Stanley Baker, who later became Sir Stanley before his untimely death from cancer in the mid-1970s, was a kind of Welsh prototype for Sean Connery in the 1950s/early 1960s. He was also an habitual associate and genuine friend of professional villains, including London godfather Billy Hill, Albert Dimes (whose defence he contributed to during a 1955 razor slashing trial), Eddie Richardson and Mad Frankie Fraser. Baker managed an amateur football team that played for childrens charities, called the Soho Rangers, whose players included Fraser, Dimes and prison escapist Alfie Hinds. Baker received similar tutoring to that given by Dimes on The Criminal for his role in 1967s Robbery, an almost forgotten piece of Brit-pop cinema that wore its inspiration on its sleeve. Its publicity poster tagline Who says crime doesnt pay? Three million pounds says it does! made a direct allusion to the Great Train Robbery take of 1963. The biggest robbery in British history up to that point, it was masterminded by one of Bakers Marlborough pub drinking companions, Bruce Reynolds then still at liberty and on the run who clearly inspired the central character, Paul Clifton. Completely fictionalised but almost documentary in its presentation of a planned heist, Robbery stands up far better today in its evocation of the great underworld coup than the supposedly official train robbers story, sentimentally unconvincing 1980s hagiography Buster. As with the real heist, there was a large conglomerate firm of workers put together to perform with military-style precision, and an earlier robbery as a trial run for the big job; the films target was a night mail train headed for London; the location where it all comes off is a bridge crossing a country lane, like the real-life Bridego Bridge; as in the actuality, the robbers anticipated bagging anything up to £6 million, but were elated to take half that. Those retro points that date the film are, today, also part of its appeal: the clipped way in which the robbers speak, laced with cliché but stripped of profanity, redolent of a more censored age and the British stiff upper lip; the admonition not to use guns because the police dont carry them. But the action scenes were stark and economic, its car-chase sequence a trial run for director Peter Yates working with Steve McQueen on Bullitt the next year.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
