Over the years there have been several English comedy-dramas about old people carrying out wacky heists, in a cynical play for the senior market – the so-called “silver dollar”.
I had my doubts about The Duke, until I saw that it was directed by the late, great Roger Michell – his last drama in fact - and it starred the always fascinating Jim Broadbent and Dame Helen Mirren.
The Duke stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren Photo: Supplied
The Duke is actually based on a famous, real-life case – the theft in 1961 of a recently-acquired portrait of England’s most famous soldier, the Duke of Wellington, from London’s National Gallery.
But of more interest was the mastermind behind the heist. Far from a Great Train Robber, Kempton Bunton – what a brilliantly Newcastle name! – was in fact an ordinary Daily Mirror reader, whose hobbies included writing unproduced plays for the BBC and getting up the nose of the Establishment.
The chief bee in Bunton’s bonnet is the BBC – in particular the TV license fee. He refuses to pay it, and he thinks television is a service that should be provided free to war widows and pensioners.
After weeks of publicity for the famous portrait of The Duke, Bunton sees the opportunity to put pressure on the Tories.
In this he’s offered little support from the rest of his family. His wife Dolly – Dame Helen is terrific as a Geordie char-woman - despairs of him.
The Duke is a completely successful revival of a genre Britain once made its own – the Forties and Fifties Ealing comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, but without the plot contrivances.
Everything in this film may be ridiculously unlikely, but it’s undoubtedly true.
And it has the enormous benefit of such a safe pair of hands. Roger Michell’s style was always subservient to the story – if you noticed the directing, he used to say, he wasn’t doing his job.
And his eye – and ear – for this very specific period is flawless.
This is England between post-war rationing and the Beatles-led Swinging London. The shots of 1961 Trafalgar Square, keyed behind Jim Broadbent as he smuggles out the painting, are straight out of a Look At Life short.
And the soundtrack – Adam Faith, Helen Shapiro and the yearning ‘Stranger on the Shore’ – is equally spot-on.
The Duke evokes memories of an England that no longer exists. Most of the factories have closed down, the Daily Mirror, ‘the workers’ paper’ became sullied by its subsequent owner Robert Maxwell, and the class war got turned into “no such thing as society”.
But maybe that’s why a film like this remains so appealing. The pairing of Mirren and Broadbent – have they never worked together before? – is a dream team.
And when Kempton Bunton is brought to book, it’s only appropriate that he returns the painting himself, and that his lawyer be the husband of Shakespearean actor Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
And just when you think there’s no more 1961 nostalgia left to mine, Roger Michell slips in the final, brilliant gag from the first James Bond film.
The tragedy at the end of this delightful comedy is that we won’t see any more films from Michell. Well not quite. Just before his death last year he’d completed a documentary about the Queen called Elizabeth, which by all accounts is one of his best.
My advice to any of the exciting, new, first-time directors setting up their stall in the film business is to ask themselves every so often “What would Roger Michell do?” Your film will immediately become a foot taller.
