Class Acts.(Movie review)

In September, 1971, a group of stumblebum thieves tunnelled their way into a branch of the Lloyds Bank in the Marylebone section of London and cleaned out the vault. While the robbery was in progress, a ham-radio operator, randomly spinning the dial, overheard walkie-talkie conversations between the gang and a lookout posted on a nearby roof. Paradoxically, the "walkie-talkie robbery" became famous, in part, because press coverage of it disappeared four days after the break-in was discovered (it took place on a weekend). The reason for the silence was widely assumed to be that journalists had been told by the government that national security was at stake. Those are the curious real-world events behind "The Bank Job," an enjoyable new British heist movie that falls into the genial line of "The Lavender Hill Mob," "The Day They Robbed the Bank of England," and other such easygoing Anglo entertainments about the pleasures of theft. "The Bank Job" has its familiar scenes--sturdy fellows digging underground to get to the vault, the excitement of closing in on an enormous treasure, a smashing girl who's connected to the caper, and so on. But, despite these generic building blocks, the actual robbery that the picture is based on is shrouded in mystery, and the screenwriters, Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais, have engaged in a fair amount of entertaining invention.

"The Bank Job" begins with a glimpse of England's best-known party girl of the time, Princess Margaret, misbehaving on some unnamed Caribbean island. Lurking outside a window, a young man with a camera snaps the royal personage in bed with two men. The photographs then fall into the hands of Michael X, a real-life tough who, in the late nineteen-fifties, had moved from Trinidad to London, where he set himself up as a pimp, drug dealer, and extortionist. By 1971, Michael X had spent several years as a spokesman for black power, a fiery ideologue who titillated parts of the city's intelligentsia (including some upper-class women). In the movie, he stores the photographs of Margaret in a safe-deposit box and uses them to protect himself from prosecution--an outrageous ploy that causes Britain's internal Secret Service to spring into action. The smart boys of MI5 undertake a highly dubious scheme: they dispatch a beautiful ex-model (Saffron Burrows) to persuade some low-rent London friends from her past to break into the bank and to take her along, so that she can quietly nab the Margaret indecencies and return them to the protection of the Crown. The men, at first, think that they're after nothing but jewels and cash. They're ignorant not only of the photographs but also of the other items the filmmakers rather implausibly say are stored in the vault, including a ledger detailing payoffs to the police and photographs of swells at play in the city's poshest brothel.

How much of this is true? It's impossible to say. The filmmakers admit that they made up the model, but the Caribbean island is presumably Mustique, where Margaret spent a good deal of time playing. Several of the actual thieves were arrested, but it's unknown how much hard time they served, and most of the swag (at least five hundred thousand pounds) was never recovered. Many of the alleged principal players are dead, so the filmmakers have jauntily mixed together fact, fiction, and what sounds like the party gossip of many decades. They draw on the tabloid traditions of ruling-class kinkiness and hypocrisy. They even introduce, in a kind of special guest appearance, a representative of the Crown: no less than Lord Mountbatten. The scathing portrait of Michael X (Peter de Jersey) feels as if it had been shaped by V. S. Naipaul's contempt for him in the novel "Guerrillas" (1975) and the essay "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad" (1979). The picture is a potpourri: American viewers can enjoy it as a crime film with many twists and turns; the British can merrily decode the references to well-known figures and scandals of long ago.

Given the nature of the material, which comes to a climax with half of London's criminal and Secret Service personnel chasing the baffled thieves, you would expect the movie to be played as farce, or perhaps as a satire on the manners of the upper class. That's the way Richard Lester or the Boulting brothers would once have told such a story. But Roger Donaldson, the Australian-born director who, in recent years, has become the kind of solid pro that Hollywood developed in the nineteen-thirties and forties, has made a straightforward, tight-knit crime ...