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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