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Film Description
A gang of criminals acquire an old army truck and try to pass themselves off as military policemen as they plan to steal a £250,000 payroll intended for soldiers in the Middle East.
While Cliff Owen's lean and economical 1962 film A Prize of Arms is essentially a well-turned heist movie, it is also (inter alia) a multilayered picture of the workin... more >
While Cliff Owen's lean and economical 1962 film A Prize of Arms is essentially a well-turned heist movie, it is also (inter alia) a multilayered picture of the workings of the British Army on all its levels - a picture, what's more, which takes into account hectoring, bull-necked sergeant majors, sardonic squaddies, chinless wonder officers and all the multifarious petty tyrannies of the service. But it is a vision which is not unaffectionate - and celebrates the fact that for all the customary breakdowns of communication and obfuscatory lines of command, things in the army (eventually) get done. (This subtly worked pro-establishment line is all the more surprising given the presence of a young Nicholas Roeg among the writers - his own subsequent career would hardly suggest a vestige of respect for such a monolithic organisation).
In some ways, Cliff Owen's film reflects certain strands of Basil Dearden and Bryan Forbes' The League of Gentlemen, with its central notion of an embittered officer who feels the army is not providing sufficient recompense for the years he has given (although Stanley Baker's tight-lipped leader of the ex-army squad has, in fact, been dishonourably discharged for black market activity; the once-honest Jack Hawkins, at least, had reason to feel more resentment at his consigning to the scrap heap). In fact, it is the presence of Stanley Baker which locates the film precisely in a more working-class ethos, a fact further emphasised by the presence of an actor from the (then) next generation, Liverpool-born Tom Bell, who carried much the same working class associations as the ever-reliable Baker (the presence of Helmut Schmid as the third member of the trio attempting an audacious payroll heist is somewhat confusing, given the fact of his pronounced German accent - though the latter is built cleverly into the plot; for suspense purposes, it is important that Schmid is obliged to conceal his accent to fool the British soldiers he is deceiving).
A Prize of Arms, as a film, has its foot on the pedal from virtually the first sequence, and Owens' capable cutting for tension and suspense keeps things moving accelerando. The corollary of this kinetic quality, though, is that the characters have little chance to development beyond what we can be conveyed by their actions as they attempt to fool an entire army base with a series of complex double bluffs. But Baker, as ever, is able to delineate the resentment and sense of quiet desperation of his character with just a few terse sentences, delivered on the hoof.
What is perhaps most interesting about the film is not its ambiguous attitude to the army milieu within which it is set, but the almost geometrical precision of the plotting. The scenario here affords a particular, unfolding pleasure as the viewer realises that seemingly meaningless actions performed by the protagonists early in the film have a logic that will only become clear as the narrative unfolds, and elements of the planning of the robbery (involving flame throwers, stretchers, sabotaged fire alarms, even mysterious tracks deliberately made in grass by a car) fall into place.
Inevitably, any criticism of the military regime in A Prize of Arms has to seen in context: the individual effort and organisation demonstrated by the robbers has an inevitable conclusion -- a conclusion not the result of (for instance) the carefully-signalled short fuse of the Tom Bell character, but by the ineluctable, sometimes chaotic (but, as Owens seems to suggest) inevitably effective army machine. Needless to say, the precision with which the robbers execute the robbery - not to mention their improvisatory skills when things go wrong - bespeaks their military training. < less
