Heist Film - History

History

Early examples of films which elaborately depict a heist are the three screen versions of the play Alias Jimmy Valentine, the first two made in the silent era (1915 and 1920). Throughout the 1930s, thievery and scams were present in such films as Raffles, Outside the Law, The Unholy Garden and Ninotchka. The classic film noir period of the 1940s and 1950s brought the genre to fame, by focusing more explicitly on the heists themselves, with such films as John Huston's Asphalt Jungle, Jules Dassin's Rififi, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur and Le Cercle Rouge, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing or Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street. Since that time caper movies have been shot in many variations, ranging from light-hearted folly of the 1960s classic like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with its cast of clowns led by Jimmy Durante and the British made Crooks and Coronets to darker, more challenging treatments introducing innovative ways of craftsmanship, such as Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs or Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Even to contemporary Hollywood, the genre still remains promising, as the remakes of Ocean's 11 (2001, as Ocean's Eleven) and The Italian Job (2003) show. Examples of the variety of directions the heist film can take would include the comedy heist film such as Topkapi, the western heist film such as The War Wagon, the war/heist film such as Kelly's Heroes, numerous spy movies and television programs which had heist-like plots, most notably Mission: Impossible and It Takes a Thief, and recently a sci-fi heist film combination with Robot and Frank.