Popular Culture
French authors René-Louis Maurice and Jean-Claude Simoën wrote the book Cinq Milliards au bout de l'égout (1977) about Spaggiari's bank heist in Nice. Their work was translated in 1978 by the British author Ken Follett as The Heist of the Century (also published as The Gentleman of 16 July and Under the Streets of Nice). To the outrage of Ken Follett some publishers brought it out as a new Ken Follett book, while it was in fact little more than a rushed through translation.
Three movies were produced which were also based on the Nice bank robbery:
- Les égouts du paradis, a French movie directed by José Giovanni (1979).
- The Great Riviera Bank Robbery (also known Dirty Money and Sewers of Gold), a British movie directed by Francis Megahy (1979).
- Sans arme, ni haine, ni violence, a French movie directed by Jean-Paul Rouve (2008)
The Canadian television series Masterminds created an episode reenacting the story of the robbery. A Czech movie Prachy dělaj člověka contains a reference to the heist, suggesting that one of the characters participated in it.
Read more about this topic: Albert Spaggiari
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)