The Smallest Possible Theft (The Italian Job, 1969)

Somewhere in the middle of The Italian Job’s famous chase through Turin, the unmistakable white Mini Cooper S passes a restaurant just as a waiter carries an elaborately dressed roast chicken towards a table. A gloved hand appears from the passenger window, plucks the bird clean off the platter and disappears with it, leaving the waiter holding the silver platter, its elaborate greenery now conspicuously chicken-free. Inside the Mini, Arthur (Michael Standing) is already tearing into the stolen chicken, still wearing his helmet and grinning while the car careers onwards.

It’s a moment that lasts only a few seconds, but one that encapsulates the comic sense of entitlement running through the chase. The Minis tear down steps, through shopping arcades, across piazzas and even onto the roof of Turin’s distinctive sail-shaped Palavela, with the gang effectively staging their own miniature British invasion of Turin. For a few breathless minutes, the city and everything in it seems to be theirs: its streets, its buildings, its public spaces and, apparently, its lunches. Arthur snatching the chicken is simply the joke reduced to its most literal form. Why shouldn’t that be theirs, too?

It is theft for its own sake, performed with the same confidence as the theft of four million dollars in gold bullion, which rather gives the game away about what the film thinks a heist actually is: not a means to an end, but a mode of moving through the world, helping yourself because you can, with the thrill lying less in what is taken than in the audacity of taking it.