Taglines: The prefect bait. The perfect crime. The perfect triple cross. It All Happens on Perfect Friday.
Perfect Friday movie storyline. Mr. Graham (Stanley Baker), an assistant bank manager who works in the West End of London, is dissatisfied with his boring life. He becomes acquainted with Lady Britt Dorset (Ursula Andress), one of the bank’s wealthiest patrons, and they devise a plan, along with the indolent Lord Nicholas Dorset, to rob the bank. Their plan–to be enacted on the day that the manager plays golf–is for Britt to seduce the main security guard and for Lord Dorset, posing as a bank inspector, to substitute counterfeit money.
The scheme almost fails when a real inspector arrives, but a second opportunity arises, and Lady Dorset absconds with the funds. She fails to show up for the scheduled division of the loot, however, and Graham and Lord Dorset realize that they have been doublecrossed. Undaunted, they begin to plan another robbery for the following year.
Perfect Friday is a British bank heist film released in 1970, directed by Peter Hall. It stars Ursula Andress as Lady Britt Dorset, Stanley Baker as Mr Graham, David Warner as Lord Nicholas Dorset and T. P. McKenna as Smith.
Dimitri de Grunwald had set up a new production and distribution consortium, the International Film Consortium, a co op of independent film distributors throughout the world. They raised finance for a series of films produced by London Screenplays Ltd – The McMasters, Perfect Friday, The Virgin and the Gypsy, The Last Grenade, and Connecting Rooms. De Grunwald described Perfect Friday’s commercial prosects as “safe-ish”.
The movie was produced by Stanley Baker who later said of it: I think he [Peter Hall] will produce film work as interesting as what he’s done on the stage… What I like about Perfect Friday is that everybody lies to each other and everybody believes each other’s lies. I don’t know if the audience realises it, but every time the characters speak to each other, they’re lying.
Film Review for Perfect Friday
There’s something so simple-mindedly complete about Big Heist movies that it’s impossible for me to dislike them. They’re all about the same, and you know how they’re going to turn out: A mastermind assembles a team of experts to crack the Bank of England, or spirit away the crown jewels, or something, and they devise an incredibly complicated plan.
At some point during the movie, there is an obligatory scene where the leader pins a map to the wall showing all the entrances to the bank, etc., and where the guards should be at exactly 17 seconds past the hour. It’s old stuff and you’ve seen it before (in “Rififi,” “Topkapi,” “Robbery,” “Grand Slam,” “League of Gentlemen,” etc.) But if you like Big Heist movies, you squirm with delight all the same. After a while they get to be like Westerns; you go to see if they’ve found a new way to do the good old cliches.
“Perfect Friday” is like that, a movie made of froth and sweep-second hands and Ursula Andress. It is of absolutely no consequence or importance at all, but it’s nice while you’re watching it. Very nice. And it confirms once again that Miss Andress may be the only sex symbol since Sophia Loren who can also play comedy. They keep lobbing those Raquel Welch roles at her, where she has to make a loincloth look statuesque. But in movies like this one and “The Tenth Victim” or “What’s New, Pussycat?” she’s as funny as Loren or even Marilyn Monroe.
The mastermind this time is Stanley Baker again, fresh from being the mastermind in “Robbery.” He’s a bank manager who has a scheme for heisting 300,000 pounds and wisking it away to Fiji, or Rio, or Geneva, or wherever Pan Am’s going next. He enlists Miss Andress and David Warner, her husband, and both men privately plan to leave for Fiji, etc., with the money and Miss Andress but not with the other man, which sounds like a good idea to me, all right.
Perfect Friday (1970)
Directed by: Peter Hall
Starring: Stanley Baker, Ursula Andress, David Warner, Patience Collier, T. P. McKenna, David Waller, Joan Benham, Julian Orchard, Trisha Mortimer, Anne Tirard, Johnny Briggs
Screenplay by: Scott Forbes, Anthony Greville-Bell
Production Design by: Terence Marsh
Cinematography by: Alan Hume
Film Editing by: Rex Pyke
Costume Design by: Kiki Byrne
Art Direction by: Robert W. Laing
Music by: John Dankworth
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: London Screen (UK), Chevron Pictures (USA)
Release Date: November 10, 1970 (UK), December 23, 1970 (US)
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