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"The Italian Job's
real stars are the three Mini Coopers - patriotically decorated red, white
and blue"
"ridiculously,
gleefully, absurdly unashamedly jingoistic"
"sums up the joie de vivre of
the 1960s"
The Italian Job - greatest crime caper comedy of all time |
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The Italian Job - Michael Caine
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Charlie Croker, fresh out of prison, takes on a job
to steal gold from Italy. In order to finance the raid he enlists the help
of Mr Bridger, an established criminal. The team plans to distract the
Italian police with a traffic jam whilst they make off with the bullion in
three Mini Coopers...
Review
1969's The Italian Job towers mightily above its latter-day mockney
imitators. After Alfie but before Get Carter Michael Caine
is the hippest ex-con around, bedding the birds (several at a time) and
spouting immortal one-liners ("You're only supposed to blow the bloody
doors off!"). The inheritor of a devious plan to steal gold bullion in the
traffic-choked streets of Turin, Caine recruits a misfit team of genial
underworld types - including a lecherous Benny Hill and three plummy
public-schoolboy rally drivers - and uses the occasion of an England-Italy
football match as cover for the heist.
In his final screen appearance, Noel Coward joyfully sends up his own
patriotic persona, and there are small though priceless cameos from the
likes of Irene Handl and John Le Mesurier. But The Italian Job's
real stars are the three Mini Coopers - patriotically decorated red, white
and blue - that run rings round every other vehicle in an immortal
car-chase sequence, which preserves forever the British public's love
affair with the little car. Quincy Jones provided the irreverent music,
naturally, while the cliffhanger ending thumbs its nose at anything so
un-hip as a resolution. It's all unashamedly jingoistic - ridiculously,
gleefully, absurdly so - but the whole sums up the joie de vivre of
the 1960s so perfectly that future historians need only look here to learn
why the decade was swinging.
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