Films by season & age - Bank Jobs (Ages 15-18)

Seasons are a great way to explore different ideas through watching a group of films. Why not try watching all the films in a season and make some time for discussion. Topics and discussion points are included.

Few ideas have provided the movies with quite as much inspiration as that of the heist – tales of audacious robberies usually set in a bank vault, with the thieves being led by a “master criminal” who just needs to carry out “one last job” before heading into retirement. Somehow, the scenario has become the movie equivalent of a much-loved old jazz tune – where successive generations play the same basic melody, but the magic lies in the different way they hit the notes. That’s why this FilmClub season devoted to the heist can cover almost 60 years’ worth of great movies – going all the way back to 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle. We’ve pulled together heist movies that are really comedies, and others that are powerfully dramatic; tales of British bank jobs, French safe-crackers and suave customers getting the upper hand over Vegas casinos. Of course, in real life, there’s nothing funny or admirable about this kind of crime. But then, part of the magic of the movies is that they spirit us away from real life...

SUGGESTED PAIR

In such a hard-edged genre, Britain has produced two of the most likeably light-hearted heist movies ever made – The Lavender Hill Mob and The Italian Job. For some film-makers, the practical details of a heist are so fascinating they almost become the whole point of the story – you can see this approach at work in fantastic films as otherwise diverse as the 1950s French masterpiece Rififi, and American director Spike

Lee’s recent hit Inside Man.