- 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.
sekenbanashi 