The Flying Scot (a.k.a. Mailbag Robbery) (1957)

Directed and produced by Compton Bennett

A hitherto small-time thief (Lee Patterson) has a plan for a big-time robbery: he and three accomplices (Kay Callard, Alan Gifford, Mark Baker) will steal half a million pounds in old currency being brought from Scotland to London for destruction. In his description to his friends, the crimes passes off without a hitch. Reality, of course, is never the same as imagination.

Despite its obvious small budget, The Flying Scot has the ingredients of a good caper film. A low budget in and of itself is never an effective bar against quality. Plenty of first-rate films have been made with third-rate money. The Flying Scot did not need a lot of cash, considering how it is set; the cramped scenes in fact add a little claustrophobia to the story.

 

The cast, the principals of which are all Canadians or Americans, is good, if not exceptional, Gifford being the stand-out among them, while Patterson overacts a tad. His character is never likeable, unlike the others’, and contributes to the viewers’ indifference as to the criminals’ success.

The story is capable, though hardly complex, and the script is adequate. The latter has its best moments in the inclusion of other passengers, various of whom intrude on Patterson’s scheme in ways he had not anticipated. It did have a flaw that seemed almost artificial. Gifford’s character suffers an attack from a perforated ulcer during the heist, one of the plan’s many unforeseen difficulties. With no foreshadowing, this could have been added as an afterthought, half-way through the writing of the story, though I don’t think that is the case. In fact, once an element of Patterson’s original scheme is changed, Gifford doesn’t really need to have been included.

The real problem is the direction, which never raises the tension enough to make the movie the thriller it was clearly meant to be. The characters display stress plausibly enough, but the viewer doesn’t feel it. There is the anxiety of the small arena in which the action is played out – in the train’s compartments (called carriages, for some reason) and corridors – but the ending simply does not seem to be in doubt.

With an atmosphere that generates more apathy than tension, and a lead character whom one would not mind seeing fail, The Flying Scot becomes an excellent effort – with middling results.

(The title refers not to a Caledonian airman hidden somewhere in the film, but to the express train that travels from Edinburgh to London; in real-life it is called the Flying Scotsman. The fact that the name of the train is never mentioned in the movie, though it would have been well-known to Britons, may have been why a different title was used in the United States, though even this is in error: the bags robbed are not mail, but money.)