There’s Life in the Caper Movie

 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”, a brilliant career criminal just released from prison, arrives at an unnamed Midwestern city and begins to put together one last big job. Drawn into his scheme are Dix, a small-time stick-up man, Emmerich, a corrupt lawyer, Ciavelli, a safe cracker, and Gus, a hunch-backed store owner and part-time criminal. For all their weaknesses, treated with compassionate objectivity by Huston and played by Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Louis Calhern, Anthony Caruso and James Whitmore, the criminals end up more sympathetic than the corrupt and hypocritical police. In spite of “Doc’s” careful planning, everything goes wrong with the jewellery heist and the film becomes a kind of Greek tragedy with just about all of the protagonists destroyed by a kind of impersonal fate. 

Until then W.R. Burnett’s most significant contribution to American cinema had been to create the tragic gangster film when his highly cinematic novel Little Caesar was adapted by Warner Brothers. The book incorporated the structures of Shakespearean tragedy (specifically Richard III, Burnett revealed later) into its story of the rise and fall of a small-time gangster. For The Asphalt Jungle he employed the forms of Greek tragedy and by so doing Burnett, along with Maddow and Huston, managed to invent the caper movie. (Typically, the irrepressible Jean-Pierre Melville claimed to have come up with the idea earlier only to be beaten to the punch by the American film.)

Four years later blacklisted American director Jules Dassin made Rififi (1955) in France—for some still the best caper movie ever. Although based on a book by Auguste Le Breton, Dassin’s script is clearly influenced by The Asphalt Jungle. Once again a criminal mastermind comes out of jail and in a kind of redemption takes on a jewel robbery. This time the criminals are all admirable—highly professional and true to their code. In the climax Jean Servais as Tony, the leader of the gang, becomes positively heroic as he hunts down the kidnappers of his protégé’s child. 

Much-discussed features of both films were the robbery sequences filmed film noir style with only “natural” sound. Rififi’s break-in and safe-blowing was a cinematic tour de force that held its viewers riveted for thirty minutes of screen time as the team break through the ceiling of the jewellery store, neutralise the alarm and crack the safe with an elaborate can opener. 

One problem was that the methods shown in the film, devised by the head of props, were adopted successfully by criminals in Mexico. (The film was promptly banned there.) This was not the only brush with real crime for makers of caper movies. Alexander Mackendrick, director of the British black comedy The Ladykillers, told me that when he checked with Scotland Yard whether the heist portrayed in his script could work, he was told with some reluctance that it would. “You are planning to stay in the film business, aren’t you, sir?” a senior officer asked pointedly as the director was leaving.

Apart from the comic heist films—The Lavender Hill Mob or Dassin’s Topkapi, a send-up of his earlier film—The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi virtually defined the caper genre for the next fifty years. The form was seen at its best in two American-style films by Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966) and Le Cercle Rouge (1969). In the former, such is the film’s identification with the underworld code and the fate of Gu (Lino Ventura), a likeable escaped criminal, that the viewer accepts his bumping off two obnoxious stand-over men to protect his girlfriend and the shooting of two motorcycle guards during the heist. While the urbane Inspector Blot (Paul Meurisse) is a worthy antagonist, the police are on the whole far more unscrupulous than the criminals. 

Le Cercle Rouge is not quite so ruthless. Most of the killings are in self-defence, while Alain Delon’s Corey, Gian Maria Volonte’s Vogel and Yves Montand’s Jansen are warmly sympathetic. However, their principal adversary, Andre Bourvil’s Inspector Mattei, is fascinatingly repellent, little different from the big-time gangsters who are hunting Corey. Naturally our heroes are doomed, but the viewer is encouraged to identify with their camaraderie and professionalism when Melville stages his own version of the jewellery heist in Rififi. Again the characters communicate in silence, the “natural sound” broken by a single thread of music as two shadowy figures climb across the rooftops. Although Melville prided himself on using the “uniform” of American film noir of the forties—trench coats, overcoats, hats, rain-washed streets—his treatment of the police was entirely French. He could never forget their collaboration with Vichy and the Germans during the Occupation and their participation in the Holocaust when they rounded up Jews for the SS. 

It wasn’t until 1995 that the genre was redefined by Michael Mann’s extraordinary Heat. The film is built around the duel of wits between Al Pacino’s Lieutenant Vincent Hanna of Robbery Homicide and Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley, the boss of a hold-up gang. In nearly three hours of screen time Mann explores the lives of both men, with our sympathies evenly divided between them. According to the director, Vincent and Neil had their real-life counterparts and the heists that open and close the film were based on actual robberies. Also like many of its predecessors Heat was shot entirely on location (this time in Los Angeles) and did not employ any studio sets.

It is easy to see why some American critics are comparing The Town to Heat. The structure is similar to the earlier film with an opening hold-up—an armoured van in Heat, a bank in The Town—and a major heist for the climax in both movies. As well, the viewers’ sympathies in both films are divided between the cops and the stick-up men. 

Still it is unfair to take the comparison further. The Town is adapted from Chuck Hogan’s 2005 Hammett Award-winning novel Prince of Thieves. As film writers in the USA have observed, it belongs to a sub-genre of Boston crime films that include The Departed, Mystic River and Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone. All portray close-knit communities living either on the fringe of the underworld or directly involved in crime. This time the setting is the Boston neighbourhood of Charlestown. (Since the film’s release it has been pointed out that the area’s reputation for producing hold-up men really dates back to the 1990s.) Moreover the film is built around a spectacular device. Claire (Rebecca Hall), one of the bank managers, is taken hostage during a robbery then released. When the gang discover she lives in their neighbourhood, Doug (Ben Affleck), the leader of the unit, is pressured by other gang members to kill her in case she recognises them. He follows her and they begin a relationship. All this is developed in some beautifully written scenes by Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard. And seeing the crime from the point of view of one of the victims underscores the brutality of the gang’s activities. 

There are further twists in the plot that I won’t spoil by revealing here. But even a viewer familiar with the genre will be surprised by the way the narrative unfolds. One of the great strengths of Affleck’s writing and direction here (and in Gone Baby Gone) is that he is not afraid of exposition and gives the scenes exploring character and motive room to breathe. There is none of the elliptical visual shorthand of the television series that is unhappily creeping into feature films at present, where pushing the narrative forward overrides everything else.

The visuals by Affleck and his director of photography Robert Elswit are even more intimate than they were when Affleck was collaborating with John Toll in Gone Baby Gone. Tight close-ups proliferate, the background out of focus with the camera seeming to probe into the characters’ most intimate secrets. The action scenes and shoot-outs are always believable and spectacularly violent. These enable us to at least understand the ruthless methods of Doug’s principal adversary, FBI Agent Frawley, played with just the right combination of cool professionalism and anger by Jon Hamm. There even seems to be an oblique  allusion to the way Vincent in Heat could set up round-the-clock surveillance on his suspects with a few phone calls when Frawley snaps, “Forget about twenty-four-hour surveillance unless one of these lunatics converts to Islam.”

Affleck gives one of his best performances to date, portraying the moral awakening of a damaged man. Until now he has been a star of the old school, handsome, versatile but never achieving the emotional range of his friend Matt Damon. With this beautifully detailed performance Affleck looks as though he could be one of the major screen actors of the twenty-first century. 

Although The Town works well at its present length there are signs that a back story has been cut back. However a twenty-minute-longer version was released on DVD in the USA in December. As the film is a major work by an extraordinarily accomplished director I will be keeping you posted.