The 1969 British caper movie The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine as the thieving brainiac Charlie Croker, with a supporting cast that included Noel Coward, Raf Vallone, and Benny Hill, is a much-loved classic in England, but its commercial failure in the U.S. at the time of its release doomed plans for a sequel. (The movie did eventually inspire a sleek Hollywood remake in 2003.) Which meant that the movie's ending--a cliffhanger designed as a set-up for a "part two"--has been hanging there for almost forty years. In the movie's last scene, Caine and his gang are heading for Switzerland with their stolen fortune in gold when the vehicle they're in goes into a skid on a winding mountain road; they wind up in a Laurel and Hardy routine, trapped in their getaway bus as it teeters on the edge of a cliff, with the robbers on one end and the gold inching towards the open doors at the other end. Is there any way our heroes can escape with their lives and the swag? "Hang on a minute lads," Caine announces, "I've got a great idea!" And there the matter stands, Or stood, until last fall, when the Royal Society of Chemistry put out a call for proposed solutions to the problem, setting only the stipulations that submissions should have "a plausible basis in science," should not require "more than thirty minutes, and not use a helicopter." (The timing was inspired, it turns out, not by the movie's fortieth anniversary but by the hundredth anniversary of the periodic table. Of the elements comprising that table, gold is Number 117. Don't you tell me this site isn't educational.)
The winning entry came in from a fellow named John Godwin, a self-professed lifelong fan of the movie, so he may have gotten a head start of a few decades on trying to work out the details of his master plan. Here's how USA Today broke it down:
•Break the windows at the back to reduce weight.
•Break two windows at the front, hold one gang member upside down out of the window to deflate the front tires and stabilize the vehicle.
•Drain the rear fuel tank through an access panel at the bottom of the bus.
•Gang members leave one by one from the front, collecting stones to replace their weight.
•Keep adding stones until someone can safely go to the rear to retrieve the gold.
Amusingly, the film's producer, Michael Deeley, who came up with the original ending after rejecting a number of other possibilities, had a vision of how the problem would be solved at the start of that sequel that never got made, and it depended on--yes, a helicopter. The whirlybird would contain Mafia soldiers, who would rescue the bus, reclaim the gold, and set up a plot that would have the robbers chasing them so they could steal it again. (It would of course be plausible that the gangsters wouldn't kill them, because even the Mafia likes Michael Caine.) A few years ago, Caine himself offered a solution, though it's not completely clear whether he was describing something that was considered for filming or even something that had been filmed and discarded, or just recounting a daydream he'd cooked up during a slow day on the set of Hannah and Her Sisters. Caine said that in his own alternate cut, his character would "crawl up, switch on the engine and stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out... The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over" into the ravine, where it is collected by the Mafia, and then the heroes have to run after them to steal it back. Of all these solutions, Godwin's has the virtue of ending with the heroes and the gold in pretty much the same place, with no spoilsport Mafiosi in sight. It remains an open question which of the gang would be deputized to walk down the mountain in search of a gas station so they could refill the fuel tank. But who am I kidding, it'd have to be Benny Hill.
