Last night I and my lovely wife rented what we expected to be some
mindless entertainment from the local Blockbusters. With a title like
"The Bank Job" and starring British actor Jason Statham, veteran of
action-oriented B movies like "The Transporter", we fully expected
car chases, eye-gouging and all the other guilty pleasures associated
with this genre.
As it turned out, "The Bank Job" was a far more understated movie
that touched on some interesting social and political questions.
Based on a true eventthe 1971 Baker Street robbery in central
Londonit explores the venality of British law enforcement and
corruption at the highest levels of British society.
The movie begins with unidentified people involved in some kind of
orgy at an unnamed Caribbean resort (this was the swinging 60s after
all). As one couple is going at it hot and heavy in a bedroom,
somebody is taking photos through the window. It turns out that the
woman is Princess Margaret and the photos become the possession of
Michael X, a leading Black Power advocate in Great Britain who styles
himselfas the name impliesafter Malcolm X.
Next we see Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), a fashion model returning
from a vacation being stopped by cops in Heathrow Airport. Caught
with an ample supply of heroin, she is pressured by her boyfriend Tim
Everett (Richard Lintern), an MI5 spook, to recruit her old
boyfriend, a small-time criminal named Terry Leather (Jason Statham),
to organize a bank robbery to retrieve the photos from a safety
deposit box. Yes, I know, the negatives could have been kept
somewhere else but this is a movie after all.
Statham goes about recruiting a crew to tunnel into the bank vault
from the basement of a nearby clothing store. The robbery itself is
not played for high drama, but is only a device to move the plot
forward. Once they open the safety deposit boxes, they discover a
virtual treasure trove of documents that are just as compromising for
the British authorities as Michael X's photos. There are photos that
the madam of a brothel has taken of members of the upper crust in S&M
sessions at her establishment. A porn merchant has a ledger book with
entries reflecting payoffs to the London cops.
Most of the drama takes place after the robbery and depicts a
cat-and-mouse game between Statham and his crew on one side and the
MI5, London cops and the porn king's goons on the other.
Of the greatest interest to me was the Michael X character who I
remember from coverage in Intercontinental Press in the late 1960s,
when I was in the SWP. IP was edited by Joe Hansen, one of Trotsky's
bodyguards in Coyoacan, and served as a kind of press digest from
leftist sources around the world, not always Trotskyistthank god. I
could be mistaken, but I remember Michael X, who was charged with two
murders in his home country of Trinidad, being defended by the
Trotskyists as a police frame-up victim like Mumia. One of the two
murder victims was Gale Benson, a daughter of a prominent Tory who
became the lover of Michael X's brother. There were suspicions at the
time, supported by the movie, that she was an MI5 spy sent in to
infiltrate Michael X's group.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/the-bank-job/
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