Loot 1970

[Henrietta Naughton]

Lootis a 1970 British comedy film directed by Silvio Narizzano starring Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick, Hywel Bennett, Milo O'Shea and Roy Holder.[1] It is based on the play of the same name by Joe Orton. It was entered into the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.[2]

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Opening out Joe Orton's comedy, [Narizzano] succeeds admirably in preserving its black tone. The Galton-Simpson script lacks some of Orton's verbal finesse and drops a couple of his more outrageous lines, but it invents incidents ... in Orton's spirit and provides a good general foundation for the cast. ... But the real triumph of the film is visual. It must have been planned with considerable care. The frame often contains as many colours as in Chabrol's A Double Tour [1959], but here they are deliberately rendered by Austin Dempster in the garishness of a biscuit tin, with nauseating clashes between orange, mauve, lemon-yellow and mismatching tones of green. ...The detachment of the audience is complete, underlined by a Brechtian use of narrational songs which recap the action at significant points. ... All in all, though, Loot is remarkably successful, both as an adaptation of the play and as a piece of film-making in its own right."[4]

Rich. of Variety said that the film had "transferred uneasily to the screen, the opening-out in the script ... having robbed the yarn of much of its comic tension. Nevertheless, though it may offend some on the grounds of 'bad taste,' it has enough speed, inventiveness and sharp, acid, irreverent comedy to satisfy many."[5]

The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 4/5 stars, writing: "It's a ruthless satire on authoritarianism as well as a send-up of the Agatha Christie-style whodunnit that had kept the British theatre ticking over for decades. The play had gone from disaster to prize-winning success but the film version flopped badly. Reworked by TV writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, it's wholly faithful to Orton's surreal sense of humour and the extreme tackiness of the characters, especially Richard Attenborough who clearly delights in playing the creepiest, kinkiest detective you'll ever see."[7]

According to the screenwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, in 2012 Orton's agent Peggy Ramsay was complimentary: "... even she couldn't tell where he'd finished and where we started. But it's not a great film, unfortunately". Part of this was because, to the writers' regret, Narizzano directed the actors to perform "in an over-the-top style, and it doesn't work".[9]

Loot is a 1970 British crime comedy movie directed by Silvio Narizzano and based on the Joe Orton play of the same name. It stars Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick, Hywel Bennett, Milo O'Shea, Roy Holder, Dick Emery, Aubrey Woods, Harold Innocent and Stephen Yardley.

Two bank robbers, Dennis and Hal, are on the run from the police after a successful heist. Needing somewhere to hide the loot, they turn to a funeral parlour where they stash the cash in Hal's recently-deceased mother's coffin. Taking the coffin, they turn to Hal's father and hide it in the bathroom of his hotel. Before long the hotel is host to the eccentric Inspector Truscott.

Hywel Bennett and Roy Holder are the crooks who rob a bank vault with the help of a funeral parlour and an accommodating corpse. In true farcical mode they carry out the heist in nothing but helmets and gloves, to the accompaniment of ear-popping musical interludes on the soundtrack.

Of course, some of the best comedy has come from hitting its audience with one joke after another to the point where they have trouble breathing. But farce tends to be juggling a bunch of characters and situations on top of that and I just feel tired watching people running around and their trousers falling down and a dead body ending up in someone's bed, like what usually happens in these films.

A last gasp of flipped out, scuzzy '60s psychedelia that's matched by Richard Attenborough's manic, mannered, totally unhinged performance, throwing himself into the absurdist humiliations of unbearable frustration, maddening unreality and satirical paranoia that mark this adaptation of Joe Orton's play.

With big Droog energy that never flags, a full year before A Clockwork Orange, the rat-a-tat tempo is bursting with visual flair and bleakly amusing outrageousness, exemplified by a fully nude bank heist.

This movie is hilarious and I love how dark and ridiculous it is. The performances of the entire cast are great but the screenplay is the real star. I would have loved to see the original run for the play.

Police corruption, sexual impropriety and hypocrisy in the Catholic Church may be pretty routine subjects for films today, but in 1970 they still retained some power to shock. More so in 1965, when Joe Orton's play first appeared on the London stage; indeed, this adaptation restores details censored in the original, though a fresh set of censors obliged it to hold back on a few things itself. It's the story of young bank robbers Hal (Roy Holder) and Dennis (Hywel Bennett), who take advantage of he death of Hal's mother to rob a bank next to a funeral parlour and hide the cash in the coffin. Unluckily for them, they capture the attention of a police detective with a brutal approach to extracting information, and keeping their loot safe becomes more and more complicated.

With a colour palette liable to make some viewers cry and an appreciation of middle class vulgarity that's perfectly suited to Orton's work, Silvio Narizzano's film helped the Seventies start the way they wished to go on. The Summer of Love was over. Hal and Dennis, it is implied, were lovers and still engage in sex with other people together, but the carefree days of boyhood are over. Dennis wants to get married and has his sights set on the blonde bombshell, frequently widowed Catholic nurse (Lee Remick) who took care of Hal's mother. She, however, is only interested in men who are rich, and in this he has to compete with Hal's befuddled hotel-owning father (Milo O'Shea). The hippy values of the Sixties are giving way to a focus on cash that would, in time, beget Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Inspector Truscott (Richard Attenborough), used to giving orders, must face a changing world which, by more closely replicating his own values, risks depleting his powers.

Truscott is undoubtedly the most interesting role, modeled in part on the then-infamous London detective Harold 'Tanky' Challenor, so it's unfortunate that he's slightly miscast. Attenborough gets to grips with the farce well enough but is missing some of the darkness important to the part; he gives it too much Professor Hammond and not enough Pinkie. Remick, however, is perfect as the nurse, and her sharp delivery restores the necessary edge to their scenes together. Elsewhere, capable but not remarkable performances are overshadowed by Anthony Pratt's full on art direction. Orton's dialogue is wonderfully pithy as always and provides ample entertainment, but seems to box in some of the actors, who do little to reach beyond it.

Despite these difficulties, there's a lot to enjoy in a film that makes no compromises whatsoever on style. An exuberant rendition of Orton's well structured farce, it might exhaust you but somewhere along the way you're likely to have a good time.

Based on the play by Joe Orton, this film follows the adventures of two pals who have pulled off a bank robbery and have to hide the loot. Fortunately one of them works in a funeral parlor and they have a coffin to spare.

1: A basic loot filter.

Basic as in the ability to hide common item labels, like potions, arrows/bolts, scrolls and gold labels. No fancy code or syntax knowledge required that way everyone can use it.

Who owns the art from the non-Western world that fills the galleries of Western museums? That has become the most vexing question facing museums in the United States and Europe today. This month historian Sarah Van Beurden examines this issue by looking at the debates over material taken from Africa during the period of European colonialism. As she explains, what to repatriate and under what terms are complicated problems.

He subsequently commissioned Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bndicte Savoy to write a report on the issue. The report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage (2018) is now widely seen as the starting point of restitution debates. But African nations and the African diaspora have been organizing around the subject for years, even if this report has inspired a string of other national initiatives in Europe.

One reason is that, despite decades of demands, the issue has never been properly addressed. A second aspect is the role that the growing African diaspora communities have played in drawing attention to the often highly problematic origin histories of colonial museum collections in recent years.

Finally, generational changes also play a real role in opening up conversations around decolonization in Europe, since allegiances to previous generations involved in the colonial project are diminishing.

The debates about repatriating African cultural heritage differ in both scale and access: the collections in the Global North are large, while much less moveable, material cultural heritage remains on the African continent. This causes concerns about access of communities and countries to knowledge about their past.

Missionaries were another group often involved in the collection or destruction of objects. At times, they destroyed objects or removed them in order to use them for academic study or scientific research. Many missionaries believed that an increased understanding of African cultures would lead to a more effective Christianization. The process of conversion sometimes also led African communities and peoples themselves to surrender objects.

Scientists might have ethnographic interests, but some missionaries surmised that better insight into local customs would lead to a more efficient colonialism. Knowledge was power, and knowledge came from cultural objects.

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