Robbery

Star Review

The last successful starring vehicle for producer-actor Stanley Baker, Robbery is better remembered now for the being the film that propelled director Peter Yates on to Hollywood to make Steve McQueen’s Bullitt in 1968. McQueen, well known as a petrol head, saw Robbery and was completely bowled over by its high-octane car chase; he wanted one like it in his film. (And Yates, of course, went on to deliver it.) But Robbery still holds its own as the kind of thick-ear crime feature that Britain – and particularly Stanley Baker – used to do very well on the big screen. Sharply photographed by Douglas Slocombe and loosely based on the Great Train Robbery of 1963, it teams Baker’s criminal mastermind Paul Clifton with some solid bad boy actors of the period — Frank Finlay, James Booth, Barry Foster, George Sewell — and throws in some terrific London locations to boot. Having said that, the magnificent opening car chase is what will linger longest in the memory: it is something akin to a tyre-screeching, eight-cylinder Odessa Steps sequence.

Julian Upton on 7th February 2008

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Film Description

A dramatisation of the Great Train Robbery in which Stanley Baker plays the mastermind who assembles twenty five of Britain's most notorious criminals to rob the Glasgow mail train. However, things go badly wrong, and Inspector Langden, the detective in charge of the case, manages to catch the entire gang - with the exception of Clifton.

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Film Details

Cast

Frank Finlay, Barry Foster, Stanley Baker, James Booth, Patrick Jordan, Joanna Pettet

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