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Remember when the Coen brothers opened Fargo with the legend “This is a true story” and it turned out to be fiction? Roger Donaldson’s new heist thriller The Bank Job seems to operate on the reverse principle. A press release says it was “inspired by” the 1971 robbery of a London bank, suggesting a certain amount of fiction. But a full year ago the UK Observer reported that screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais drew on a “deep throat” informer familiar with the hushed-up case to “incriminate high-ranking police officers, the secret service, politicians, and a prominent member of the Royal Family.”
The movie opened in the UK last week and hasn’t forced the royal family to abdicate. But having turned the story into an entertainment instead of a muckraking documentary, the writers will probably get a lot more mileage out of the material and face a lot less scrutiny. Another story, in the Daily Mail, revisits Princess Margaret’s wild social life; oddly, it states that Margaret is never named in the movie, though the print I saw has heist meister Jason Statham gaping at the photos and exclaiming “That’s Princess Margaret!” Could there be two different cuts of the movie, one for the U.S. and another the UK?
