The scientific solution to the end of ‘The Italian Job’
In the landscape of world cinema, the British film industry is recognised as one of the very best, even if some of its greatest offerings go under the radar. In recent years, such films as Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir have failed to gather the necessary plaudits, even if classics of the past like Danny Boyle’s drama Trainspotting and Peter Collinson’s crime flick The Italian Job remain beloved.
Released in 1969, Collinson’s classic comedy crime caper told the story of a band of plucky thieves who planned to steal a shipment of gold by creating a traffic jam on the streets of Turin, Italy. Starring Michael Caine, Tony Beckley and the iconic comedian Benny Hill, the film is considered an influential favourite of British cinema, with several moments integrating themselves into the very fabric of national film heritage.
No doubt, its most famous moment, aside from when Caine’s Charlie goes off on his fellow crook Arthur (Michael Standing), “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off,” comes at the movie’s finale, when the filmmakers took a very little stance on the term ‘cliffhanger’.
Making off with stacks of gold in a coach bus, the gang ride off triumphant until the vehicle loses control and finds itself teetering on the edge of a cliff. On one end of the coach is the gang of men, and on the other end of the bus is the stack of gold, with the two factors perfectly balancing each other out. Just before we find out if they do or don’t make it out of this predicament, Collinson pulls the camera away and leaves audiences with one of the best endings in cinema history.
But, despite the apparent hopelessness, there is a solution to the life-or-death scenario of the characters, with the Royal Society of Chemistry running a competition back in 2009 where they found a scientific answer.
The competition’s winner, John Godwin, found a solution when pondering the quandary one afternoon, coming up with a several-step answer. Step one is to break the windows at the back of the coach to reduce weight, then break two windows at the front. This is where things get interesting; next, one of the gang members would have had to have been put upside down out of the front window to deflate the tires and stabilise the coach.
Step three involved draining the rear fuel tank using a panel on the base of the bus, then the members would leave one by one from the front of the coach, collecting stones from outside to replace the weight they had removed by stepping off the bus. Stones would then be repeatedly added until it was safe for one team member, presumably Caine’s Charlie, to snatch the gold from the rear of the vehicle.
“There’re several sheets of maths here,” Godwin said of his solution, “It was a good long day with a calculator. It’s more than 20 years since I saw the film – I remember thinking there must be some way of getting that gold off the bus…I always had an idea of how they might solve this, so when the Royal Society of Chemistry put this out to the public as a competition it seemed like the ideal opportunity to see if it would really work or to see if it was hot air”.
Take a look at the iconic finale of The Italian Job below.
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