rapture bordering on the religious. Music also links the two women. Weronika dies during a concert when her heart gives out. Veronique is immediately struck by a feeling of grief. The next day she visits her singing teacher and tells him she is giving up. Veronique seems more tentative than Weronika, more hesitant and troubled, yet we only get to know her after she is affected by this inexplicable feeling of suddenly being alone.

Veronique is drawn towards Alexandre (Philippe Volter), a puppeteer who visits the school she teaches at to perform a marionette show. Alexandre begins to reappear in Veronique’s life as if by coincidence. Veronique retreats from Alexandre when he claims he wants to use her as inspiration for a novel, but they spend a night together in a hotel. Though The Double Life of Veroniquepresents the doppelganger as being like a lost sibling, there is a brief reminder that the idea of an exact double is often used as a source of terror. Alexandre looks through the photo-reels from Krakow and shows Veronique the picture of a woman he assumes to be her. Yet Veronique knows she took the photo, and she never owned clothes like the one the girl (Weronika) is wearing.

Alexandre creates a story for his marionette show about identical girls; one of whom burns her hand badly by touching a stove, but the other pulls away at the last moment as if influenced by the pain visited upon her double. Veronique backs away from Alexandre and leaves him to his puppets. Kieslowski too shies away from revealing any more as if like Veronique he feels the implications are too much to bear. Kieslowski announced his retirement shortly after the release of Three Colours: Red (1994), despite the film’s commercial and critical success. Like Veronique he returned home. Like Weronika his heart failed him.

Kieslowski commented on the difficulties of conveying “the realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams.” (1) For Kieslowski these make up the inner-life of a human being and no filmmaker since his death has been able to deal with these themes as effectively. German director Tom Twyker tried with the stylish but empty Blind Chance(1981) knock-off Lola Rennt(1998), and the ghastly euro-pudding Heaven(2002), based on an unfinished screenplay by Kieslowski and his regular collaborator Krysztof Piesiewicz. There is no other self out there, another Kieslowski, a doppelganger blessed with the same ability to ask metaphysical questions with a sublime grace.

1.       p 194 Kieslowski on Kieslowski.Faber & Faber 1995

Never much cared for The Italian Job. Love the opening sequence but its matey banter and its Euro-phobic stance leave me cold. Anyway here’s my programme notes for this screening back in March 2012. 

The Italian Job misdirects the audience with an opening sequence which introduces us to a suave middle-aged man (Italian actor Rossano Brazzi) as he drives a Lamborghini through the Alps as Matt Monro sings the haunting ‘On Days Like These.’ This is not Brazzi’s movie though, nor is it the Lamborghini’s. The Italian Job belongs to a couple of British institutions – Michael Caine and the Mini Cooper. A moderate box office hit on its initial release in 1969, the film has gradually developed a strong following over the years thanks to regular television screenings and the critical reappraisal of star Michael Caine which began when he became a cult figure with the ‘New Lad’ culture of the mid-90’s and Mike Myers credited him with being one of the inspirations for Austin Powers.

A nuanced and charismatic actor Caine has had a more varied career than people realise but he is best known for his mischievous onscreen persona. Caine first found fame as an upper class army officer in Cy Endfield’s classic war film Zulu (1964). However he soon became known for playing cocky working-class types. As the cynical spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965, Sidney J. Furie) he trades barbs with his condescending superiors but gets the job done. As smooth-talking lothario Alfie (1966, Lewis Gilbert) he thinks he’s got all the answers and delivers lengthy monologues to the camera about the meaning of life

The Italian Job is a cheeky caper movie in which British ingenuity triumphs over continental style and sophistication. No wonder fans of the English national football team have adopted its catchy anthem ‘Getta Bloody Move On’ aka ‘The Self Preservation Society’ into their repertoire. Caine is in his element as the roguish Charlie Croker who walks free from prison and immediately starts work on a plan to steal gold bullion from a delivery in Turin using a football match as cover. Noel Coward makes a surprisingly effective heavy, his character representing the Old Guard of the Establishment, disgusted at having to tolerate a lower-class upstart like Charlie until of course he realises how much money he can make from him.

 Credit must also go to French driver Rèmy Julienne and his team who perform the film’s inventive driving stunts and would later work on every James Bond film from For Your Eyes Only (1981, John Glen) to 1995’s Goldeneye (Martin Campbell).