The Duke

Year 18, Day 175 - 6/24/26 - Movie #5,355 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #12

BEFORE: Just one week left in June now, and that's also one week until the start of the Doc Block, neatly coinciding with July 1 to line up the best film for July 4 and the (nearly) All-American line-up of documentaries for our country's 250th Birthday - I added a couple more films into the mix, so I think now I'm up to 41 or 42 docs. I mean, 50 would be great for 50 states and 50 stars on the flag, but I don't think I can make that happen in time. 

Helen Mirren carries over from "The Last Station". Keeping track of everyone who appears in every doc is going to be a logistical nightmare, that's why I started early by compiling the cast lists in advance, but it's still going to be a lot of work, all that archive footage. Today's film has footage of John F. Kennedy in it, so he's got a bit of an unfair head start. Honestly, I don't know who's going to have the most appearances, it could be a U.S. President or it could be a talk-show host like Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien or Letterman or Cavett, I'm just fairly sure we'll have a new front-runner when the Doc Block is over, the leader right now is still Jason Statham with 6 appearances this year. 

THE PLOT: In 1961, a 60-year-old taxi driver named Kempton Bunton steals Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery of London. 

AFTER: This film is intended as both comedy and social commentary, but it is based on a true story, the real 1961 theft of a Goya painting from London's National Gallery - now we the audience have a tiny bit of information at the start of the film about who nicked the art, but you kind of have to read between the lines a little to figure that bit out. It is very easy to leap to the conclusion, as the police did, that Kempton Bunton stole the painting, simply because he was the one who was trying to return the painting for the cash reward. Which raises a few questions, namely was there honestly a reward being offered for the painting's return, or was this just a desperate attempt to lead the thief to come forward, in order to claim that reward? It sure does not seem to be a "no questions asked" type of reward if Bunton showed up with the painting (approximate value: 140,000 British pounds) and they didn't just hand him a check, or even a cheque. Nope, he was arrested and put on trial, for a number of several but connected charges. They charged him with the theft of the painting, the theft of the frame, and also for the damage done to the country's citizenry as they were deprived of the opportunity to enjoy the sight of the painting for several weeks. 

Yes, we're exploring the vagaries of the British legal system once again, second night in a row, and just because a man tries to return a painting for the reward money, naturally that man immediately becomes the prime suspect in the art's disappearance, but, you know, other answers are possible. His fingerprints were not on the painting, but he could have worn rubber gloves. There was no footage of him entering the gallery or taking the painting, but who knows, maybe this elderly bus driver and part-time bread baker was somehow a criminal mastermind and an expert at avoiding cameras and picking locks. Hey, it could happen. 

After all, this is a guy who tried to get out of paying the license fee for his television, because he had disabled the coil on the telly that allowed the signal from BBC1 and BBC2 to be picked up, he claimed that he only watched the other channels, and not the ones financed by the U.K. government, therefore he didn't owe any money to the government for their services. Well, the TV inspectors didn't really see things his way, Mr. Bunton argued that TV should be free for all people, but especially senior citizens who were already having enough trouble making ends meet on a limited income. And he was willing to campaign and petition around his neighborhood for support on this issue, while his wife would have much preferred if he paid the 2p or whatever the fee was, then she could enjoy watching her TV without the fear and shame of breaking the law. 

My own father was kind of the same way, we never had cable TV when I was a kid, because my father felt we shouldn't have to PAY for television, it should be free, and after I moved to New York City I couldn't WAIT to get cable and the hundreds of channels that came with it. Years later I offered to buy cable for him because I knew how much he and my mother enjoyed PBS shows, and they deserved to watch them in HD, plus all the shows on A&E, Animal Planet, etc. We fought for years about this, but finally I just went ahead and arranged the cable installation and had the bills sent to me, and this was just a couple years before they stopped sending TV signals out over the airwaves, and suddenly everybody had to have cable if they wanted clear reception. You know, it kind of benefited me because then I got to keep enjoying cable TV when I went and visited them - but I had to kind of force my father around to my way of thinking. 

Anyway, Kempton had a difficult time after he lost his taxi driver job because he was too talkative and tended to say a lot of crazy things - he then kept promising his wife he'd find a new job, however he tended to sneak off to London to try and drum up press coverage for his TV license cause, while also trying to get someone at the BBC to buy his scripts to turn into TV shows. Kempton also got a job baking bread, but made the mistake of pointing out his supervisor's inherit racism in forcing the workers with darker skin back off their breaks earlier than the white workers. Kempton's wife worked as a housekeeper and babysitter for a local councillor and his wife, however once Kempton got accused of art theft they were forced to fire her, as they were afraid of bad publicity. Kempton's son Jackie worked on building boats, while his elder brother Kenny who lived in Leeds had a job in construction but you know, that probably meant he did low-level jobs for the mob. 

Meanwhile, the police are working hard to try to figure out the identity of the thief, they even brought in a handwriting analysis expert to study the notes that Kempton was sending to the newspapers, in which he was suggesting a plan to exhibit the painting to raise money for his political cause of paying for the TV licenses for older people, however when this plan seemed like a no-go, he resorted to just walking back into the museum with the painting to try to return it via the lost & found department. This was the point at which he got arrested. 

His barrister's propsed defense argument in court involved around proving that Kempton never meant to "steal" the painting for good, but just to "borrow" it for his fund-raising campaign with plans to return it once he'd raised the money for the TV licenses. The court couldn't really view this as a valid excuse, for fear that other people would then walk into art museums and help themselves to the valuable paintings whenever they were short on cash. Well, you can't blame a defendant for trying. But something happened as Kempton was giving testimony on the stand, he just seemed so plain and down-to-earth and friendly that he won people over. It was really hard to believe in the first place that an older man could have been such a nimble thief, plus he didn't really fit the profile of "criminal mastermind" at all, so he was acquitted of the crime of stealing the painting, however the jury did hold him responsible for the theft of the frame, which was never returned or ever found. 

Meanwhile, back at home the true art thief reveals himself, and then of course WHY Kempton was willing to take the blame and go on trial and serve time made perfect sense. Eventually even the police figure out who the real thief was, but re-opening the case and having another trial might cause them to be seen as inept, plus the fact that Kempton was incarcerated even though he was innocent would give him a reason to sue them for false imprisonment, so the police intentionally did not pursue the matter any further. Really this became a comedy of errors across the board, and while not much of it is laugh-out-loud funny, a lot of it is slice-of-life, isn't-that-quite-peculiar funny. 

Really, there's just one thing missing - the film could have used an animated bear who liked marmalade and wears a rainhat who also could have been falsely accused of art theft and gone to prison for it. I mean, this all feels a bit like a "Paddington" film only it doesn't have Paddington in it. Do you remember someone used to alter the "Garfield" comic strips to remove Garfield from every panel? Those were kind of weird because there was just empty spaces where Garfield should have been and it all felt kind of surreal and sad. Yeah, this is kind of like that, it's definitely a Paddington movie without Paddington. I wonder if somebody could add him now, using A.I. JK. 

The real theft was so famous that it got referenced in the first James Bond film, "Dr. No" - the painting of the Duke of Wellington is seen in Dr. No's hideout, implying that maybe he was the one that took it - well, at the time it was just as good a guess as any.

Directed by Roger Michell (director of "Morning Glory" and "Notting Hill")

Also starring Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Jay Kelly"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "Imagine Me & You"), Fionn Whitehead (last seen in "Voyagers"), James Wilby (last seen in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"), Anna Maxwell Martin (last seen in "Alan Partridge"), Sian Clifford (last seen in "See How They Run"), Charles Edwards (last seen in "The Witches" (2020)), Charlotte Spencer (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), John Heffernan (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Aimee Kelly (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Richard McCabe (last seen in "Gladiator II"), Joshua McGuire (last seen in "Saltburn"), Jack Bandeira (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Sam Swainsbury (last seen in "Thor: The Dark World"), Andrew Havill (last seen in "The Last Vermeer"), Neal Barry, Craig Conway (last seen in "The Current War"), Michael Hodgson, Dorian Lough (last seen in "Far from the Madding Crowd"), Sarah Beck Mather (last seen in "Deep Cover"), Michael Mather, Austin Haynes (last seen in 'The Boys in the Boat"), Simon Hubbard, Matthew Steer (last seen in "Criminal"), Val McLane, Michael Gould (last seen in "Radioactive"), Heather Craney (last seen in "Child 44"), Claire Lams, Stephen Rashbrook, Ashley Kumar, Darren Charman (also last seen in "Deep Cover"), Sparrow Michell, Michael Adams (last seen in "Papillon" (2017)), Steve Giles, Andrew John Parker, Cliff Burnett, Sarah Cotton, Sarah Annett, Alice Stokoe, Sharon Facinelli, with archive footage of Sean Connery (last seen in "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?", John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Apollo 18"), Joseph Wiseman (last seen in "Dr. No")

RATING: 7 out of 10 ginger nut biscuits