The Heist Film: Stealing With Style

By Daryl Lee

A concise introduction to the genre about that one last big score, The Heist Film: Stealing With Style traces this crime thriller's development as both a dramatic and comic vehicle growing out of film noir ( Criss Cross, The Killers, The Asphalt Jungle), mutating into sleek capers in the 1960s ( Ocean's Eleven, Gambit, How to Steal a Million) and splashing across screens in the 2000s in remake after remake ( The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, The Good Thief). Built around a series of case studies ( Rififi, Bob le Flambeur, The Killing, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Getaway, the Ocean's trilogy), this volume explores why directors of such varied backgrounds, from studio regulars (Siodmak, Crichton, Siegel, Walsh and Wise) to independents (Anderson, Fuller, Kubrick, Ritchie and Soderbergh), are so drawn to this popular genre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231850582

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: THE HEIST AS GENRE

The hold-up film deserves credit for having revealed, as Thomas de Quincey so tastefully did long ago, the aura of art and beauty that any human activity may assume, no matter its morality.

(Lacourbe 1969: 71)

The heist film, or ‘big caper’ as it is sometimes called, is back on the marquee. The year 2001, annus mirabilis, saw the production of four major heists. Original titles from seasoned directors – Frank Oz’s The Score, Barry Levinson’s Bandits and David Mamet’s Heist – were all successful, but the smash hit of the year was Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded reprise of the 1960 Rat Pack showcase Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone). The draw of Soderbergh’s remake came in part from its ensemble cast – George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Elliot Gould, Andy Garcia and Matt Damon among others – and the mere hint of a revived 1960s title seemed promising to audiences. Witness John McTiernan’s 1999 remake of Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), replacing Faye Dunaway with Rene Russo and Steve McQueen with Pierce Brosnan in the title role. Other remakes followed: the high-profile F. Gary Gray picture The Italian Job (2003) reclaimed Peter Collinson’s original 1969 feature starring Michael Caine, Neil Jordan’s low-profile The Good Thief (2003) took a gamble in redoing Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1956), and in 2004, Joel and Ethan Coen put their signature on a remake of the darkly comic caper The Ladykillers (1955, Alexander Mackendrick) with Tom Hanks in the lead role. More significantly, 2004 marked a new, serialised step in remakes, giving us Ocean’s Twelve. Soderbergh’s sequel dropped in critical appreciation, but not significantly in financial gain. Worldwide in theatres, Ocean’s Eleven grossed over $450 million, Ocean’s Twelve took in $232 million, and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) earned $310 million; The Score brought in almost $110 million; The Italian Job saw receipts of $160 million; and The Thomas Crown Affair topped $125 million. Add to these original titles such as Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006: $110 million), Ben Affleck’s The Town (2010: $92 million), and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010: $820 million), and the major heists alone have made off with over $2 billion in box office sales alone in the last decade. Crime pays very well these days; recidivism even better. It is not a bad time to be thinking about the heist as a genre.

The heist film is clearly a type of crime film. But does the heist constitute a stable or unique genre? What does it mean, for example, when what one critic calls a caper film, emphasising the crime at its narrative core, another calls a ‘thriller’, a term that characterises the movie’s reception, its affective impact on the audience, making it akin to many other genres? And if the heist or big caper does in fact constitute its own genre, is it solely a crime genre? After all, does the synonym ‘caper’ not also suggest an adventure? For that matter, does the heist have to be any one thing at all?

There are several ways to approach a history of the heist film, each with its limitations. One way of answering the question is to trace the ‘parentage’ and ‘evolution’ of heist movies over time. But we can only do this as long as we do not get trapped working through the entire corpus of films with theft as a central plot element. This would fall short of providing a precise conceptual account since plenty of films with petty thieves, or genre films with exciting robberies, let alone idiosyncratic films like the documentary Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008), are partially identifiable as a caper. There is a reason critics refer to the ‘big caper’ film. They emphasise the centrality and grandeur of the crime in the narrative. Tracing the heist’s filiation would helpfully tease out features shared with well-defined genres, criminal or otherwise, such as 1930s gangster films. Yet, where the gangster film has remained relatively stable over time, a sign of its enduring form, the heist film has been taken as a weak or unstable genre by critics who nevertheless know one when they see it. From another point of view, early heists find themselves just as often in a historical lineup with film noir, which has been variously understood as a cycle, a visual style, or a discourse of crime film, but in any case is lacking generic moorings. A heist can be both a type of gangster film and a narrative variant of film noir. Or more problematically for the parentage approach, neither of them – many heists are purely comical, have bumbling thieves as opposed to gritty tough guys, or are devoid the visual qualities of noir.

The big caper’s ‘inter-link of generic strains’ (Newman 1997: 70) also reveals something of the heist film’s utility and pleasure. It shares ties with war movies of all sorts (The Dirty Dozen, Robert Aldrich, 1967; Kelly’s Heroes, Brian G. Hutton, 1970; Les Morfalous, Henri Verneuil, 1984; Three Kings, David O. Russell, 1999) or draws on the post-war problems of veterans looking to practice their skills (The League of Gentlemen, Basil Dearden, 1960; Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Michael Cimino, 1974; Dead Presidents, Albert & Allen Hughes, 1995). The western (The War Wagon, Burt Kennedy, 1967; The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah, 1969), the spy movie (Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton, 1964), con artist films (The Sting, George Roy Hill, 1973), and lone wolf thief movies (To Catch a Thief, Alfred Hitchcock, 1955; Thief, Michael Mann, 1981), all have connections to big capers. Other films borrow from the heist, such as the ‘Noc-list’ sequence with Tom Cruise in Brian De Palma’s espionage thriller Mission: Impossible (1996), the robbery montage in the family melodrama Millions (Danny Boyle, 2004) or the Joker’s (Heath Ledger) double-cross heist in Batman: The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008). But these films tell us more about how valuable the heist is to their generic projects than they do about the heist film itself. While important, the generic lineage and ‘inter-links’ of the heist will not fully account for the specificity of its cinematic form, let alone its social function as a mass genre. The genre must be linked to a flexible conceptual definition that takes into account the specific and most enduring motifs or conventions of the formula and the use to which the genre is put, all the while assuming that genre films transform over time as their specific cultural and production contexts pressure or remodel its conventions.

In addition, any account of the heist film must take into account its evolving critical conceptualisation, paying close attention to a fluctuating taxonomy and terminological differences proposed by film theorists, historians and industry players. When Stuart M. Kaminsky revised the second edition of his influential study American Film Genre a decade after the first edition (1974, 1985), he expanded it but also dropped the chapter ‘Variations on a Major Genre: The Big Caper Film’. Kaminsky’s analysis stands as the most important of the genre’s formula and is a crucial reference for this study. But its purview ends in the mid-1970s. For Kaminsky, the big caper had already enjoyed a ‘limited but distinct history’ (1974: 74) to this point, but had ‘not continued as a significant generic form’ (1974: vii) from the 1970s through the mid-1980s. That claim resonates with another made in a much-read 1984 essay by the genre theorist Rick Altman in which he argued that the big caper was among a set of genres that had failed to develop a ‘coherent’ or ‘stable syntax’ (1984: 16). This view persisted tacitly when Altman included the same essay in his study Film/Genre (1999: 225) that appeared just as the heist began a resurgence around 2000. With few notable exceptions, heist films continued to appear sporadically between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, such that Kaminksy and Altman’s claims have merit. But I wonder to what extent those claims may be viewed as historically contingent, since starting around the mid-1990s, and particularly since 1999, a proliferation of heists have solidified the heist genre’s syntactic patterns while modifying its social function or message by emphasising certain virtualities of the genre that have existed since its inception around 1950.

* * *

This study attends to the formal conventions or textual structure of the heist film, but its principal target is the genre’s historical trajectory and concomitant notional thrust – its social message and function. In the introduction I will restrict my comments to establishing a few methodological views and to what I perceive to be the heist film’s function as a genre.

By ‘textual structure’, to begin with, I have in mind the ‘semantic/syntactic approach’ of Rick Altman. Semantics, for Altman, refer to recurring ‘building blocks’ of the same film genre, ‘common topics, shared plots, key scenes, character types, familiar objects or recognizable shots and sounds’ (1999: 89). Stuart Kaminsky was the first to carefully analyse those recurring semantic features of the heist that provide it a lexical ground. Among the heist’s most salient semantic features are its character types, which are, according to Kaminsky, of two broad categories. First, the gang leader, defined as a man of action (rarely a women), and a mentor with experience of the criminal world (1974: 80). In John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) is the man of action, mentored by the mastermind of the job, ‘Doc’ Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe); in The Italian Job (F. Gary Gray, 2003 version), John Bridger (Donald Sutherland) is the mentor, Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg) the man of action. Sometimes the mentor and man of action are blended into a single character. Next, there are the team members with ‘individual skills and crafts which command no great social respect and which have little or no chance of making those who possess them wealthy by any legal method’ (Kaminsky 1974: 79). This group of social misfits and societal castoffs traditionally embraces serious craftsmen, such as safecrackers, mechanics, drivers, demolitions experts and other technicians. Semantics, however, has its limitations as a means for identifying genres – at least since Jules Dassin’s caper team in Topkapi (1964), made up of peculiar members like mute acrobats and a maker of automata. The quirky cases of Virgil (Casey Affleck) and Turk (Scott Caan) Malloy, the puerile brothers from Provo, Utah, in Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001 version), are an example of this sort too. The serious craftsmen and the curious oddball, as opposed as they might appear on the surface, occupy the same role as thieves in a heist film. Yet another binary divides the heist film’s types between a ‘thuggish prole’ and cool caper characters of the sort found in the original Ocean’s Eleven (Newman 1997: 71). There are seeming differences in the sleek professional thieves of Michael Mann’s Heat (1994) and in the bumbling professional ones in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (2000), but then there are amateur thieves in many a comic heist such as Mad Money (Callie Khouri, 2008). Semantics may be necessary for generic understanding, but it is far from sufficient. In the aforementioned examples, as thoroughly dissimilar as the heroes might appear, they perform the same task in heist plots and the audience is led to cheer for their victory.

Heist films afford a powerful screen identification with criminals breaking the law, providing ‘escapism and voyeurism, or in other words the pleasure of watching stories about illicit worlds and transgressive individuals … that may appeal to our fantasies and desires’ (Thompson 2007: 4). The heist encodes in story form a particular desire to elude the oppressive aspects or limitations of contemporary mass society. We recognise the necessary cooperation among team members and the rivalry between competing criminals, and want to see whether the social microcosm remains resolute or dissolves in the face of pressures (see Mason 2002). Will the team overcome obstacles in order to execute the plan, pull off that one last job, and break free at last from whatever constraints bind them? Risk and reward, bound in an equation invariably distorted by the ‘foolproofness’ of the plan, induces apprehension in the spectators and the hope that they will experience an affective payoff at the end. The audience’s reception of the heist film is thus also a part of its utility. But in this we are encroaching on Altman’s notion of generic ‘syntax’.

Syntax works in alignment with audience reception and serves to identify ‘generic affiliation’ more tellingly than semantics ‘because a group of texts organizes those building blocks in a similar manner (as seen through such shared syntactic aspects as plot structure, character relationships or image and sound montage)’ (Altman 1999: 89). The syntactic dimension of Altman’s model for analysing genre is crucial: vocabulary (semantics) varies with relative ease, as I have suggested, but syntax often matters more in figuring out form and meaning, especially over time. At the heart of the heist film is the extraordinary robbery of a formidable institution that requires careful planning and the skills of specialists. Kirsten Thompson’s lucid definition calls the heist ‘a cycle or sub-genre of crime films that feature an elaborately planned and executed robbery, and whose narratives emphasize the logistical and technical difficulties of a crime and its execution’ (2007: 43). And Kim Newman’s superbly concise entry on the ‘caper’ as a criminal ‘sub-genre’ in the cheekily titled BFI Companion to Crime points to how ‘professional crooks plan and execute a clever, daring but (the censors insisted) ultimately unsuccessful robbery’ (1997: 70). Newman’s definition reiterates the central narrative focus on crime, highlights the skill and ingenuity of the ‘professional’ criminals, and foregrounds the failure of the crime in most capers made before 2000. (At this moment the genre seems to turn away from its longstanding ‘fatal strategy’, as Telotte puts it [1996: 163], that is, its tragic ending or the failure of the criminal exploit; I’ll return to this point.) Newman and Thompson’s definitions echo Kaminsky’s: ‘the one essential element of big caper movies, the essential which defines them, is the plot concentration on the commission of a single crime of great monetary significance, at least on the surface’ (1974: 77). Kaminsky’s qualifier ‘big’ implies a unique subset of films differentiated from those in which a robbery functions merely as a backdrop. The job must involve a risky operation that will reap great rewards; the plot ‘concentrates’ on a singular crime that occupies a significant portion of the diegesis and the affective buildup of the story, ennobling the work, skilled labour and physical or mental effort of the crimes represented. The narrative focus of the heist film is wrapped up