Dir. Michael Radford, UK/Luxembourg, 2007, 108 mins
Cast: Demi Moore, Michael Caine
Review by Carol Allen
This heist movie set in the financial world of London in 1960s has a neat plot, though its sense of period is sometimes a little unsteady – surprising in view of the fact that Radford is directing but maybe he got overruled at times by his American writer Edward Anderson and the film's producers. And in many ways, apart from a couple of scenes which bookend the tale, in which Moore as the heroine tells her story in the present to a confident, thrusting young female journalist, pointing up the difference between career women then and now, it would have worked just as well in the present day.
Moore plays Laura Quinn, an ambitious high flyer for the times, who is an executive with the world's leading diamond corporation but whose career has ground to a halt and hit the “glass ceiling” – not a phrase that was in use in 1960. It's also doubtful that any woman would have got as far up the career ladder as Laura has, but the fact that she's an American makes it a bit more feasible. She forms an alliance with the company's “janitor” - sorry, in England we call him a caretaker or a cleaner - an apparently gentle, self-effacing character, who is invisible to the powers that be, as he goes about his cleaning work at night gathering all sorts of interesting information. But Hobbs (Caine) nurses a grudge against the company and when he reveals to Laura that she's about to be sacked, he uses that to recruit her help in a scheme to steal what he tells her is a mere thermos flask of diamonds, which will hardly be missed but be enough to keep them both comfortable in retirement. It seems at first a fairly simple, albeit ingenious, heist plot and the actual robbery is a bit lacking in tension. It gets really interesting though, when we find that all the diamonds have gone, not just a thermos flask full and the story starts going in unexpected directions with some inventive twists, which confound your expectations.
The look of the film is pretty accurate in terms of capturing the fact that 1960 was really still the 50s as far as fashion and social attitudes were concerned, though the headquarters of the diamond firm looks very stark concrete and glass modern for the London of that time, when most city buildings were fashioned from stonework and mahogany. There are also some security cameras, which figure in the plot, which also seem somewhat premature but let's say for the sake of argument these were early prototypes!
Moore as Laura gets us rooting for her and is the sort of character with whom today's ambitious young women may well empathise. The role of Hobbs is so well inside Caine's wide range he could almost do it in his sleep and he makes the apparently cuddly cleaner, who turns out to be a wily old fox with a secret agenda, both likeable and believable. This is a movie where you're totally on the side of the thieves. There are some solid supporting performances from Joss Ackland as the hard-headed chairman of the company, Lambert Wilson intriguing and a bit different as the investigating detective, who is attracted to Laura and Derren Nesbitt as the insurance man, who doesn't want to pay out for the missing diamonds. The fact that they're dealing in a trade which ruthlessly exploits the Third World for the profit of the West is rather uncomfortably touched on from a 21st century point of view, just enough to make the diamond traders the villains.
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