Ben Affleck’s True Caper Movie

Ben Affleck’s Argo is one of those enjoyable caper movies that are high on every filmgoer’s list of guilty pleasures. Not always such a guilty pleasure really—Jules Dassin’s classic Rififi with its brilliant twenty-minute break-in sequence and doomed protagonists is one the great films of the 1950s. Nearly as good are its predecessors The Asphalt Jungle and the delightfully witty Lavender Hill Mob. What makes the form so effective, and therefore attractive to film-makers, is that it has a built-in three-act structure. First there are the scenes showing the gathering of the team that help to establish character. Then we see the planning of the operation that provides all sorts of opportunities for sub-plots and minor drama. Finally there is the caper itself—do they get away with it? Or does everything go wrong?

The caper in Argo is a Scarlet Pimpernel-type escape from Iran in 1979 by six diplomats who had evaded capture by the mobs that invaded the US embassy—exactly the kind of…