Men and motors: "The Italian Job"

Labour in government. Oasis announcing concert dates. The Italian Job restored to prominence. What year is it again? In fairness, Peter Collinson's film has reached 55 in marginally better shape than most of those blokes who've clutched these frames to their hearts over the decades. Never a canonical classic - too parochial for that - what we have here is a caper lent a carapace of class by Paramount money and overseas location work, a film that stresses only the importance of gleaming bodywork. Its plot remains negligible, being dashed-off, indeed finally unresolved B-movie business: a plan to smuggle gold out of Italy under the Mafia's noses. Yet its pistons were greased with a very British cheek and wit - the screenwriter's equivalent of Castrol GTX - and encased in enduring images: Lambos cruising Alpine roads and Minis rolling round like marbles (the writer in question was Troy Kennedy Martin, who'd broken through with TV's Z Cars and closed out his career with a posthumous credit on Michael Mann's Ferrari); a major Italian city reduced to gridlock; an introductory close-up of Michael Caine, as mastermind Charlie Croker, looking as though he had mischief firmly in mind. Much of The Italian Job would be customised to Caine's star persona as it was in the late 1960s. Croker's first stops, upon being released from prison, are to his tailor, then to a garage to retrieve another flash motor, then to a Dorchester surrogate's Dollybird Suite for a spot of rehabilitating how's-your-father. If I'm not mistaken, Caine even found the energy to lend his vocals to Quincy Jones' theme song "Getta Bloomin' Move On! (The Self-Preservation Society)", which continues to strike the ear less like its producer's "Ai No Corrida" than one of those cor-blimey knees-up F.A. Cup final songs Chas 'n' Dave recorded with Spurs ten years later.

Around Caine, a winning eccentricity holds sway. It's everything involving Noel Coward's Mr. Bridger, which even treats one old lag going to the lavs to perform morning ablutions as a matter of grave national pomp and circumstance. (Coward always had far more fun with his national treasure status than that miserable sod Olivier ever did.) It's Benny Hill and Irene Handl, two of a crop of familiar TV faces (John Le Mesurier, Fred Emney, Robert Powell) who explain why the film enjoyed such easy small-screen rotation in later years, in the roles of a sex-case professor ("Are they big? I like 'em big") and his enabler sister. The American remake of 2003 - prompted by the glorious new dawn of the Fast & Furious franchise - took Martin's chicanery very seriously, which missed the point: The Italian Job wasn't finally so much about the cars as it was the characters behind the wheel and cramming into the back seats. These were our budget version of Danny Ocean's slick hipsters: lopsided, asthmatic, distractible, disreputable, kinky, a bit crap, midpoints between Ealing's wheeler-dealers and early Guy Ritchie's shameless chancers who collectively embody the thick streak of perversity in the English national character. Wouldn't true classic car lovers squirm masochistically while watching those scenes in which convertibles get bulldozed down Italian hillsides? While we're at it, the sunkissed international shoot makes one wonder why on earth anyone would want to spend any more time on our accursed, rain-lashed isle, though Collinson stages one mournfully pretty tableau on the occasion of Aunt Nellie's "funeral". (Croker's gang only get as far as they do by exporting exactly the kind of traffic jam that was waiting to ensnare them back home.) The film remains an entertaining nonsense, though it's weird it became a sacred text of the Brexit set when what it so clearly illustrates is what we might call patriotic overreach: an inability to think through big ideas, and the capacity of flash Harrys like Charlie Croker to lead their followers over a cliff edge. One reason Britain is where it is in 2024: its people still regard The Italian Job not as cautionary but aspirational.

The Italian Job returns to cinemas nationwide from Friday.