BELLMAN AND TRUE
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1988 Jeff Meyer
Seen at the Seattle Film Festival: BELLMAN AND TRUE (Great Britain, 1987) Director: Richard Loncraine Screenwriters: Desmond Lowden, Richard Loncraine, Michael Wearing; from a novel by Desmond Lowden Cast: Bernard Hill, Kieran O'Brien, Richard Hope, Frances Tomelty
BELLMAN AND TRUE is a caper film, and one of the very best ones in recent memory. What it lacks in sympathetic characters it makes up for in realism and technical panache, and in controlled, on-key acting. The film opens with an engineer named Hiller (Hill) and his stepson on the lam from some criminals. Hiller was paid to go in and steal some information about the company he worked for from their computer banks; instead, he took the money and ran. They catch up with him, and get him to decode the information they are looking for. Hiller also learns that the information will be used to rob one of the most heavily guarded banks in Britain; his technical abilities are in demand, and he decides to throw in with the caper.
Outside of Hiller and his son, there are hardly any sympathetic characters; the burglars may be interesting, ingenious and remarkable in their "old world, new world" thinking, but they are also brutal and quite willing of kill anyone who stops them from the heist or causes problems afterward. So the audience is left rooting for the father and son combo, and this works very well, thanks to Hill's understated performance. Both are people who've never been particularly well-treated by anyone before the other came along, and their love for one another is the only warm, tender thing in either of their worlds -- or this movie. They form a nucleus that one worries over during the course of the film.
And rightly so. It's a dangerous break-in, but fascinating in its ingenuity. The technical jargon is right on -- how often does that happen, eh? -- and is as intriguing as the British underworld jargon; "bellman" is the title of Hiller's job, to disable the alarm systems. It is particularly fascinating to see how the thieves deal with the new technology and the new gangland ethics -- the money-man for the operation is a yuppie who none of the burglars seem to be too enthused with. At any rate, the suspense is palpable throughout, and everything is down-to-Earth -- *including* the ending, which has constantly been reported as "unbelievable" by other critics. I can't imagine why; the entire film seems enormously plausible.
A good $4-$5 film any time. Recommended.
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
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