Getting wide release this weekend is Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, also known as the movie that seems like it should be directed by Guy Ritchie but isn't. It is, however, based on an infamous 1971 vault heist which has gained recent noteriety not so much for the unsolved crime — although it was one of the biggest bank jobs in British history at the time — but the circumstances of its aftermath: what seemed to be an incredibly newsworthy story was hardly written about in the days following thanks to a "D notice" that served to gag the press. Speculation as to why this would be the case has raged for thirty-five years, and now, Donaldson's film (informed by a newly popular conspiracy theory involving a royal sex scandal) attempts to answer the question definitively, if fictionally. Nothing makes for an exciting movie like crime, and nothing makes a crime movie have that little extra edge than the slightest elements of truth. True crime movies have been a fixture of the silver screen almost since their inception; there's so many to choose from that we don't even begin to pretend this list is definitive. It's just a few of our favorites, each for a different reason. Line them all up on a cold night, watch them in a row, and thank your lucky stars this never happened to you... 

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

A little-seen and underrated noir thriller from the genre's waning days, Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story eschews the highly stylized approach of many of its contemporaries and goes for an understated, gritty style that allows it to function almost like a documentary.

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The Bank Job says it's based on a true story, proudly proclaiming on its striking retro posters, "The true story of a heist gone wrong. . . in all the right ways." Unlike some movies that make similar claims, like the upcoming 21, The Bank Job doesn’t take too many gross liberties with its foundational truths, such as they are. This much is fact: in 1971, Lloyds Bank on London’s Baker Street was robbed. During the burglary, the criminals’ walkie-talkie communications were overheard by a ham-radio enthusiast. It was the biggest story in town for about a week, until a government-issued D-notice, or gag order, was put in effect and that was the end of it. (The U.K. government denies a D-notice was ever issued.) The bad guys got away with it, and no one ever found out why. Bank Job writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, along with director Roger Donaldson, take these events and spin them into a decent story about amateur crooks, thuggish pornographers, pervy politicians and evil Black Panthers.

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The Bank Job a new British film directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Jason Statham, offers a twist on a spectacular true crime story. In September 1971, someone broke into the vault of Lloyds Bank in London on Baker Street, tunneling through a concrete floor from forty feet away, and made off with more than three million pounds' worth of loot from the safety deposit boxes. It was an audacious heist — the biggest bank robbery in British history — but what was even more remarkable was the way the story suddenly disappeared from the newspapers a few days later. As Will Lawrence reports, "This was prompted by the issuing of a D Notice, a government order that forbids the press from reporting on certain events. Ordinarily, such a measure would be employed only if the story threatened national security. So why was it slapped on this particular story? What else did the robbers find in those safety deposit boxes?" Dick Clement, who co-wrote the movie with his writing partner Ian La Frenais, thinks he knows. Clement, who has been working on getting a movie project based on the story for almost ten years, says he got the straight dope from George McIndoe, who once tried to sell the idea himself to Hollywood when memories of the robbery itself were still fresh. McIndoe, who claimed to have gotten his information from two of the robbers themselves, reported that the thieves had found "sexually compromising photographs of Princess Margaret inside one of the deposit boxes."

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