Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

This week's film is the 1978 British heist comedy, "The Great Train Robbery."

It was directed by Michael Crichton, who also wrote the screenplay, adapting his own 1975 historical novel of the same title.

"The Great Train Robbery" stars Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Leslie-Anne Down with a supporting cast that includes Alan Webb, Malcolm Terris, Robert Lang, Michael Elphick, Wayne Sleep and Pamela Salem.

In 1855 London, Edward Pierce is well-known and accepted as a wealthy businessman who hobnobs with his fellows at fashionable clubs.

But in fact, Pierce is a master criminal with an outrageous ambition to rob a train of a load of gold bullion intended for the British troops fighting in the Crimean War against Russia.

The gold is locked inside two heavy safes in a baggage car, and each safe is fitted with two locks.

The four keys to the safes are kept separate.

Two are held by two different directors of the bank, Huddleston and Bradford.

And two are locked away in the South Eastern Railway office.

To carry out this daring plan, Pierce depends upon the help of his mistress, Miriam, and enlists a pickpocket and screwsman, a safecracker named Robert Agar.

With his team assembled, Pierce sets to work.

First, they must obtain access to each of the four keys and make wax impressions of each and to return them to their place so no one will know they have been copied.

If and when they manage to do this, they must then find a way to get someone into the baggage car with the safes, open them, put the gold into bags, and get the bags to waiting accomplices, all while the train is speeding along the track from London to Folkestone.

The job will require various criminal and intellectual skills, split-second timing, a keen sense of human psychology, and considerable luck, since no one has yet figured out how to rob a moving train.

Michael Crichton was a man of many talents, most notably as a director, screenwriter, and a prolific novelist.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 23rd, 1942, and had what he later described as an idyllic childhood growing up on Long Island, New York.

He always wanted to be a writer.

And at 16 had an article he'd written about a trip to Arizona published in "The New York Times."

He graduated from Harvard College with a degree in biological anthropology in 1964 and was a guest lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge University in 1965 before entering Harvard Medical School.

It was while he was at Cambridge that Crichton first became aware of the story of the Great Gold Robbery of 1855 and began researching the facts behind what would become his third novel published under his own name, "The Great Train Robbery," which appeared in 1975.

But "The Great Train Robbery" was, in fact, Crichton's 13th novel.

He wrote eight pulp novels under the pseudonym John Lang between 1966 and 1972, a medical thriller under the name Jeffrey Hudson in 1968, and another novel with his brother Douglas under a pseudonym combining their first names, Michael Douglas, in 1970.

After he graduated, Crichton decided to write rather than enter medical practice.

His first novel under his own name, was another medical thriller, "The Andromeda Strain" published in 1969 and adapted into a movie directed by Robert Wise in 1971.

Crichton began writing for films with a screenplay for "Extreme Closeup" in 1973, the same year he both wrote and directed "Westworld" starring Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin and James Brolin.

In 1978, he directed and wrote the screenplay for "Coma" based on a novel by Robin Cook and starring Genevieve Bujold and Michael Douglas, the real Michael Douglas.

When Crichton later felt the British and Irish crew for "The Great Train Robbery" didn't respect him as a director, he was only 36 and an American, he had them watch "Coma."

It worked.

The crew decided Crichton knew what he was doing and started doing their best work.

When Michael Crichton adapted the screenplay for "The Great Train Robbery" from his novel, he quite deliberately thought first in terms of what elements would make an effective film comedy.

As he said, "The book was straight, factual, "but the movie is going to be close to farce."

So it's not surprising that Crichton's script plays fast and loose with the historical data.

In real life, the four criminals were Pierce, Agar, Burgess, and Tester, a railway clerk.

The lovely Miriam, unfortunately, was entirely a product of Crichton's imagination.

Two of the four keys were kept in London and were stolen by Tester and duplicated.

Another two were kept in Folkestone, where Pierce took and duplicated them, but they were not used in the robbery.

The baggage car was not locked from the outside, and Burgess, the railway guard, let both Pierce and Agar into the car.

The robbery was successful and authorities were not even sure where and when it had taken place, in London, between London and Folkestone, or later on the ship to France.

But it all came apart when Agar was arrested on an unrelated charge and he asked Pierce and Tester to provide for his mistress.

When they failed to do so, she told Agar, who grassed on his erstwhile comrades to the authorities and later testified against them at trial.

Pierce was sentenced to two years hard labor while Burgess and Tester, because they had betrayed their employer, The Southeastern Railway, were transported to Australia for a minimum of 14 years.

In making his novel into a film, Michael Crichton said, "My dream was that the historical world "was going to be lovingly recreated, "and then I was going to shoot "'The French Connection' inside it."

Most of the movie was shot in Ireland, which had both the unspoiled rural countryside and the impressive Victorian buildings the script called for.

The budget was $7 million, making it Crichton's most expensive motion picture to that point, with 1/10th of the budget spent on a single set, the recreation of London's Strand in the mid 19th century.

The sequence when Sean Connery, as Edward Pierce, works his way along the top of the train from his passenger car to the locked baggage car recalls his days as James Bond, a role he had last played in "Diamonds Are Forever" three years earlier.

Critic Rob Nixon wrote for TCM in 2004, "For the thrilling climax, "ace photographer Geoffrey Unsworth "filmed Connery on top of a speeding train "barely escaping decapitation as he ducks under low bridges "with no stunt double, back projection, "or the computer-generated effects we're used to today."

The scenes were shot over several days.

The tops of the train cars had been treated with grit, and Connery wore soft-soled shoes to keep him from slipping, but he still had to contend with the soot and cinders from the locomotive getting into his eyes and hair.

At one point, director Crichton's own hair caught on fire from an ember.

Connery, who was 48 at the time, had been assured the train would only travel at about 35 miles per hour during the shoot, but Connery was convinced it was going faster.

As it turned out, the train's engineer was counting telegraph poles to calculate the speed and got his figures wrong.

The pilot of a helicopter that was used to film the sequence confirmed that the train was really going over 55 miles per hour.

Despite close calls, Connery completed the sequence unscathed, but he would later have to face his wife Micheline's anger that he agreed to do such dangerous stunt work in the first place.

"The Great Train Robbery" was released in Britain under the title "The First Great Train Robbery" to differentiate it from two other events.

First from Edward S. Porter's silent movie of the same name that is generally considered the first movie Western, and then the later great train robbery of 2.6 million pounds from a Royal Mail train between Glasgow and London on August 8th, 1963.

Critical reaction to the film was mixed.

Critics applauded its light and comical tone, its lush Victorian setting, and its action sequences, but expressed disappointment with what some considered too slow a progression to the robbery itself.

Charles Chaplin in "The Los Angeles Times," for example, called "The Great Train Robbery," "An intelligent and handsome work.

"It is just a little slow, dull, and bloodless, "pure Victorian, when a dash or two "of Elizabethan vivacity couldn't have hurt."

Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times," like many other critics, praised Sean Connery's performance, although not, like them, for his daring stunt work.

Instead, Ebert said Connery, "Is one of the best light comedians in the movies "and has been ever since those long ago days "when he was James Bond."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.