Heist film: History and Key Facts

The heist film or caper film is a subgenre of crime films and the caper story, focused on the planning, execution, and aftermath of a significant robbery.

One of the early defining heist films was The Asphalt Jungle (1950), which according to Film Genre 2000, "almost single-handedly popularized the genre for mainstream cinema". It featured robbers whose personal failings ultimately led to the failure of their robbery. Similar films using this formula were Armored Car Robbery (1950), The Killing (1956), and The Getaway (1972). By the 1990s, heist films began to "experiment and play with these conventions", incorporating elements such as comedy into their stories, as Topkapi had so successfully in 1964.

The caper, a subgenre of the crime film, organises its narrative around the assembly of a crew, the execution of a robbery and its subsequent unravelling.

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