It’s no wonder the concept has proven so enduring: somewhere deep down, everyone romanticises the concept of living outside the law, and even if we find the perpetrators despicable, there’s a visceral rush to watching criminality in action.
Well over a century later, filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Stanley Kubrick to Kathryn Bigelow had taken the same basic premise and used it to create some of the most memorable moments in cinema, whether it’s Rififi ’s silent hit on a Parisian jeweller or the breathless shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat. In truth, though, the subgenre predates the many umbrellas it exists under: movies had barely been invented when Edwin S Porter dropped The Great Train Robbery, depicting a group of bandits holding up an American locomotive in the Old West. At the intersection of crime drama, action flick and psychological thriller lies the heist movie.
