That's the second film made about the 1976 Nice heist.
A bunch of fifteen or twenty men drilled during two months a tunnel between the sewer net and the Societe Generale safe deposit room. The bank vault. They forced 317 armored boxes, and did not forget the bank one too. They grabbed more than 50 millions of France - 16 millions of dollars.
The leader - the brain - of this bunch was arrested several months later and escaped one year after, in 1977, jumping out of the judge's office, and disappeared. He ran away from France to South America. He has never been caught again.
Albert Spaggiari was not a real gangster, but a hard boiled adventurer, former paratrooper during the Indochina and Algeria wars. A real hard boiled guy. And most of his former brother in arms - the surviving ones - followed him, were at his side in this outstanding expedition. The remaining hoods were, however, authentic gangsters, specialists in safe cracking with oxyacetylene cutting torches.
Another movie was made in 1979, directed by Jose Giovanni. It focused more on the heist itself, not the afterwads...
The 2008 film points out the escape in a South America country, where a "journalist" tries to meet the famous thief for making an interview.
Spaggiari is shown as a weird character. Racist and engaging at the same time. Ambivalent.
In short, it's an interesting film for anyone who looks for details about the mighty 1976 heist, the equivalent of the 1963 Great Train Robbery - the Glasgow London one.
But that's another story...
A bunch of fifteen or twenty men drilled during two months a tunnel between the sewer net and the Societe Generale safe deposit room. The bank vault. They forced 317 armored boxes, and did not forget the bank one too. They grabbed more than 50 millions of France - 16 millions of dollars.
The leader - the brain - of this bunch was arrested several months later and escaped one year after, in 1977, jumping out of the judge's office, and disappeared. He ran away from France to South America. He has never been caught again.
Albert Spaggiari was not a real gangster, but a hard boiled adventurer, former paratrooper during the Indochina and Algeria wars. A real hard boiled guy. And most of his former brother in arms - the surviving ones - followed him, were at his side in this outstanding expedition. The remaining hoods were, however, authentic gangsters, specialists in safe cracking with oxyacetylene cutting torches.
Another movie was made in 1979, directed by Jose Giovanni. It focused more on the heist itself, not the afterwads...
The 2008 film points out the escape in a South America country, where a "journalist" tries to meet the famous thief for making an interview.
Spaggiari is shown as a weird character. Racist and engaging at the same time. Ambivalent.
In short, it's an interesting film for anyone who looks for details about the mighty 1976 heist, the equivalent of the 1963 Great Train Robbery - the Glasgow London one.
But that's another story...