Safes often appear on the silver screen, as we have mentioned in the past on our blog when writing about the panic room featured in the well-known film "Asylum" starring Jodie Foster. One of our safes even had its modest appearance in a series, but today we would like to start with a cinema classic.
Polish accents
In 1978, Janusz Rzeszewski and Mieczysław Jahoda made the musical comedy "Hallo Szpicbródka, czyli ostatni występ króla kasiarzy" (Hallo Szpicbródka, or the last performance of the king of safecrackers), starring famous actors such as Piotr Fronczewski and Gabriela Kownacka in the lead roles, as well as legends of Polish cinema in the persons of Irena Kwiatkowska, Wiesław Michnikowski and Jan Kobuszewski. The film depicts the cunning enterprise of a burglar Fred Kampinos, who decides to support a revue theatre threatened with insolvency and from its cellars get into the neighbouring bank in order to empty the treasury. The interestingly sketched scenario, set in pre-war Warsaw, features the character of Poland's best-known cashier at the time, Stanisław Cichocki, alias Szpicbródka, whose adventures are to be the axis of the libretto of the theatre's new revue. Although the person concerned does not reveal himself, someone else discovers Kampinos' true identity and reports it to the police.
Another classic is undoubtedly the film Vabank by the then débutant Juliusz Machulski. The director was only 26 years old at the time of the film's premiere, but his work has been on our screens for four decades. The lead role of the gangster Henryk Kwinta, whose inspiration was the aforementioned 'Szpicbródka', was played brilliantly by the director's father Jan Machulski. The plot is also set in 1930s Warsaw. Kwinto gets out of prison after a few years and plans to rob his rival Kramer's bank as an act of revenge, which will naturally require successfully breaking into the safe. In 1985, the second part, „Vabank II, czyli riposta” (Vabank II, that is the riposte) was made. A third part was even planned, but failed to secure financing.
You may also be interested in the entry: Vaults, safes and other scrap-iron in film and beyond – the most interesting stories
Foreign movies
Safes also appear in more recent foreign productions. In the 2015 comedy "The Perfect Robbery", breaking into a safe becomes an act of revenge and is the Swedish answer to the legendary Danish series 'Olsen's Gang' (repeated persistently today by a TV station), perhaps even better than the original. The creators had enough ideas for as many as eight episodes.
Worthy of mention is the 2003 thriller film 'Italian Job', which brought together famous actors on set: Donald Sutherland, Jason Statham, Charlize Theron, Mark Wahlberg and Edward Norton. The safe is broken into here by the charming Stella, daughter of a thief who stole a safe with overly rich contents in Venice, killed suddenly by one of the members of a criminal gang.
Can a vault be the protagonist of a documentary film? Naturally – Michael Andrawis shot the film "Tresor Berlin: The Vault and the Electronic Frontier" in 2005, showing Dimitri Hegemann's 1991 discovery of an underground vault of the Wertheim bank in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, which had not been entered since the end of the Second World War. Interestingly, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new music scene – techno – began to emerge there, contributing to the integration of East and West Berliners.
And now we head a little further west in Europe. The safe of the Bank of Spain in a historic building in the country's capital Madrid is of interest to a brilliant young engineer Thom Laybrick. To make things even more exciting, a certain lost treasure will be briefly stored in the safe, and the prepared burglary plan seems to be aided by the final of the football World Cup, held in Spain. That, in a nutshell, is the plot of 'Way Down' (or, indeed, 'The Vault') by Spanish director Jaume Balagueró, with Freddie Highmore as Thom, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Famke Janssen and Liam Cunningham as actors.
Quite recently I watched a film called "Lethal Porter 2", the title of which may suggest the genre and level of this picture. In it, there's a scene of a safe being disarmed by a gang of art thieves (sadly, they're far from cashiers, as the safe is destroyed).
We can find quite a few films with the word safe in the title, such as the 1914 short drama "The Man in the Vault", the silent comedy "The Vanishing Vault" from 1915, the 1956 crime drama "Man in the Vault", the 2018 Hungarian crime film "Trezor" and even the American horror film "The Vault" from 2017.
For cold winter evenings, I recommend a mug of hot chocolate and a movie session, starring the safe, of course!
You can read more about the aforementioned panic room: Panic room in your home
