Friday, September 3, 2021

The Italian Job (1969)

IMDb plot summary: Comic caper movie about a plan to steal a gold shipment from the streets of Turin by creating a traffic jam.
Directed by Peter Collinson. Starring Michael Caine, Noel Coward, Benny Hill, and Raf Vallone.

The humor in this is its strongest feature. The chaos of all the moving pieces of the heist is always just moments away from being a zany cartoon, and that keeps it enjoyable throughout most of it. It's interesting to note the pieces of this that have entered the zeitgeist -- I didn't realize until the actual moment it was said that this is the movie that "you're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" came from. Given the somewhat madcap nature of the film, I was also interested to see how it would end, and it did not disappoint. I wouldn't have predicted that ending, but it's absolutely perfect and fits so well tonally with the rest of it. In fact, I like the ending so much that I'd say that pushes it up a couple notches from what would have otherwise been an entertaining but forgettable crime comedy. This is pretty solid and worth a watch, especially if this is anywhere near your genre.

How it entered my Flickchart:
The Italian Job > Frank
The Italian Job < Kuroneko
The Italian Job < Fantasia 2000
The Italian Job < Ice Age
The Italian Job > Drunken Master
The Italian Job > The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Italian Job > Total Recall
The Italian Job < Star Trek: Generations
The Italian Job > Tangled
The Italian Job < 101 Dalmatians (1961)
The Italian Job > Les Miserables (1935)
Final spot: #1515 out of 3423, or 56%.

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