The Lady Is a Thief

By Frank Rich

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY Directed and Written by Michael Crichton

There are flashes of excitement in The Great Train Robbery, but the thrills have little to do with locomotives or crime. This film's heat is generated almost exclusively by Lesley-Anne Down, who played Georgina in Upstairs, Downstairs. After too many blah roles in bad movies (The Betsy, A Little Night Music), Down has a fine role in a mediocre movie. It's all she needs to begin her film career in earnest. Though The Great Train Robbery is on the wrong track, Down is on her way.

She plays Miriam, the chief accomplice and paramour of the suave con man, Edward Pierce (Sean Connery), who masterminded England's first celebrated train heist in 1855. Miriam served as an all-purpose decoy: to help steal -L-12,000 worth of gold ingots, she had to pose successively as a French courtesan, a cockney seamstress and an old beggar. Down turns each impersonation into a polished comic nugget; she swings effortlessly in and out of her various roles. Her scenes as Miriam are just as funny: in the film's best bit, Down turns the act of shaving Connery's neck into a delicate game of lovers' oneupmanship. Yet this actress is not merely another talented comedienne: she also has the voluptuous figure and classic features of an oldtime movie star. When she strips down to black silk undies and slithers under the sheets with Connery, the audience gets a dizzying whiff of pure sex worthy of Loren or Monroe. It is no wonder that Director Michael Crichton's camera all but jumps into bed with her.

Such moments aside, The Great Train Robbery is a curiously enervated affair. In his previous films, Westworld and Coma, Crichton has shown a gut instinct for creating nasty suspense. His movies looked sloppy, but fiendish humor and scare tactics helped paper over the visual lapses. Train Robbery, paradoxically, looks gorgeous but lacks bite and narrative rhythm. The thieves carry out their complex scheme in a series of repetitive, evenly paced sequences, most of which involve the hijacking of keys to a safe. When you've seen one key theft, you've seen them all. The robberies are so perfectly planned and calmly dispatched that the culprits may as well be executing a recipe for steak-and-kidney pie. Even the hero's climactic sprint across the top of the moving train is a set piece.

The film's source material, Crichton's own bestselling novel, had far more zip. Crichton conceived the book as a socially conscious thriller: he not only told the story of the robbery but also drew a savage, well-researched portrait of the economic inequities and moral hypocrisy of the mid-Victorian era. Unfortunately, he has not found a way to translate his Dickensian themes to film. Though his movie contains vivid re-creations (shot in Ireland) of London's stately mansions and grisly slums, Crichton photographs them as if he were a sightseer. His usual acerbic point of view -- so apparent in the future-shock environments of his other movies -- evaporates completely. What remains is a story that in itself cannot sustain a full-length film.

Connery's cool rogue occasionally conveys a bit of Crichton's original intentions. The character's honest amorality stands in contrast to the false piety of the wealthy bluebloods he swindles. But Connery's low-key performance is often vitiated by Donald Sutherland's uncharacteristically broad caricature of a bum bling aide-de-crime. Then again, when the delicious leading lady is at hand, both men tend to fade away. The great train robbery may well have been the crime of its century, but it looks like petty theft compared with Down's ability to steal a scene. -Frank Rich

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