The release of Ben Affleck’s The Town marks the return of the one the most enjoyably subversive of cinematic forms—the caper movie. Typically the plots of these films portray the assembling of a crew for some kind of nefarious enterprise—bank robbery, jewel heist, train robbery, whatever—and the characters become so fascinating, and often so likeable, that the viewer wants them to succeed in their “left-handed form of human endeavour”.  The first of the caper films was John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, based on a novel by W.R. Burnett. The script by Huston and Ben Maddow follows the book closely. “Doc”,…