Peter Collinson’s classic British crime caper The Italian Job has one of the most iconic cliffhanger endings in movie history. Michael Caine leads the ensemble in one of the most memorable roles of his career as smooth-talking Cockney crook Charlie Croker, who puts together a crew to steal a cache of gold bullion on its way through Turin, Italy. Along the way, they face adversity from the Mafia, the local authorities, and simple bad fortune. The Italian Job follows the heist movie formula pretty closely until its delightfully subversive ending brings the whole operation grinding to a halt, precariously dangling on the side of a mountain in the Alps.
Caine’s pitch-perfect performance, the thrilling climactic Mini Cooper chase sequence, and the portrayal of contemporary culture have made The Italian Job a staple of British cinema. The hilariously ambiguous final scene is one of the main reasons the movie has enjoyed such a lasting legacy. The ending leaves audiences with an interesting dilemma to ponder while the credits roll. The problem that Charlie and his gang face at the end of The Italian Job is still discussed and debated to this day. In fact, The Royal Society of Chemistry put the best minds in the world in a competition to figure out a scientifically sound way to solve the predicament.
The Italian Job Ends On A Literal Cliffhanger
In the third act ofThe Italian Job, unlike most other movies about dangerous heists, the robbery is a resounding success. Charlie and his crew get away with the gold, split it up between three Mini Coopers, and manage to evade the cops in a high-speed pursuit through the streets of Turin. After outrunning the police, they ditch the Minis, load the gold onto a bus, and take off with the rest of the crew on a long, winding mountain road. Then, the bus spins out of control and dangles over the edge of a cliff.
The crew huddle to the front while the gold slides to the back. Charlie says, “Hang on a minute, lads, I’ve got a great idea...” But the movie ends before that “great idea” is revealed. Not only is this a cliffhanger movie ending that leaves the audience without a clear resolution to the story, but it’s also a literal cliffhanger with the characters hanging off a cliff. According to the behind-the-scenes documentary The Making of The Italian Job, four definitive endings were written for the movie, but producer Michael Deeley was dissatisfied with all of them and came up with the cliffhanger that made it to the final cut.
How Could The Italian Job’s Cliffhanger Ending Have Been Resolved?
The ending of The Italian Job encourages viewers to fill in their own resolution to the story. There are a number of factors to take into account, but the ideal solution would save the gold without losing any of the crew members to a deadly drop. In 2008, the Royal Society of Chemistry held a competition in order to come up with the most plausible solution to the problem of the ambiguous ending of The Italian Job. John Godwin had the winning entry; he suggested knocking out the bus’s windows and draining the fuel tank (via Reuters).
With an empty tank, the bus would stop teetering on the edge of the cliff and settle back down on the road. This would allow one of the robbers to get out of the bus and load rocks onto it, balancing out the weight so that the gold could be retrieved without risking any of the crew’s lives. Since this would leave the crew stranded on an isolated mountain road, Godwin also suggested they could bribe a passing motorist with some stolen gold to acquire a vehicle. The Royal Society of Chemistry’s chief executive, Dr. Richard Pike, praised Godwin’s entry as “the kind of practical thinking Croker would have used.”
Why Did The Mafia Want To Foil The Heist?
In the opening scene of The Italian Job, the mastermind behind the heist is run off the road and sent to his death by some Italian mobsters who want to prevent the robbery from going ahead. When Charlie takes over leadership of the heist at his dead friend’s posthumous request, he is harassed by the Mafia every step of the way. At one point, the mobsters are going to kill Charlie, and he has to threaten to vandalize all the Italian establishments in the UK to get them to spare his life. Yet it’s never clear why the Mafia is so adamant to stop the heist from taking place.
To the original Charlie Croker and his heist team, the Mafia simply presented another obstacle standing in the way of their goal. They’re the villains in a movie with no clear heroes. Since the mobsters aren’t the focus of the story, the filmmakers aren’t too concerned with their motivations. There are two possible reasons why the gangsters wanted to foil the heist so badly. The simplest explanation is that the Mafia wanted to steal the cache of gold bullion for themselves. There’s also a chance that they wanted to keep British criminals out of their home turf of Italy.
Was An Italian Job Sequel Planned?
Michael Caine told the BBC his version of what happened after the movie’s ending, which would’ve led into a sequel to The Italian Job. Similar to Godwin’s explanation, Caine’s involved emptying the fuel tank to balance out the weight and level the teetering bus. Caine explained, “I 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. There are a load of Corsican Mafia at the bottom watching the whole thing with binoculars. They grab the gold, and then the sequel is us chasing it.”
The lack of an Italian Job sequel is attributed to the movie's negative reviews and underperformance at the U.S. box office (via the Daily Mail). Maybe it’s for the best that this cornerstone of British cinema remained a standalone work and audiences didn't see what happened next. The cast shared great chemistry, but comedy sequels are tricky to pull off. A sequel might have tarnished the legacy of the original if it didn’t live up to its greatness. The unresolved cliffhanger is one of the most iconic movie endings of all time, and making a sequel that resolved the cliffhanger would have ruined its hilarious ambiguity.
The Real Meaning Of The Italian Job’s Ending
The literal cliffhanger at the end of The Italian Job is essentially the punchline of the movie. Every great comedy like The Italian Job is structured like an elaborate joke: the planning and execution of the heist are the setup and the bus careening over the edge of a cliff is the punchline that pays it off. Rather than intending to confuse The Italian Job's audience at the end, there could be a deeper meaning to the movie's final scene. The cliffhanger could be seen to convey the message that crime doesn’t pay.
The failure in The Italian Job runs deeper than a lot of heist-gone-awry movies. The heist itself was a success: the crew successfully acquired the gold, got the cops off their tail, and escaped with the full payload. Then, Charlie and his crew found themselves in a unique predicament where they could save themselves but lose the gold, or try to save the gold and end up plummeting to their deaths. In this sense, in the end, The Italian Job is a parable about greed.