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Italian job9/28/2023 ![]() Mr Bridger will drive them into the sea.” That’s what you call a hostile environment.Īs for the 60s-style sexiness, well, I remember first seeing this movie on TV as a 12-year-old, saucer-eyed at the scene when Charlie gets out of prison, shows up at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London to find half a dozen scantily clad women waiting for him in his suite. Every restaurant, cafe, ice cream parlour, gambling den and night club in London, Liverpool and Glasgow will be smashed. ![]() But I find myself thinking about Charlie’s crude, borderline-racist threat to the Italian mafia chieftain threatening to block his plan: “There are a quarter of a million Italians in Britain and they’ll be made to suffer. Everyone quotes “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” when one of Charlie’s underlings dynamites an entire armoured car during a practice session. There are plenty of memorable touches in the script. Coward, in his final film role, is a good sport (in Coward’s biography, Philip Hoare ponders how far The Italian Job was removed from Coward’s first film role, in DW Griffith’s silent Hearts of the World, in 1918). The brio and ambition of The Italian Job can’t be doubted and Caine has enormous charisma, especially posing as the super-posh tiger-shooting English gentleman picking up his 007-style Aston Martin after a couple of years “away”. (He was infuriated to be told to redub his Yorkshire accent with something more RP so American audiences could understand him.) The script was by Troy Kennedy Martin, except for those bits involving Benny Hill’s creepy and not especially funny sex-pest “professor” figure, which were written by Hill himself. ![]() There are also those endless shots of cars crashing down mountainsides – which was a big feature of film and TV in those days and of course reached its climax in this film with the famed cliffhanger ending. The director was Peter Collinson, whose flair for action was revealed in the exhilarating location sequences in chaotic Turin as Charlie’s red, white and blue Mini Coopers whizz along the city’s pavements and through its colonnaded piazzas.
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