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C'mon down, Michael Caine wants to sell you a Mini Cooper!

I don’t drive, but if I did, I’d drive a Mini and I’d probably rob banks, and it’s all because of this film. Put on your best ‘cor-blimey’ trousers and join us we wrap our peepers around a British movie classic.

STORYTELLING:  
lright, chances are most of you reading this have already seen ‘The Italian Job’, and have long since made up your own minds about its various merits as a piece of storytelling, but we’re here now so let’s do this anyway: Michael Caine plays Charlie Croker, a dashing young rogue-about-town who has just been released from prison, and is hired to take on his first ‘big job’, a £4m gold bullion heist in Italy.

Aided by his colourful team of 1960’s London criminal-types, he creates gridlock on the streets of Turin by tampering with the traffic lights, stopping the gold while in transit, then swings through in three Mini Coopers, nicking the whole bloomin’ lot. Cor blimey, pie ‘n’ mash, my old man’s a carthorse and so on and so forth.

Alfred's early years were dark times, before Master Bruce.

Writer Troy Kennedy-Martin had always intended The Italian Job to be a darkly humorous affair, but under the helmsmanship of director Peter Collinson what we get is a comedic romp, a heist movie which, although not necessarily able to compare to today’s offerings in terms of cleverness of plot or intensity of action, still manages to give a ruddy good account of itself.

It’s a charming, funny, utterly British adventure. It’s not often that a film manages to pull off the mean feat of being totally ‘of its time’ yet timeless in its appeal, but The Italian Job is one such rare gem.