Thursday Minute
No. 125 | June 24, 2010

The Art of the Heist

Our theme this week
Heist films

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Thomas Crown Affair (1968, 1999)
Tuesday         —   Rififi (1955)
Wednesday    —   The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Sexy Beast (2001)

Sexy Beast generated plenty of buzz when it opened in the U.S. in mid-2001, much of it for Ben Kingsley’s performance as a psychopath who won’t take no for an answer.  I thought the hype was a little overblown, but it’s a good, solid, entertaining film.  It’s vulgar and violent, and has an odd comic edge.   I rather liked Ray Winstone’s character, and among heist scenes in movies, this one had a novel twist.

Winston plays Gal Dove, an ex-con living in Costa del Sol with his wife.  Dove is retired, and wants to be, but he gets an invitation from Don Logan (Kingsley) to join him for (yes, that staple of the genre) one last job—a bank heist in London.  Dove turns down Logan but Logan makes it clear that the only acceptable answer is yes.  That’s a problem.  Logan is so unhinged you can never be sure what he’ll do, and his volatile, profanity-spewing, likely-to-blow-at-any-moment temper makes him an utterly watchable villain.  While he’s in the movie, that is.  But he’s too nasty a creep to last.

Dove still has to deal with Logan’s boss and agrees to go through with the heist, a somewhat ludicrous job involving drilling into the bank vault from the neighboring Turkish bath.  It makes for some memorable images, and a good metaphor for Dove—who’s underwater and unable to breathe.  He needs the heist to go well, not for the riches, but just so he can be done with the life of crime.

Kingsley earned an Oscar nomination, one of his four, and got the lion’s share of the film’s famously juicy dialogue.  The script had an exceptional number of f-words and c-words; many hundreds, in fact, and someone apparently has counted them.  In that respect, Sexy Beast didn’t borrow from heist films of the ’50s, which broke new ground but still conformed to Production Code standards (at least in Hollywood).  Brits, however, seem to have a certain talent for that kind of language.

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Sexy Beast (2000)
Jonathan Glazer, director
Trailer

 

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Sexy Beast (2000)
Ben Kingsley

 

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Quote of Note
“I love you like a rose loves rainwater, like a leopard loves its partner in the jungle, like—I don’t know what like.”
—Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), Sexy Beast (2000)

…58…59…60.

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