On August 21, 1961, a mystery thief broke into London's National Gallery and made off with Francisco Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, a painting recently acquired by the British Government to the then-cool tune of 140,000 British pounds. Baffled authorities assumed the robbery to be the work of master criminals; little did they know the culprit was a 60-year-old pensioner from Newcastle by the name of Kempton Bunton. Or so he led everyone to believe.
It was a burglary so brazen that it captured the attention of a nation. A replica of the missing painting even showed up as a sight gag in the original James Bond film, 1962's Dr. No, at a time when detectives were so confounded that an arch supervillain may as well have been a plausible suspect.
Bond makes a cameo in The Duke, a lightly fictionalised film about the Novocastrian art thief that transforms him into something of a folk hero – at least as played by a winning Jim Broadbent, who brings the garrulous, idealistic Bunton to life in a performance of vivid wit and charm.
The final feature from the late stage and screen director Roger Michell (Notting Hill; My Cousin Rachel), it's one of those films the British always seem to do so well: a jaunty historical tour spliced with a little cosy subversiveness; ever-so politely rowdy in a way that feels designed to capture cinema's lucrative older audience.
That's not a criticism. The Duke is the kind of film that Hollywood, for better or worse, doesn't make anymore: smart, character-driven, a mischievous twinkle in the eye — a movie that can comfortably entertain an entire family without a glimpse of spandex.
Broadbent is the heart and soul of the film as Bunton, the boisterous Newcastle pensioner who's the very definition of a 'character'. A war veteran, autodidact and wannabe playwright, he's also an anti-establishment agitator and self-styled champion of the common people, much to the chagrin of his — what else — long-suffering wife, Dorothy (Helen Mirren).
"Stop all your agitation," she pleads at one point, Mirren deftly sketching her weariness and exasperation.
Bunton's contentious idealism makes it hard for him to hold down a job, while his adult sons (Fionn Whitehead and Jack Bandeira) dream and scheme and Dorothy takes work as a housekeeper. They've lost a daughter, something neither parent wants to talk about. It's almost certainly fuelling Bunton's heightened sense of the world's injustice.
When we first meet him, this working class warrior is doing battle with the BBC over his campaign to provide free television licenses for the elderly and veterans – a crusade that briefly lands him in the dock.
Bunton could come off as deeply, insufferably righteous in the wrong hands, but Broadbent plays this would-be Robin Hood with a full, magnanimous serve of irresistible Northern humour, while also suggesting a man whose inability to confront loss might be sending him around the bend.
By the time he arrives in London to protest TV licensing, we fully believe he's a man capable of slipping off to the National Gallery and swiping the expensive artwork he regards as a shameful waste of public funds.
"Toffs looking after their own," Bunton mutters, "spending our hard-earned money on a half-baked portrait by some Spanish drunk, of a Duke who was a bastard to his men and who voted against universal suffrage."
The line is characteristic of a screenplay, penned by playwrights Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, that's sprinkled with cheerful anti-establishment jibes, and which delights in lampooning a clueless police department convinced that the robbery must be the work of a devious, cleverly orchestrated crime gang — or, in one of the movie's dry running gags, Italians.
Michell delivers most of this as light comedy, with recurring split-screen mosaics and a vaguely jazzy score (by veteran composer George Fenton) that's in clear dialogue with 60s Hollywood's fondness for art heists (it's a wonder Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers never got their hands on this story).
Yet The Duke is less a caper than a tale of class angst. The film has plenty to say on working class England and the limits of activism, even as it embodies the paradox of its own breezy, tasteful style — historical radicalism seen through the safe lens of chipper, entertaining period nostalgia.
And while Bunton is, in many ways, a classic idealist whose dedication to the so-called common good means he neglects the people around him, Michell and Broadbent eventually flatten those contradictions as they tilt him toward beloved folk hero — complete with a grandstanding bit of courtroom buffoonery and a feel-good peanut gallery chorus right out of a Frank Capra movie.
It's hard to buy into the movie's faith in collective humanity when its designs are so corny, but as a piece of entertainment — with an admirably cheeky pro-theft message — it's extremely satisfying.
The Duke is in cinemas now.
