When I think of old British steam trains, I usually picture them in miniature. I might recall Thomas the Tank Engine or the Kinks’s song “The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains”. I am less likely to imagine them as the setting for a daring gold heist, one in which Sean Connery is running across the top of the compartments and coming close to losing his head during an impossibly close pass under yet another bridge. And yet, that’s what we get in 1978’s The Great Train Robbery. And Connery was doing his own stunt work atop that train, all of which is very impressive.
His chief accomplice is Donald Sutherland. At this point, he is posing as dead inside the carriage where 25,000 pounds in gold is in two safes, each of which takes two keys. Once the coast is clear, he will take the four keys he has gone through great pains to forge, open the safes and replace the gold bars with lead ones, thus performing a kind of reverse alchemy.
Those keys were originally distributed between four highly reputable men, thus making it seemingly impossible to steal the loot. Never mind the fact nobody had yet successfully committed a heist from a moving train in the 1850’s in which this film is set. But the men are proven to be corruptible, with one’s weakness being gambling and another’s women.
It is that latter element of corruption which brings Lesley-Anne Down into the plot. She’s Connery’s lover, and he coerces her into posing as a prostitute in order to get the key Malcolm Terris always wears around his neck and under his clothes. In the brief period the key is set aside, Sutherland quickly makes wax impressions.
I love heist movies and especially enjoy the preparation leading up to the main event, so I enjoyed seeing the minutiae of this operation. The last two keys are in the office of a train station and getting access to those involves the superb cat burglary skills of Wayne Sleep. Like Connery, this actor did his own stunts, including an extremely impressive escape from prison, where he scales a 60-foot wall.
Some elements of the scheme don’t really go anywhere and are tangents I would have jettisoned, especially as the picture feels longer than its two-hour runtime. In particular, I wasn’t intrigued by Connery’s attempt to get the key of Alan Webb through the seduction of either his young wife (Pamela Salem) or his adult daughter (Gabrielle Lloyd).
I was especially bemused by a conversation between Connery and Salem that is filled with obnoxious sexual double-entendres as her breathily musing upon “Long bolts fitted tightly. It is exciting to see things come together.” I am definitely not above enjoying ribald humor, but this attempt at such rings false and feels incongruous in the film overall. Another similar moment which rang false near the end is a riff on the contemporary “Mile High Club” trope, wherein Terris find himself with Down on the train and he invites her to join the “50 MPH Club”.
Still, watching this is enjoyable enough, and a large part of that is how much fun the cast appears to be having. The general spirit of the enterprise has me overlooking Sutherland’s curious accent, which seems to wander all over the British Isles in the course of the runtime. Down is adequate in a role where there isn’t much to do. Strange, but I could picture Lesley Ann Warren in the same part, when the only thing these two actress have in common are similar first and middle names.
Really, the reason to see The Great Train Robbery is Connery. The impressive stunts are all the more so because he did them himself. And he seems to be having a genuinely good time in the type of role for which he’s best suited. One moment that stands out for me is when Down finally gets him to admit he never tells the truth and he smiles like a mischievous lad who has been caught out for some indiscretion and is amused to have been caught. That fleeting moment captures a certain element of the man which distinguishes him from other actors.
Dir: Michael Crichton
Starring Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, Lesley-Anne Down
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray