Which train robbery film?
Help, please:
I'm puzzled. I distinctly remember seeing a documentary-style film about the Ronnie Biggs train robbery, which I recall as being named 'The Great Train Robbery', and which I believe must have come out in the late 60s or early 70s.
None of the films that come back from a IMDB search for 'Great Train Robbery' really matches my memory of this film. This one is the closest, but from what I remember, 'my' film continued after the capture and sentencing, and included a few snippets showing Biggs and Flower's escape. It sounds as though 'Die Gentlemen bitten zur Kasse' doesn't include this.
An aspect of 'my' film that I liked at the time was that there was no heavy moral stance taken against the robbers, and that the daring and ingenuity of the robbery was granted some admiration. The coshing of the driver was shown to be a) not a particularly serious injury, and b) a mistake, and very disagreeable to the rest of the robbers, who gave the perpetrator a very hard time about it. The robbers weren't heroes, but nor were they the black-hearted evildoers that everyone
I don't remember how the police were portrayed, but I do remember that the villains of the piece were the public - only interested in the reward money - and the judiciary - handing down outrageously vicious punishments to these working-class people who had had the effrontery to steal the Crown's money: 30 years and more for an essentially victimless crime.
I was surprised to find that antipathy toward the robbers is still quite strong here in the UK: when Ronnie Biggs came back home, most people I talked to about it wanted him to rot. As far as I'm concerned, he's a man who took on the System and won, fair and square - and the system should take the defeat gracefully. It seems ugly and spiteful to seek to punish this frail old man now, just because he's finally too weak and poor to run anymore. That's just my opinion, which isn't relevant.
So, does anyone know which film this is?
CD