The Italian Job

A breezy, irresistibly confident British caper whose two great assets have carried it from modest beginnings to national-treasure status: Michael Caine's swaggering, deadpan charm as a recently released Cockney thief, and a legendary getaway chase through the streets of Turin that lets a trio of Mini Coopers loose on staircases, rooftops, sewers and shopping arcades. Critics past and present agree the film's brio and sheer style are its lifeblood; its much-quoted one-liners, the iconic pairing of Caine and a silkily imperious Noël Coward, and Quincy Jones's brassy score give it a swagger few caper films have matched.

The same reviewers have always noted, with equal consistency, that the plot is held together by cheek rather than logic. Characterization is thin — the supporting crew amounts to sketches, the middle stretches sag, and the script visibly prefers gadgets and gags to people. The film's era-bound attitudes have aged the least gracefully: its broad, leering sexism (Benny Hill's professor chief among the offenders) reads as dated rather than funny to many modern viewers, and even admirers split on the soundtrack, which is as often criticized for noise as praised for its energy.

Disagreement splits most cleanly along vintage lines: contemporaries tended to file it as a lightweight trifle, while retrospectives canonize it as a snapshot of late-Sixties Britain — stylish, cheeky, class-conscious and proud of it. What no one disputes is the finale, one of cinema's most famous unresolved cliffhangers, an image built on the film's running joke about British pluck that has resonated through the culture for five decades. That ending was written as a setup for a sequel that never came, which has only deepened the film's legend. Its place in the British film canon is secure — it appears on the BFI's official Top 100 British Films list and is repeatedly described as one of the greatest British films ever made, even while its craft is acknowledged as uneven.