Blow the Bloody Doors, Only the Bloody Doors
By Jason McBride
May 02, 2009
The greatest piece of trivia about “The Italian Job” (which was remade in 2003) is that film crew engineered a real traffic jam during the day in downtown Turin. They recruited motorists to sabotage the flow of traffic and set up cars to break down at multiple points at one of the city’s busiest intersections. In the story, once the heist is made, the chaos escalates, as the thieves pack the gold into three Minis, which proceed to drive down the steps of palaces and monuments, through sewer passages and up a ramp onto the roof of a massive auditorium-like structure.
It’s got that classic sixties zaniness, and it couldn’t have happened without a madman at the helm. Director Peter Collinson was known for his mercurial, larger-than-life personality. In a documentary interview, his wife recalled how the young director drove his Rolls Royce through her front window as a joke.
Like many modern day rogues, Collinson died young – at 40, of lung cancer – with a small body of work. Few of his 17 films are household names, but “The Italian Job” has a cult following in Britain, and in a 2005 poll by a British music and movie store chain, it was voted the number one British film of all time. The film probably owes this honor to one of those annoyingly over-quoted lines, in this case, a scene where the gang’s demolition guy tests some explosives on an old truck. The blast tears the vehicles to shreds, and Caine shouts, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”
It was the “hot mess” of its day.
Even though you can go to Britain and find better wit under a rock, the lighthearted mood is novel in itself, being a caper film. In movies like “Heat” and “Ocean’s 11,” competence and professionalism come before everything else. But in “The Italian Job,” Croker is less of leader and more of a babysitter. At one point during the heist, he has to tell his bickering crew to shut up. In fact, most of the actors cast for the roles of Croker’s gang had comedy backgrounds. Professor Peach, who slobbers over fat women, is played by Benny Hill, who took his lecherous shtick and turned it into an international success with his eponymous vaudevillian TV show.
Years later, screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin explained he had intended the film to be more “straight” than it turned out to be. He hadn’t set out to write a comedy.
In fact, Hill’s character was originally intended to be a compulsive toy train collector, not a dirty old man.
--
More information about “The Italian Job” on IMDb.
