Cinema: German Heist

The Great British Train Robbery is neither great nor British. It is, however, a robbery—by the Germans, of an idea that could have made an excellent picture. The film dramatizes the 1963 hold up of a Royal Mail 'train from which a gang of crooks heisted a world-record $7,000,000, most of it still unrecovered.

At least three different groups of British moviemakers—one of them including Richard Burton—have shown some interest in a film about the truelife Lavender Hill Mob. What has held up production is worry over the country's stringent libel laws, and a ruling by Britain's film censorship board that such a movie might prejudice the still incomplete case. Meanwhile, German Producer Egon Monk has stolen the story from them. He shot 80% of the movie in England, changing names but otherwise retelling the robbery in straightforward documentary style.

In scene after scene, the film accurately portrays the major sequences of the crime: the initial holdup at London airport to bankroll the big caper; the carefully planned mail call in which not a pound note was overlooked, and the only injury was suffered by a locomotive engineer who proved unexpectedly belligerent; the foolish, post-heist swaggering of the thieves; the burial of the loot in such out-of-the-way places as a church graveyard; Scotland Yard's massive descent upon the scent. At film's end, a voice ominously booms the warning that some of the robbers are still at large, plotting to spring their jailed associates.

If, by chance, the train robbers see their fictionalized selves in Robbery, they will doubtless be appalled by the Teutonic treatment of their dazzling crime, portrayed by an all-German cast mouthing dubbed dialogue. They may also be amused that the British have let yet another valuable property fall into the wrong hands—and foreign ones at that.