Reviews

Although Robbery belongs to one of my favourite British film genres, i.e. that of the sordid, sleazy gangster movie, I can't really like it. Compared to pictures such as The Good Die Young (1954), Villain (1971), The Long Good Friday (1980), Get Carter! (1971) and The Frightened City (1961), it lacks any psychological interest, and has no characters in whom one can invest even the slightest sympathy.

Another thing that doesn't help is that the leading man is the snake-eyed Stanley Baker, whose talents didn't include charm or likability. But perhaps the nastiest thing about Robbery is that it's based upon the so-called "Great" British Train Robbery of 1963, in which the train driver was very badly beaten up, which may well have contributed to his premature death a few years later. The film gives his fictional character no sympathy at all.

Moral considerations apart, Robbery is also shot in the ugliest, flattest colour I've ever seen in a modern-era film, and it feels like the longest 110-minute film ever made. I give it 6/10 for historical interest only.

It may interest some readers to know that this story of a parent/child identity swap originates with the British comic author F Anstey's novel Vice Versa, published in 1882, and there have been at least 10 film and TV versions of it (probably more), going back as far as 1916, under various titles. It's a pretty decent time-passer for a Sunday afternoon, and suitable for all the family to watch together, but I think Jodie Foster's role was slightly too sexualised. To be fair, back in 1976 we weren't quite as sensitive to that kind of thing as we are today. For example, Foster's 1978 film Pretty Baby would, quite rightly, never get a release today. However, Freaky Friday is generally good, old-fashioned family fare.

A Few Good Men is unusually morally complicated for a military drama, because it doesn't make the usual choices for you. While the act that drives the plot - the unintentional killing of an inadequate US Marine by two of his comrades, who intended only to discipline him roughly for informing on another comrade's misconduct - is obviously wrong, we are clearly shown that the soldiers on trial, underprivileged members of the American working class, are decent and honourable men.

Defending his subordinates against US Navy lawyers Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) is a macho monster whose religion is the Marines' book of rules (and some rules of his own), but his business in life at Guantamano is, essentially, the protection of other people's lives. By the superbly dramatic end of the film, we're really not sure whether he's the hero or the villain.

Like it or not, Western liberals and lefties like myself have to recognise that all our rights and freedoms depend on people who volunteer to put themselves in the way of harm, even if we don't always agree with the causes and campaigns that they're ordered to serve in. To deny that would put you in the position of those who, in the words of Rudyard Kipling's poem, enjoy "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep".

Well, that's how I feel about this highly enjoyable and superbly scripted piece of film entertainment. Put it this way: whom would you rather have defending your home and family - the US Marines, or brigades of arts and humanities graduates such as myself? Before I go, though, let me point out an enormous hole in the plot: in real life, an officer in Colonel Jessup's position would have ordered the victim, Santiago, to be discharged from the services as unfit for duty long before the story even got started. The Marines don't want 4Fs, do they? But then there wouldn't have been a film ...