March mischief.(FILM)(The Bank Job)(Movie review)

T. S. ELIOT picked April, but as far as moviegoers are concerned, March is the cruelest month. The weeks immediately after the New Year are the traditional dumping ground for the worst of Hollywood's dross, but unless you're a critic (or a true obsessive), you probably won't have kept up with the flood of highbrow films that get released en masse at Christmastime, and you can spend the depths of winter catching up, ignoring the new releases, and prepping for the Oscars. It's the period between the Academy Awards and Easter when things get really grim, with movies that aren't so much laugh-out-loud bad as persistently mediocre: unsuccessful star vehicles, middling romantic comedies, blockbusters that didn't make the summertime cut, and art-house films that left the critics cold.

If audiences are lucky, though, there's the occasional gem scattered in amid the fool's gold. (I mean the metaphorical sort of pyrite, though last month's lousy Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey film, Fool's Gold, fits the bill as well.) This year's pleasant March surprise comes with a pleasantly direct title: A heist movie called The Bank Job, it's a solid, fast-moving, nuts-and-bolts caper set in 1970s Britain. And it's something more interesting as well--a speculative account of one of the Western world's weirder true-crime stories, and a coarse, violent, sexy entertainment with a thread of right-wing populism running through it.

Here are the facts that give the film its "based on a true story" jumping-off point. On September 11, 1971, a gang of thieves tunneled into a Lloyds Bank branch in London and made off with the contents of dozens of safe-deposit boxes. Aham-radio operator overheard their walkie-talkie conversations, and for four days the "walkie-talkie robbery" was the talk of the London press; then the government slapped a "D-Notice" on the media, requesting a halt to further coverage for reasons of national security. Several of the robbers were eventually arrested, while others apparently got away, but to this day nobody knows why the media blackout was imposed--except, perhaps, for one George McIndoe, who claims to have met the robbery's ringleader and learned that the heist turned up photos of Princess Margaret, that era's blacksheep royal, participating in a Caribbean orgy.

McIndoe has a producer's credit on The Bank Job, which spins a complex, outlandish, and wildly entertaining conspiracy theory from his piece of (supposed) inside information. In the movieland version of the story, the photos in the vault belong to the black-power hustler Michael X (Peter de Jersey, striking just the right balance between fraud and menace), who pals around with John Lennon and other radical-chic poseurs while using the pictures to blackmail the British government and escape prosecution for extortion. To snatch the photos without ...