Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job is a freewheeling, completely unpretentious chase comedy about a gang of British hoods who plan to steal four million dollars in gold from the Italian mafia. Many of the subtle jabs at British patriotism and isolationist attitudes toward the rest of Europe don’t really become apparent until well after its open ending, which literally has the Brits teetering between remaining (and dying) in Europe and fleeing the continent. (The exception to the film’s subtext, of course, is Noël Coward’s marvelously crusty performance as Brit mob boss Mr. Bridger, who espouses the supremacy of the Queen even as he is being held in a definitively laissez faire white-collar prison cell.) Michael Caine plays another good-humored swinger here, and one imagines that the freaky orgies that are obliquely suggested in the first few minutes of The Italian Job probably went directly into Mike Myers’s borrowed-shtick notebook. Collinson seems to relish grouping every detail of the film into threes: secretaries, getaway cars, sexual escapades. He also keeps the logistics of the big heist that makes up the last third of The Italian Job exciting and different. This wasn’t the first movie to take car chases into strange and new environments, but it remains among the more creative ones (the culminating sewer chase is actually quite visceral). The whole goofy package gets its bow from Benny Hill, who goes after “big women” so he can grab a handful of their chunky trunks.
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