The Heist Film: Stealing with Style (Short Cuts)
Daryl Lee
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 0231169698
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (BFI Film Classics)
Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge (BFI Modern Classics)
Il conformista (The Conformist) (BFI Film Classics)
the narrative syntax or directorial touch, the world portrayed was decidedly French. Instead of a flat transposition of forms, this cross-cultural encounter led to a congenial and ‘highly successful and influential generic matrix’ (Vincendeau 2003: 103). Modernist in spirit, several noir heists critique the corporatist, money-mongering compulsions of the new expansionism in effect on both sides of the Atlantic. Jules Dassin: The Dark Work of Creation Dassin’s adaptation adopts much of the
protagonists, Peckinpah protracts the first twelve minutes of The Getaway to underscore Doc’s social and existential imprisonment through a series of montages showing him working at the prison or clearing growth in a field under surveillance. With little or no dialogue, just the churning of machines, guards barking orders, a lawyer and parole board deciding his fate, Doc is portrayed as a subject of the system. Peckinpah also inserts shots of Doc and Carol making love, which are gentle,
inflationary period of Carter’s presidency; it had little satirical bite to it. No matter that the film tweaked the heist’s semantics: the thieves are housewives, unfulfilled in love and material standing, who rob a mall in American suburbia. Even an auteur like the Frenchman Louis Malle, whose American films of the early 1980s are ‘thoughtful explorations of human emotions, told through small stories of ordinary individuals living in contemporary America’ (Frey 2004: 20), could not keep the
plea for more thoughtful filmmaking that registers with the terms and history we have explored in our study of the heist film genre. The speech came shortly after the release of Side Effects (2013) and amid a swirl of rumours that the film might be his last directorial effort — that one last job. Soderbergh’s critique of the moviemaking industry lays out in expository fashion what his own production gambles and heist films express implicitly, by raising two interdependent problems: the lack of
Cinema. London: Routledge. _____ (2002) Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA. New York: Continuum. Taylor, Mark C. (2004) Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Russel (1959) ‘Encounter with Siodmak’, Sight and Sound, 28, 3/4, 180–2. Telotte, J. P. (1989) Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. _____ (1996) ‘Fatal Capers: Strategy and