10 great British heist films

A Saturday shift at a suburban English bank draws to a close. The bank manager and cashier are surprised by robbers, their features contorted and smeared by tights pulled over their heads. They break into the strongroom, nicking the loot and locking the two bystanders inside. The bank won’t reopen until Tuesday, but there’s only 12 hours of air inside the resealed strongroom. Will the robbers risk a murder charge? Will the police discover the robbery in time?

With tremendous economy and surety, Strongroom (1962) introduces a premise and counts down to a single, absolute question: can the occupants of the strongroom escape? Appraised by film giants such as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright, director Vernon Sewell’s lean, mean heist film is everything you want a British crime ‘B’ picture to be: a nerve-wracking exercise in surprise and dread, a colourful snapshot of the British class system, and a film packed with as much detail of the robbery’s uncontrollable fallout as the heist itself.

Heist films come in dramatically distinct stages – the diligent preparation, the explosive robbery, the paranoid chaos of the aftermath – and British filmmakers have been proving the elasticity of the heist formula alongside their Hollywood peers for decades, with subversive genre parodies sitting alongside straight-faced noirs and period films throwing back to a more ‘classic’ period of crime adventure stories. 

If you want to chart the violent evolution of hard-edge Brit crooks risking their lives for a payday, we’ve assembled a crack team of British heist films to mark Strongroom’s nationwide rerelease and upcoming Blu-ray.

Director: Charles Crichton

Like many of the criminal masterminds from this list, Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is an inside man jaded by a boring life. Equally capable of being canny and bumbling (the best type of Ealing comedy protagonist), he works for the Bank of England and is often in close proximity to gold bullion during deliveries, so he decides to nick the lot. His partner-in-crime is eccentric neighbour and foundry operator Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), who helps cast the stolen, melted gold into Eiffel Tower replicas. 

It’s after the robbery is wrapped up that director Charles Crichton and screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke (both Ealing regulars) push the material to its full caper potential. The several extended, panicked set pieces of Holland and Pendlebury scrambling to avoid incrimination and, inevitably, spoiling the chances of a clean getaway are as giddy and hectic as heist movies get.

Director: Basil Dearden

Coursing throughout Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen is an anxiety that Britain’s army officer class lacks a worthy purpose or function in the post-war era. It’s an anxiety that is deflected and rejected by Lieutenant Colonel Norman Hyde (Jack Hawkins), who assembles a gang of disgraced, desperate former soldiers to rob the Bank of England. 

Dearden’s dry, catty heist film transposes the airtight military hierarchy to a band of criminals defined by their defiance or ostracisation, and the tension between deference and arrogance lingers in scenes thanks to memorable performances from, among others, Roger Livesey, Richard Attenborough and Kieron Moore. Like multiple films on this list, the post-heist portion of the film introduces a detective on the robbers’ heels, but screenwriter (and also co-star) Bryan Forbes only drops the stock character in the final few minutes, keeping us firmly in the officers’ single-minded perspective until their confidence shatters.

Director: Sidney Hayers

Anglo-Amalgamated boasted a variety of low-budget productions during its mid-century heyday: a dozen Carry On films, a slew of ‘B’ crime, noir and sci-fi pictures, and a distribution arrangement with Roger Corman stable American International Pictures (later on, they even distributed Ken Loach’s 1967 debut feature, Poor Cow). Payroll is a noir-tinged highlight in the company’s history, an assured and impactful heist film that elevates its simple payroll heist with a multi-perspective structure and surprising outcomes for its roster of characters. It’s a film that hammers home the web of miserable violence that stretches from one eventful heist. 

The mix of pathetic and domineering characters and the sudden, calamitous mistakes that spin them into chaos recall Stanley Kubrick’s American heist film The Killing (1956). Payroll raises the pressure and paranoia until the most fragile players have fallen away and the most determined survivors – namely Billie Whitelaw as a widow who blackmails and hunts the robbers – violently collide.

Director: Vernon Sewell 

An incredibly taut ‘B’ picture, Strongroom kicks off with a well-prepared but costly strongroom heist that sees a bank manager and cashier tied up and hurtling towards death by suffocation. Over the following hour, director Vernon Sewell cuts between three parallel storylines: the trio of criminals trying to undo their murderous act without alerting authorities; the police sergeant dutifully investigating the strongroom key found in a morgue; the panicked, trapped bank employees working out how much time – and air – remains. 

Each narrative strand unfolds with a different degree of urgency but, by switching between them, they’re united by a gripping ticking-clock tension that deepens with every obstacle and distraction. The enduring image of the film is that of the helpless employees, deteriorating on the strongroom floor, their professional distinctions eroded in the airless space, confronting the senselessness of their fate.

Director: Peter Yates

A fictionalised dramatisation of the 1963 Great Train Robbery, this is the first of two films on this list produced by Stanley Baker’s short-lived Oakhurst Productions (who also produced the beloved 1969 caper The Italian Job). Robbery is meticulous and exact, giving an edge of realism to a sensational, well-publicised case. Baker stars as Paul Clifton – based on the robbery’s real mastermind Bruce Reynolds, who had not been caught by the time of the film’s release – and plays the ringleader with a steely-faced discipline and sharpness that protects him as his co-conspirators scramble for safety. 

Robbery splits its attention between the robbers and the detectives who suspect something big is afoot. The high point is an exquisite car chase through central London that opens the film, which was impressive enough to get Yates hired by Steve McQueen for Bullitt (1968).

Director: Peter Hall

A major figure in British theatre, Peter Hall dipped into genre material for this dry, often titillating class comedy. It centres on a clean-cut bank employee Mr Graham (Stanley Baker) who is tired of his unsatisfying life and desires to rob the emergency cash reserve in his office, with the help of an adulterous and broke aristocratic couple, Lord and Lady Dorset (David Warner and Ursula Andress). 

Baker has a rigid, inflexible coolness and, of all the films on this list, Perfect Friday is most interested in the tedium of long-term employment triggering a criminal turn. Much of the film’s comedy focuses on Dorset being micro-managed (and also cuckolded) by an ordinary member of the bourgeoisie, but once we turn to the finely detailed long con at the centre of the heist, the synergy required of the squabbling trio is so satisfying that you second guess their allegiances until the punchline of the final moments.

Director: Michael Crichton

Far more of a winking adventure film than the noirs and B-movies elsewhere on this list, this light-hearted romp argues that the lack of historical precedent for a crime was too tempting for an imaginative criminal to pass up. Michael Crichton adapted his own novel based on the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, where thousands of pounds worth of gold was stolen from a train travelling from London Bridge to Folkestone. 

Crichton’s film, starring Sean Connery as the suave gentleman mastermind and Donald Sutherland as his mad-haired pickpocket partner, indulges in a string of cons and thefts building up to the climactic train job, which lets the audience luxuriate in the breezy, playful tone and period setting. Crichton aims for pleasant, romantic escapism: sparky characters, bawdy humour and a healthy satirical edge that befits Connery’s smug leading-man charm. Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down play accomplices amusingly forced to fulfil the less glamorous and daring duties of his elaborate plan.

Director: Richard Loncraine

Founded by George Harrison and Denis O’Brien to hastily fund Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), HandMade Films continued producing edgy comedies like Withnail & I (1987) and How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989). But their run of scuzzy London crime films in the 1980s set the tone that filmmakers have been trying to meet ever since. Less adored than The Long Good Friday (1980) and Mona Lisa (1986) is the nasty, razor-sharp Bellman & True, which follows Bernard Hill as a computer expert strong-armed into robbing a bank by gangsters who kidnap his son. 

Taking advantage of London’s dingy streets, suburbs and motorways, and aided by Hill’s perpetually tense performance, Bellman & True launches straight from an ingenious technical heist into an extended, gnarly fallout on the Kentish coast. The gangsters’ casual violence and the camera’s focus on spilt blood and viscera makes Bellman & True feel like a mean-spirited and intense aesthetic upgrade to the British heist picture.

Director: Antonia Bird

A British heist film for a country gripped by neoliberalism: Antonia Bird’s film about a heist gone wrong focuses on Ray (Robert Carlyle), a former socialist who abandoned leftist organising for a criminal life. After a battering-ram-aided robbery reaps far less money than initially planned, the crew (played by Ray Winstone, Phil Davis and Steven Waddington) find their loot stolen and collapse into viscous paranoia. 

Face uses its genre archetypes to spell out a clear and timely thesis: abandoning community and principles for ruthless self-betterment makes you isolated and disposable. Ray is a hard man and a confident crook but ultimately just another independent contractor in competition with his peers, scrambling for safety nets he thought he didn’t need. Directed with a modern, low-budget verve, Face’s geezer gangster hallmarks feel especially miserable here. There is none of Guy Ritchie’s plucky Cockney luck, just a dead-end road.

Director: Roger Donaldson

We waited until the end to drop a Jason Statham film, one that came 10 years after Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) helped propel the British actor to action stardom. Roger Donaldson directed this thriller based on a 1971 burglary of safety deposit boxes from the Baker Street branch of Lloyds Bank, shooting the period heist on high-definition digital cameras that lends a frenetic, ugly edge to the scandal-driven crime story. 

The historical context that the robbery stumbles upon is fiendishly provocative, involving a purge of corrupt police officers and a Black militant gangster named Michael X who has dirt on the royal family – namely compromising photos of Princess Margaret. These lurid complications heighten the stakes for head robber Terry Leather (Statham) well past the usual intensity of paranoia typical of a heist film. The Bank Job is a fittingly ugly escalation of the grisly, cynical gangster tropes that had pervaded the genre for several decades.