Plot
A criminal gang uses a gas canister to knock out the occupant of a car and then bundle him into a stolen ambulance. There they cut free a briefcase full of jewelry. Shortly after, when changing vehicles, the criminals are spotted by the police and a high-speed chase develops with the criminals getting away.
Using the money from this job, crime boss Paul Clifton (Stanley Baker) builds up a team to hit a Royal Mail train coming south from Glasgow. A meticulous plan is put in place, but there are obstacles: the driver of the getaway car identified in an identity parade and arrested (but refuses to name accomplices to police); gang member Robinson (Frank Finlay) has to be broken out of prison; and Inspector George Langdon (James Booth) is hot on the trail of the jewel robbers, and finds out through informers about plans for an even bigger heist.
The gang gathers to do the job and change the signals to stop the train and escape with the cash. In the morning Langley and the police investigate the crime scene and explore possible local hide-outs, including a disused airbase where the robbers are hiding in the basement, but are not found.
The cash is divided up and the getaway vehicles hidden at a scrapyard. Members wait in turn to take their share to Switzerland. However, the paid-off scrapyard man is arrested at an airport and found with banknotes from the raid and confesses. Police then arrest some of gang as they retrieve cars at the scrapyard. This leads the police back to the airfield where they arrest further gang members.
However, leader Paul Clifton evades capture and places his cut of the money on a private plane and is last seen disembarking at New York with a different identity.
Read more about this topic: Robbery (1967 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)