Team FC
John Huston introduced the world to Marilyn Monroe through this gritty film noir piece featuring Sterling Hayden in the lead role. The film follows Hayden's character and his tryst with the heist from beginning to end, whilst also taking on the city as a character.
The heist is the centrepiece in Jules Dassin's film, with no dialogue, no score - just a piece-by-piece recreation of a jewellery theft in Paris' Rue de la Paix. The film won the blacklisted Dassin a Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Jean-Pierre Melville returned to crime noir three years after Le Samouraï (1967), this time tackling a robbery engineered by the oddest of odd teams: a convict who has been released on grounds of good behaviour, a fugitive, and an alcoholic ex-policeman.
Quentin Tarantino burst on to the scene with a multi-starrer heist film that didn't show the heist. Instead, Tarantino focused his narrative on the players before and after the incident, deriving terrific drama from the situation.
Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino came face-to-face for the first time on film in Michael Mann's intense crime drama whose gunfights were as loud as its heists were methodical, revealing a preparedness not often credited to crooks looking for the next payday.
Danny Ocean walks out of prison and in to a casino, intent on robbing the owner blind. That is the idea of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, in a nutshell. Remade from a 60s classic, the film boasted a glittering star cast of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Andy Garcia, and Julia Roberts, and also spawned two sequels and a spinoff!
Ben Affleck trained his camera on himself for his second feature, and cast Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Rebecca Hall, and Jon Hamm alongside himself in this violent robbery film set in Charlestown, Boston.
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