• The Duke

6/7/24 (Fri)

Richard Michell’s 2020 comedy is a charmer. It’s based on the incredible true story of the theft in 1961 of a heralded Goya painting from London’s National Gallery just days after its acquisition. Writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman delve into the circumstances behind the case. The painting had been purchased by the British state for a princely sum just weeks earlier to keep it in the UK after an American attempted to buy it, so its loss from the tightly guarded state-run museum was a national embarrassment.

The incident was apparently headline news at the time, coming unbelievably 50 years to the day – almost to the minute – of the more famous pilfering of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. That coincidence and the apparent sophistication of the operation (based on the assumption that security was doing its job) led to widespread speculation that the robbery was carried out by an international syndicate; it featured in the first James Bond film, Dr. No a year later, where Bond does a double-take upon seeing the missing painting in the villain’s lair. The riddle remained when the painting was mysteriously returned in perfect condition in a train station locker four years later, but the museum became even more red-faced when the thief, turning himself in six weeks later after careless pub talk left him open to blackmail, proved to be an eccentric, disabled and overweight former bus driver with the odd name Kempton Bunton.

A trial found Bunton innocent of grand larceny on the novel grounds that he simply borrowed the painting (a loophole that was quickly corrected), jailing him only for three months for not returning the frame. Suspicion continued to loom over the incident given doubts that a 240-pound elderly man could climb up and down a ladder and slip through a small window to grab the painting in an immaculately timed moment when the guards weren’t there. Those doubts were answered years later after his death when it turned out that the actual thief was the retiree’s son, who was trying to help his father in a campaign to eliminate television licensing fees for pensioners. (The government eventually did jettison such fees for the elderly, though it later reinstated them.)

The film gives a slightly fictionalized background behind the incident. Bunton lives in the northern town of Newcastle, where he was something of an activist and aspiring playwright. He carries out a quixotic crusade for free television fees, setting up a booth on the streets to collect signatures and serving jail time for refusing to pay despite having disabled BBC from his television. His activities lead to his firing from jobs, such as an incident in a bread factory (a territory Bean explored in Toast) where he defends a Pakistani colleague from their racist boss. His long-suffering wife, who works as a domestic, feels charity begins at home and is unsympathetic with his foils. They have been driven apart by the memory of their late daughter, who died in an accident on a bike that the father gave her; he constantly visits her grave, keeps her photo in his desk, and even writes a play about her, while the mother prefers to forget her entirely.

After he travels to London in an attempt to talk directly to Parliament, we find that he has come into possession of the Goya painting. He keeps it hidden from everyone but his son, who builds a hiding place in a cabinet behind a fake panel. Bunton writes anonymous random notes to the police promising to release the painting if the television licensing fees are scotched. Unfortunately, his other son’s girlfriend spots the painting and attempts to blackmail him. This prompts him to take the painting in hand to the National Gallery and return it (veering significantly from historical fact).

As noted, he is defended in court on the creative claim that since he returned it, he was simply borrowing it and not stealing it; the lawyer also notes Bunton’s charitable aims. (Much of the testimony was apparently taken directly from the court records.) The judge does warn the jury that the defense would allow anyone to borrow a Rubens for their garden party, but the lawyer’s strategy and Bunton’s artless stance (to the female court clerk: “Same again, love, not guilty”) win them over.

When Bunton returns from prison, he finds that his wife has framed their daughter’s photo and hung it on the wall, signaling a reconciliation. The film moves forward a few years to show the son’s confession following the father’s death, revisiting the scene to show how the son took the painting and how the father took the crime upon himself. The son is let off the hook with a warning by the prosecutors, who evidently can’t be bothered with dredging the case up again.

The film approaches the subject with a wonderfully dry British eye, skirting sentimentality only occasionally as with the framed photo of the late daughter appearing on the wall and the attendance of the wife’s upper-class employer at the trial. Michell, who sadly died soon after completing the film, really caught the feeling of contemporary England, at least as seen in films of that period. The racist incident, which I figured was invented as a sop to modern liberal critics, seems to have been based on fact, so good on Bunton for that. The dialogue is understated and natural but always witty, as per the standard for Bean. (The married son, warned about eyeing a woman: “I can look at a menu as long as I eat at home.”) The unhurried pacing was a particular pleasure.

Jim Broadbent, who looks remarkably like the real-life Bunton, plays him to perfection as a guileless idealist. He was the key to the film. I didn’t recognize Helen Mirren as the grim wife, but she turned a potentially bland character into an interesting and sympathetic woman of some depth. They had ample support from Fionn Whitehead as the son and Matthew Goode (who I remember from The Good Wife) as the lawyer in an overall strong cast. A very enjoyable flick.