Cinema: English Muffing

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Robbery. A team of German film makers recently stole a home-grown English property: The Great British Train Robbery (TIME, April 21), a plausibly clever re-creation of the 1963 heist of £2,631,784 from a Royal Mail train. In Robbery, the Limeys have tried to recapture the story for their own, using the talents of Stanley Baker, Joanna Pettet and a regiment of able character actors, and the cinema verite style of Director Peter Yates. The result, unfortunately, is a hot property gone tepid with time.

Once again the scenario follows the gang of small-time thieves breezily intent on bringing off the biggest caper of them all. "Money breeds money," theorizes one. Replies his colleague: "Mine must be on the Pill." Audaciously, they work out their gentlemanly battle plans, forsaking guns—it's hard-cheese for the armed robber who gets caught—recruiting specialists in such arcane subjects as railroad engineering and advanced electronics. After the loot is lifted, the film collapses into a text-bookish story of police procedure, as Scotland Yard tries to run the thieves to earth.

Star and Co-Producer Stanley Baker, who saunters through the film as the master criminal replete with belted trench coat and salt-and-pepper mustache, is a man both obviously enamored of his project and absolutely blind to the faults of the beloved. With tedious attention to detail, Robbery examines every minor maneuver of the criminals, watches a handcuff screw turn 17 times before it is opened, sees every last bag of loot passed from hand to hand into waiting trucks. And after playing it taut upper lip until the last moment, the film goes soft when all but one of the gang are captured. Fleeing England, Baker sends Pettet a note via canine messenger. Its message: "Goodbye." The final footage shows him walking up the New York docks under the superimposed title: THE ? END. A bit precious, since the Germans got there in THE ? BEGINNING.