The Great Train Robbery

The First Great Train Robbery is a first rate, seldom seen, crime thriller with Sean Connery, Lesley Ann Downes (who impresses in corsets) and Donald Sutherland who execute an audacious train heist...in England 1855 (with a little help from Wayne Sleep). Written with forensic prescison by Micheal Crichton, it staggers me that Sean Connery could have been considered box office poison with a project of this calibre.

Makes Buster look turgid - heartily recommended.

'The First Great Train Robbery' is about a quite impossible mission in Victorian underworld... It is about 25,000 pounds in gold bars placed in strongboxes and taken by armed security guards to the railway station...

'The First Great Train Robbery' is about the fastest pickpocket you'll ever see, a suave and daring gentleman who never tells the truth… It is also about a bunch crooks that can steal your heart with the company of a fascinating disguised mistress who suspects that her father breaks his own regulation for each morning of the shipments...

'The First Great Train Robbery' chronicles the grandeur and hypocrisy at all levels of England during the Victorian Era, and proves that the cleverness and prowess of a criminal mastermind is elevated to heroic status...

With excellent photography of Ireland beautiful countryside, and great music score by Jerry Goldsmith, plus the costumes and sets, Michael Crichton's movie gives train heist's fans the pleasure to enjoy a very entertaining period thriller

The year is 1855. The place is England. A man going by the name of Edward Pierce (Sean Connery) has his eyes on a near impossible heist. He wants to steal the Crimean gold that goes by railway from one part of England to another. Besides the fact it's guarded at the time of transit, the safe requires four separate keys that are in three separate locations. Oh yeah, and no one has ever robbed a moving locomotive before. I suppose he could Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid it and force the train to stop, then blow open the safe. But this is England and no such brutish tactics will be used. This will take stealth, guile, and intelligence. In other words, it was a sophisticated operation.

This was a superb heist movie. It was clever, it was cohesive, and it was funny. I liked the pairing of Connery and Donald Sutherland. Heist movies always have to be clever and cutting edge because the mark is always super-secure and nearly impossible to breach. What sets one heist movie apart from the other is the story within and the characters. This story was straight forward and simple. There were no red herrings, no sappy side stories, and no deux ex-machinas. And the characters were very enjoyable.

This Michael Crichton film was simply excellent.

This one is fun to watch as the thieves work an intricate plan to rob a train.

The performances are terrific, but the director and the late great Geoffrey Unsworth's delightful photography bring the Victorian Era back to life. The detail is wonderful in all the sets and surroundings.

The plot is very simple, the film is focused and I found myself rooting for the thieves!

I was very surprised when I saw that "The First Great Train Robbery" was written and directed by Michael Crichton. This is because Crichton is normally associated with sci-fi and fantasy, such as "The Andromeda Strain", "Coma", "Westworld" and "Jurassic Park". But apparently in 1975, Crichton wrote a book about this actual robbery in 1855...though the film ended up being highly fictionalized, particularly the ending.

The first two-thirds of the film is very slow and meticulous. I didn't mind this too much, though I am sure this will lose a lot of viewers. My suggestion is bear with it. First, it is well crafted. Second, the look of VIctorian London is wonderful....so take time to enjoy what you are seeing. The final portion is much more exciting and concerns the robbery itself. It's amazing to see Sean Connery doing his own stunts* and the footage is incredible...and it must have been incredible to see on the big screen.

Overall, a slow and deliberate movie that is great provided you don't mind the pace or that too much of the story is fictionalized in order to make the story more cinematic. The ending, in particular, is pure fiction and the real case, though interesting, is much different.

I do have two further comments. First, the sound on this DVD was abominable...with music that is so much louder than the dialog. You really do need the closed captions in order to watch the film....it's that bad. Second, one mistake I noticed is that the 'gold' in the film was ridiculously lightweight...and seeing Connery and Sutherland EASILY tossing the bags of gold off the train (as if they were filled with newspapers or scones) was silly.

*I know that they touted how Sean Connery did the insane stunt of climbing across the moving train and he clearly did. But in a few scenes, despite the hype, I do strongly suspect that a stuntman was occasionally used...such as when Connery's character is hanging off the sides of the moving train.