The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton (1975)
The Great Train Robbery directed by Michael Crichton (1978)
Spoiler Free thoughts
This is the first time on why the book wins that I am covering an adaptation that was directed by the writer of the book! Dark Matter was adapted and created by Blake Crouch, so that is close. But Crouch didn’t direct the show.
I had seen this movie many years ago when I was between 10 and 12 and to be honest the main reason why I remembered it is because there is a scene that scared me. And because this was a fun heist movie that I was having a good time with, the fact that suddenly there was something I found disturbing came as such a shock that it had stuck with me all these years! But I have now faced my demons and can say that scene no longer scares me, though I can understand why it would have scared young Laura. (Stay tuned to hear the details on the scene I am referring to!)
What does still scare me is how much wasted potential this movie has! I liked the book pretty well, but it had a cinematic feel to it and therefore assumed it would make an even better movie. I think in the hands of a different director this could have been much better, but unless it gets remade, we will never know.
But this is a fictionalized history of a real train robbery that took place in England in 1855. Crichton fabricates much of the story in both book and movie though so don’t make the mistake I did by thinking the book was nonfiction! Some of the most interesting and wild parts of the robbery are not even true lol. But I did learn a lot about Victorian England and so I still learned quite a bit while reading this book even if I wasn’t learning the truth about the robbery, and would still highly recommend it.
Though I have to say there were some aspects of this book I found very disturbing so before we get into spoilers, I want to give potential readers a heads up. First of all, various forms of dog fighting entertainment are talked about in this book and we hear in detail of how they would train dogs back then to be fighters. Just hearing the training process was so upsetting. And when it comes to animals dying in books or movies, I am not the type that gets overly bothered, so the fact that what is talked about in this book was so disturbing to me really says something.
The movie has a scene where a ratting dog kills rats, but we don’t get talk of actual dog fighting like we do in the book. (This scene by the way isn’t done using fake rats or something. That dog was really trained to kill rats and is really killing these live rats for this movie! Engalnd’s version of PETA found out about this and was upset but never took any kind of legal action.)
As said, this is based on a real robbery, but many details are made up. After talking about the book and movie, I will share a bit at the end about the real robbery.
From here on out I will get into the details of the plot which means there will be spoilers going forward!
The Plan
Edward Peirce is a wealthy gentleman who rubs shoulders with the underbelly of London and wants to find a way to steal gold that is transported from England to the soldiers fighting the Crimean War. The gold is transported in two safes by train before it reaches the coast and is shipped to France. He wants to find a way to steal the gold while it is still on the train, and since safes were impossible to open (dynamite hadn’t been invented) and were too heavy to carry off, the only way to open them was to get copies of the four keys used to unlock them-two keys per safe.
He partners with Edward Agar who is the best safe cracker/key maker in London and the two of them, along with the help with some others including the train guard named Burgess, plan to steal the gold.
In both, he also gets the help of his girl on the side named Miriam. She is there in the book, but she is more of a character in the movie and we see her involved in more of the plan and see that she clearly is in love with Pierce.
Getting the keys
A large portion of the book and movie are about them trying to figure out where the four keys are kept and the effort it takes to get a hold of them long enough to get an impression of them so a duplicate can be made. Two of the keys are kept in the train offices, the other two are kept by two different men who work for the bank.
One bank worker, Fowler, is friends with Peirce and while among their gentlemen friends he straight up tells them where he keeps it-around his neck at all times. In the movie, Fowler sees Miriam at the bank and takes a liking to her. Peirce tells him he knows her and can hook him up. He later takes Fowler to a fake brothel and gets Fowler alone with Miriam. She gets him to undress and take off the key, and while the two are distracted, Agar is able to get the key and make an imprint before then returning it. Miriam doesn’t have to actually be with Fowler sexually though because they have a fake police raid after the key copy is secure.
In the book, Fowler gets an STD and this is when he approaches Peirce asking if he knows where he can get a “fresh” girl in order to cure it. Peirce gives him the info on someone he can see, and while with this person, she gets him to undress and while he is having sex with her, the imprint of the key is made.
The next guy is a man named Trent and he is tough because he is a very rigid man and he and his wife run a strict household with loyal servants. He seemingly has no shady affinities which would make it easy for Peirce to weasel his way into getting the key somehow. But no one is as clean cut as they seem, and Peirce finds out in both that Trent is into various dog sports and that his own dog is a ratting dog. Peirce meets him at one of these ratting events, and afterwards talks to Trent about a proposition for Trent to get his hands on a fighting dog while also mentioning that he is single but would like to be married. In the movie, he doesn’t talk about hooking Trent up with a fighting dog, but he does show that he would make a good suiter for Trent’s single daughter.
So in both, Peirce is invited to the Trent home, and when he meets the daughter, he feigns attraction. While courting the daughter, she eventually slips and says that she thinks her father has a secret drink of wine the morning gold is sent out because he goes to the wine cellar alone and forbids anyone come with him. Peirce knows now that Trent keeps his key in the cellar, and that is actually the reason why Trent goes down there alone.
Peirce and Agar are able to sneak into the Trent home and find the key in the basement.
Clean Willy
To get the two keys kept at the train office, they need the help of Clean Willy, a small guy who can climb walls and fit into tight spaces. The train office is guarded at night and the only time they can run in to get the imprints is when the guard takes his predicable bathroom break which lasts just over 60 seconds. They get Clean Willy out of prison so he can sneak in the office and unlock the door and the cabinet, while Agar then runs in while the guard is using the bathroom and makes the copies.
Clean Willy eventually snitches on Peirce though. Peirce keeps his cards close to his chest and even Agar doesn’t know what they are robbing until the time gets closer. Therefore, Willy doesn’t know what exactly Peirce is up to, but he tells the police that he is up to something. Peirce ultimately has Willy killed-snitches get stiches after all-and in the book he throws the cops off of his trail by making it seem like he has a different robbery planned.
In the movie, the cops assume Peirce is stealing the Crimean gold, and therefore put up more protective measures to prevent this. In the book, again, they did not think he was stealing the gold because he threw them off of that. But the train still adds some last minute protective measures. In the book this happens because a man claims his expensive wine was stolen from the train, and so the train impliments new measures to prevent future robberies.
Last minute plan details
Due to these new protective measures, they need to find a way to get Agar into the train car with the gold. They come up with the plan to put Agar in a coffin, and have him loaded into the car that way, and once inside, Burgess, the train employee who is on it, will let him out. Even coffins are checked though and other guards are as thorough as to even prick dead bodies to make sure they are dead and not smugglers. But at this time, there was a real fear in England of burying people alive. A lucrative business then was formed all about preventing the burial of someone before they were actually dead. One method was to have a bell on top of the coffin with a string inside that the person could pull should they awake.
Agar is in a coffin such as this along with a dead cat in order to get the dead body odor. And before the guard is going to open it, Agar rings the bell and this gets Miriam, who is pretending to be the dead man’s sister, crazed with excitement that her brother is alive after all. There is a distraction from this as they try and quickly open the coffin, but once opened, Agar has makeup on which makes him appear dead and ghastly. The men then don’t bother to use pins and check the body, but rather quickly close it. This method of distracting the guards with the excitement of the man being alive only to then faint when she sees he is “dead”, combined with Miriam saying he had died of cholera, and the odor from the cat, it’s so hectic that it causes the men to not bother with a thorough check and they instead quickly close the coffin and load him up.
This shot of Agar in the coffin is the part that scared me so much when I was a kid!
But the other problem is that the train car with the gold is now locked from the outside. But they need to open it up so they can dump the bags of gold out of the train at the appropriate spot to be picked up by someone they have waiting. Peirce then takes on the task of getting out of his train car and running along the top of the train to the back car and uses ropes to strap himself down to the lock and get it opened. He is covered in soot from this though and has Agar undress so he can put on Agar’s clean clothes as to not draw attention from Fowler who is also on the train.
The arrest
In the movie, Peirce is arrested right away, in part because the suit he took from Agar doesn’t fit properly and rips.
Some unknown time has passed, when he is brought to trial. Clearly the crowds like him though and when leaving the courthouse, people are cheering and a woman grabs him and kisses him. Turns out this is Miriam, and in the kiss, she passes him the key to his handcuffs. He then uncuffs himself, beats up the police around him, and leaves in the prison carriage which is being driven by Agar.
In the book, the robbery got a lot of attention when it was first noticed that the gold was stolen. It was the talk of the town, but then over a year passed and no one was caught. Eventually, Agar’s girlfriend is arrested for stealing, and in order to avoid putting in jail she tells them that she knows Agar was involved in the crime. He is currently in jail for another crime, and the investigator is able to manipulate him into confessing what he knows of the robbery.
Peirce and the train guard are arrested and the robbery is once again what everyone is talking about. Burgess and Agar take the stand first, and they save Peirce for last. Again, as he is leaving the courthouse he is kissed by a woman, but in the book, he still gets into the jail car. However, while inside he uncuffs himself and escapes with the help of the guy they had used as a driver in the book, someone who isn’t even in the movie. In the book Peirce then just disappears, and the gold was never found so it is assumed he got away with all of the money while Agar and Burgess were sentenced and served their time for their part in it.
The real story
In real life, Peirce was a former SER (South Easten Railway) employee who was fired when they found out he was a gambler. He was not the suave gentlemen of the book and movie. While Agar and Burgess were involved in real life, there were two other men who aren’t in the book or movie and the plan wasn’t as dramatic as Critchon portrays. No smuggling Agar in a coffin, not pretend dating one of the men’s daughters, no Clean Willy and that ensuing drama. They did replace the gold with lead, and they did get copies of the keys but in real life all of the keys where kept at the train station. In real life they actually smuggled the gold off the train by attaching it to their bodies underneath their clothes as well as in bags that they carried.
In real life it was also Agar’s girlfriend that turned them in, but it was because Agar had been arrested on a different crime and before his arrest he asked Peirce to look after her financial needs. Peirce agreed, but then didn’t keep his word. This is what caused the girlfriend to go to the police and tell her what she knew.
Everyone involved was tried and given jail sentences that they had to fulfill, though Peirce didn’t get as long a sentence as the SER employees did.
Book and movie changes
One of the things I loved about the book was the London history throughout. For example, Clean Willy had such severe burns on his hands from being a chimney sweeps assistant as a boy, that his hands are now numb of feeling because people would keep their fires going till the last minute and so the chimney would still be crazy hot as these boys scrambled up them.
Also, women weren’t tried for crimes and rather their husbands would be arrested because it would be assumed a woman didn’t have it in her to be bad or to think of a scheme. We read, “In 1847, the police raided Mary Taggert’s coining operation, catching her red-handed in the midst of stamping out sixpenny pieces. She greeted the raid with equanimity, announced pleasantly that she was married, and told the police the whereabouts of her husband. By law, a husband was responsible for any criminal activities of his wife. It was assumed that such activity must be the result of the husband’s planning and execution, in which the wife was a mere—and perhaps unwilling—participant.”
I tried to google this, because obviously some women were still arrested and hung for crimes, but maybe most women were only accused of sexual crimes but not ones like forgery and such.
The fear of being buried alive due to them actually burying people alive on accident was also really interesting and how there was a whole side business all about saving people from this fate.
The police were also fairly new at this time and so we read a few different ways this effected Londoners and thief’s alike.
Even the things I didn’t like hearing like the dog fighting details and the age of consent being 12, it made me uncomforabtle to read yet it still added to what the world was like at this time.
So many other small details really brought this world to life in such an immersive way and while the movie we get the visuals of London at this time, it just didn’t compare with the atmosphere of the book.
Also, in the book we hear so much more about what the public thought of this crime and how it gripped society. The movie show us the crowd cheering for him in the end, but because his arrest and trial was so fast, we didn’t get the full impact of this news on Londoners. And him beating up the cops right there in front of everyone and riding off was a bit too cheesy. Like why is no one going after them?? I get some of the legal people are being blocked, but there had to be other cops or someone about who could have gone after him couldn’t there?
Book vs movie
The movie does quite a bit of overexplaining, either in voiceover at unneeded times, or there is a scene when Agar is telling us about a pickpocket he just did, and we are shown the scene again as if the audience wasn’t expected to have caught what just happened.
The movie also doesn’t have the best pacing. In the book we hear how keys were everything back then, hence why getting the keys is largely what took so much planning and work. I liked the schemes and the key making going on in the book, but the thrill of that didn’t quite carry over into the movie. I also saw reviewers complain how the actual train robbery doesn’t take place until over halfway into the movie and I do think they could have had that get a move on sooner.
Some scenes, like the fake brothel, have a The Sting vibe and I wanted so much for this movie to be the kind of heist/con movie worthy of being compared to the The Sting but ultimately it isn’t nearly as smart or satisfying or exciting as that. And maybe The Sting isn’t the best comparison since this isn’t a con movie per se, but it isn’t as exciting as say an Ocean’s Eleven either. I was getting Ocean’s Eleven vibes as they recruit different people to do certain jobs, and aspects of the crime itself. But again, this wasn’t as fun or exciting as Ocean’s Eleven either.
The stunts are impressive, including Connery really going on top of a moving train that was going faster than he anticipated. Clean Willy also climbs those walls in real life. But unfortunately, the stunts weren’t enough to make this movie anything more than average.
And I went into this so excited and ready to love it! The book seemed perfect for a movie, but due to Crichton fearing the audience wouldn’t get the story and therefore holding our hand through too much and the poor pacing at the start, the book wins on this one. Not that this is a five-star book or anything. I gave the book 3.5 stars and the movie 3 stars though so the book wins out by just a bit.
What’s your favorite heist book or movie??