When a film begins by telling you how securely some valuable object is safeguarded, you can be sure that object will be stolen before the final credits roll. This is a dramatic principle as time-honored as Chekhov’s gun, and its unselfconscious employment in Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery is emblematic of how the film works as a whole: it does exactly what you expect it to do, but does it so well, and with such great enthusiasm, that you’re inclined to forgive its obviousness.
The Great Train Robbery is a caper film based on a novel by Crichton, which is in turn based on a real event: The Great Gold Robbery of 1855, in which 3 boxes of gold were stolen from a moving train headed from London to Paris. In the film, the gold is headed to Crimea to pay British troops fighting the Russians and is held in two safes secured by locks requiring four separate keys. Those keys are kept in three different locations: two in the railway offices, one held by bank manager Henry Fowler (Malcolm Terris) and one held by bank president Edgar Trent (Alan Webb).
Edward Pierce (Sean Connery), a thief who passes as a member of the British upper crust, enlists the help of the safecracker Robert Agar (Donald Sutherland), his mistress Miriam (Lesley-Anne Down), and his chauffeur Barlow (George Downing) to steal the gold. To keep their plot secret as long as possible, Pierce’s crew don’t steal the keys but make wax impressions of them. Sexual hijinks play a key role in gaining access to Fowler and Trent’s keys (in a much more family-friendly way than is the case in Crichton’s novel) while a cat burglar, Clean Willy (Wayne Sleep), is enlisted to get impressions of the keys stored in the railway offices.
The Great Train Robbery is full of set pieces alluding to different aspects of Victorian culture—public executions, the “sport” of ratting, the elaborate precautions taken to diminish the probability of burying someone alive. Everything’s very glossy and cleaned up, of course, and potentially serious material is played for laughs, but that’s exactly what you expect in a film that’s essentially cinematic comfort food to be consumed and enjoyed without reflection. It’s well-made and incorporates several impressive action sequences, including one that has Pierce crawling atop a moving train (Connery did the stunt himself) and another that has Clean Willy escaping from Newgate Prison (performed by Sleep himself).
There’s nothing to challenge the viewer or make anyone think about heavy topics like social justice in The Great Train Robbery, just a fast-moving story with lots of action, great production values, an appropriate score by Jerry Goldsmith, and an able acting crew. There’s also some nice location work—most of the film was shot in Ireland, with locations like Trinity College and Dublin’s Heuston Station making star appearances.
The Great Train Robbery is a period piece in the obvious sense of portraying a different historical time than the one in which it was made, but it also qualifies as a textbook example of a particular approach to filmmaking that feels old-fashioned even for 1978. Crichton’s film seems to exist in a parallel cinematic universe in which films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) simply did not exist, and in which big-budget, all-star productions like Hello, Dolly! (1969) were hits rather than flops. And yet it works well enough on its own terms (watching it is a bit like watching Carol Burnett reruns with your parents, but with a big budget and lots of stunts) and manages to avoid the inert, lacquered feel of contemporary glossy productions like Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby (1974). | Sarah Boslaugh
The Great Train Robbery is distributed on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. The disc includes a commentary track by Crichton, a collection of TV spots, and the trailers for this and several other films.
