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.)
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