This week, director Tony Scott pits a New York City Transit officer (Denzel Washington) against a cryptic, train-stealing criminal (John Travolta) in an update of the 1974 heist flick The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. It’s a close remake of the original with a modern spin that asks, how could a gang of armed men steal a subway car in the age of the Internet? With that in mind, we take a look back at the long and colorful history of the heist film — generally speaking, movies featuring intricate plots to steal something, be it money, diamonds, or entire modes of transportation — to revisit ten decades of heists and capers on celluloid.
Below, we name one influential heist movie per decade, from The Great Train Robbery to Ocean’s 11 and everything in between; chime in with your favorites!
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The Great Train Robbery (1903) didn’t just lay the groundwork for heist films; it changed the way that moviemakers told stories. Edwin S. Porter’s landmark 12-minute short was one of the first narrative films, and it utilized some groundbreaking cinematic techniques (cross-cutting, non-static camerawork) to tell the tale of a railway heist and its bloody aftermath. Though the film begins with the villains undertaking the job, it’s clear from their actions that they’ve done their homework, executing the heist with cold, occasionally murderous discipline. The Great Train Robbery is one of the most influential films ever made, and its iconic final shot — that of a man firing a gun directly at the camera — has been emulated in countless films, perhaps most memorably in the final scene of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.
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What’s a heist movie without a colorful band of crooks? Tod Browning‘s The Unholy Three (1925, and remade as a talkie in 1930) presents one of the weirdest criminal plots ever committed to celluloid, in which a quartet of carnival freaks trick marks into buying “talking” parrots from their pet store by using ventriloquism, and then burglarize their homes when they inquire as to why the birds aren’t talking. The gang members include a ventriloquist (Lon Chaney), a little person, a strong man, and a beautiful pickpocket. Browning, who also helmed Dracula and Freaks, is best known as a horror director, but with this strange feature (which got an approving nod in Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects), he hit upon something that the makers of caper flicks would consistently exploit — namely, that a gang of weirdos makes for a more entertaining heist flick.
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By the 1930s, the heist on film was more a plot point than a story-spanning focus, placing more emphasis on who was doing the heisting, who was being stolen from, and the complicated and comical relationships that transpired. In the 1930 romantic thriller Raffles (nominated for the Best Oscar for Sound in the category’s founding year) the titular gentleman thief known as the Amateur Cracksman trades his posh life of crime (and a prized necklace) for the love of a woman. A 1939 remake (one of many TV and screen adaptations to come) starred David Niven, who subsequently popped up as distinguished con men in The Pink Panther (1963), Bedtime Story (1964), The Brain (1969). Elsewhere during the Post-Depression era, heists were integral to dramatic crime movies where jewels rather than cash were the prime targets (15 Maiden Lane, Bulldog Jack) and desperate criminals almost always met a violent end.
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The first heist flick we tend to think of when remembering the 1940s is High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart, in which he plays Roy Earle, an expert thief charged with planning the robbery of a California casino. The requisite cast of ne’er-do-wells is gathered and the plan is executed, but when all is said and done, things begin to fall apart. As the 1940s was a defining decade for what we now know as film noir, and no one quite embodied the genre the way Humphrey Bogart did, High Sierra represents a unique entry in the heist movie genre, steeped in the cinematic culture of the day and powered by one of Hollywood’s greatest screen legends.
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Nobody made stylish heist films like the French in the 1950s. Case in point: Jules Dassin‘s Rififi, a dark, cynical tale of a group of thieves who meticulously plan and execute the perfect jewel heist before falling prey to human nature. Rififi perfected many of the conventions that would inform subsequent caper flicks, from the assembly of the perfect team to the inevitable fallout once the job is completed. However, its pièce de résistance remains the job itself, a wordless, virtuoso 30-minute sequence so precise and tense that it still dazzles today. Rififi inspired countless heist films, including Reservoir Dogs, Heat, and The Usual Suspects, and a remake starring Al Pacino was announced a few years back. Other 1950s heist classics include Jean-Pierre Melville’s moody, influential Bob le Flambeur and John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, (both of which exerted a profound influence on the Ocean’s movies), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s time-jumping, fatalistic The Killing.
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Crime got a little more fun in the swinging ’60s, thanks to a batch of upstart capers and one iconic ensemble pic in particular: Lewis Milestone’s seminal heist flick, Ocean’s Eleven (1960). In addition to being the very first Rat Pack film, Ocean’s broke new ground by adding some much-needed levity to a genre previously known best as a genre of violent crime and punishment. In short, it was fun. Frank Sinatra, who helped to shepherd the project towards its Vegas setting and appeared nightly at The Sands hotel during production, starred in the film as mastermind Danny Ocean, a suave veteran who pools together eleven associates (including Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop) to rob five Vegas casinos in one night. As an elaborate scheme plays out against the high-rolling desert setting, the crooks come out on top — well, sorta. Even empty-handed, these playboy criminals are the epitome of hip 1960s cool, a sentiment echoed four decades later by the likes of George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the same name. (Ocean’s Eleven wasn’t the only great heist movie of the decade; see Band of Outsiders (1964), Topkapi (1964), and The Italian Job (1969) for more onscreen capers that influenced future generations of filmmakers.)
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Heist films enjoyed a resurgence in the 1970s — at least in the number of pictures produced, if not necessarily in quality — as comic capers, period dramas, and foreign films abounded, all tales of would-be robbers and their meticulously-planned schemes. [See Clint Eastwood in Kelly’s Heroes (1970)! Robert Redford in The Hot Rock (1972)! Sean Connery in The First Great Train Robbery (1979)!] In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the heist genre hit upon a new twist, thanks to the gritty realism of ’70s filmmaking. Inspired by a true story, the anti-establishment classic starred Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik, an amateur bank robber who becomes a media sensation when a heist goes awry. Suddenly, the criminal — forced into his predicament by The Man, naturally — became an antihero to root for as one man’s lone crusade against society came to represent the hot button politics of the decade. (Audiences of the time also found themselves rooting for bandit couple Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, and commiserating with crooks undone by insidious surveillance in The Anderson Tapes.)
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The 1980s were not rife with heist films, but one thing they did not lack was a healthy cache of screwball comedies, so it’s fitting that perhaps the most entertaining caper of the decade involved Kevin Kline (in an Oscar-winning role), Jamie Lee Curtis, and a couple of Monty Python alumni. A Fish Called Wanda chronicles the tale of two pairs of jewel thieves who team up for a job, ultimately with intentions of double crossing each other, and become entangled in each other’s lives. Though the heist itself is not the main focus of the film, it serves as the setup for a slew of zany hijinks, and like a few of the other iconic films on this list, Wanda played with the genre’s conventions to serve its purposes, often with hilarious results.
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A new wave of film brats took over the independent scene in the 1990s, chief among them Quentin Tarantino. For his feature debut, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino turned the genre on its head, showing none of the heist and all of its grisly aftermath. From its myriad of film references to its audaciously cool dialogue to its inventive use of few locations and an even smaller budget, it’s no secret that an endless series of violent films (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, The Boondock Saints, Smokin’ Aces) released since are indebted to QT’s work.
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For the lead in this frothy remake of the Rat Pack flick about the simultaneous robbery of three Vegas casinos, director Steven Soderbergh chose George Clooney, frequent collaborator and one of few contemporary actors who effortlessly recalls old Hollywood chic. The resulting movie is a proudly shallow affair. Ocean’s 11 pulls the rug from underneath the ’90s brainy genre exercises that preceded it (Reservoir Dogs, Bottle Rocket, Heat), offering itself as a bubblegum caper filled with heavily stylized shots and a hot ensemble cast espousing witty one-liners. Other new millennium heist films, like The Italian Job (another remake) and The Bank Job, also patterned themselves after classic cinema, though more in line with the grittier style of the 1970s.
Want more on the heist film genre? Check out our previous Total Recall: Steal These 11 Heist Movies and take a peek at clips from this week’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 below!
Written by Jen Yamato, Tim Ryan, Alex Vo, and Ryan Fujitani.
