Bellman & True

By Tom Keogh

Richard Loncraine's 1987 heist drama puts the accent on character-driven drama and not on the mechanics of a crime. Bernard Hill plays a computer whiz whose wife abandons him and his son, a devastating change that results in Hill's character getting drunk, losing his job, and selling a computer tape containing a map of a bank's security system to a particularly brutal crime boss (Richard Hope). The nerdy hero's troubles are only beginning, though: the gangster kidnaps his son and forces Hill to collaborate on defeating the bank's security during a theft. While there is no mistaking the real villains in this piece, the story has its share of twists inspired by moral grayness and issues in which forced culpability merges with outright temptation. This is a human drama, and Loncraine shoots it accordingly, more fascinated with the characters' internal experiences than anything else.

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