PETER Yates was a director with more than a few quality and very cult-friendly credits to his name.
A veteran of the 1960s TV spy genre with multiple credits on the likes of Danger Man and The Saint, his first feature film was the frothy Cliff Richard vehicle Summer Holiday in 1963. He would go on to helm the likes of Bullitt with Steve McQueen in 1968, the brilliant crime drama The Friends Of Eddie Coyle in 1973, The Deep in 1977 and the frankly nuts sci-f fantasy Krull in 1983 in a career that would roll on into the 1990s.
For me though, the film that best encapsulates the qualities of the man as a director is Robbery.
A very loose re-telling of the so-called Great Train Robbery that was released just a few short years after the actual event in 1967, it stars the inestimable Stanley Baker as a criminal mastermind who plots a massive train heist and employs the best of London’s underworld to help him pull it off.
Fast, gritty and tense from start to finish, it’s a remarkable piece of work that showcases beautifully the director’s natural ability for foot-to-the-floor action sequences.
The first 20 minutes, which cover a robbery and the resulting car chase through London between criminals and coppers, is a tyre-squealing, suspension-wrecking tour de force and feels like a dry run for the more acclaimed but ultimately less effective sequence Yates would deliver in Bullitt the following year.
One of the most thrilling and involving car chases ever committed to celluloid, it unfolds almost in real time with minimal dialogue and a naturalistic soundtrack of screeches and screams that place you right in the driver’s seat of a battered old Jag as it careens around city centre streets and sleepy housing estates.
It's such an effective section that the rest of the film, which mainly falls back into straight-forward police procedural mundanity until the actual train robbery is executed, inevitably struggles to match up to it - but by then you’re hooked and desperate to know how everything is going to pan out.
Baker is, as always, superb as the intense lynch pin of the gang who struggles to balance his life of crime with his crumbling domestic situation. He’s ably supported by a first-class cast of quality character actors including Barry Foster, Frank Finlay and George Sewell as the cold and cocky cons he recruits to do his bidding.
The good guys are led by an impressive James Booth, usually cast as a criminal in these kind of things, as a dogged cop who’s determined to catch the gang, but really it’s the perpetrators of the crime that we are encouraged to identify with here.
Stuffed with nostalgic images of a long gone London of fashion boutiques and empty waterfront vistas, this is a superior crime epic imbued with a growing tension that leaves you hanging on every minute detail of the robbers' intricate plan.
Hard, no-nonsense film-making from a director who really knew what he was doing.
