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."
According to the theory offered up by McIndoe and the screenwriters, the pictures supposedly belonged to Michael X, the drug-dealer, pimp, extortionist, and questionable political leader who was immortalized, in fictionalized form, by V. S. Naipaul in his novel Guerrillas, and later in Naipaul's long journalistic essay "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad." In the movie, Michael X (who died in 1975) uses the photos to keep the law at bay, threatening to make them public unless he was given a wide berth by the authorities. The writers suggest "that the robbery was masterminded by MI5, which was eager to get its hands on the photos and thereby neutralise Michael X's threat." "That's the theory, anyway," adds Clement, invoking the time-honored escape hatch of conspiracy theorists since time immortal. Audiences can chew all this over when The Bank Job opens in Britain later this month. Others have already made up their minds — such as Robert Rowlands, a ham radio operator who tried to alert the police that the robbery was underway when he intercepted the burglars' walkie-talkie transmissions. "The film is an amusing series of misconceptions, dragging in royalty," he says cheerfully. "I am in touch with the princess's solicitors."