The Bank Job
Scripted with a light touch by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais and directed with considerable verve by Roger Donaldson, The Bank Job is a conspiracy thriller. It's a speculative account of what lay behind the actual robbery in 1971 of a branch of Lloyds Bank in London's Baker Street. Amazingly, a radio ham recorded the thieves' walkie-talkie conversation while they worked and alerted the cops, but no one was brought to justice.
A case of life imitating art, the robbers borrowed their plan from Baker Street's most famous resident; Sherlock Holmes's tale The Red-Headed League details how thieves tunnel into a bank vault from a shop down the street. The sympathetic minor villains have been conned into this caper by a beautiful model with underworld connections, who's being blackmailed by the security-service people.
Philip French, The Observer
Roger Donaldson, born in Australia, entered the film industry when he made the drama series Winners and Losers. He directed and produced his first film Sleeping Dogs in 1977. As this was the first film to come out of New Zealand in nearly fifteen years, he lobbied the New Zealand Government to found the New Zealand Film Commission in 1978. In the mid-1980s he moved to Hollywood.
Selected filmography:
1977 Sleeping Dogs
1981 Smash Palace
1984 Bunt na Bounty / The Bounty
1988 Cocktail
1994 Ucieczka gangstera / The Getaway
1995 Gatunek / Species
1999 Góra Dantego / Dante's Peak
2003 Rekrut / The Recruit
2005 Prawdziwa historia / The World's Fastest Indian
2008 Angielska robota / The Bank Job