'The Italian Job' turns 50 this year and gets a massive new book

“The Italian Job” is still popular 50 years later, and not just because of the Minis or Michael Caine.

If you’ve ever wanted to know pretty much everything about “The Italian Job,” a new book promises to deliver just that on the film’s 50th anniversary. “The Self Preservation Society: 50 Years of The Italian Job” is a new 335-page book that will offer hundreds of never-before-seen photos from the filmmakers’ archives, along with more than 50 interviews with the cast and crew members. This massive tome, written by Matthew Field, will serve as a follow up to Field’s first book about the film titled “The Making of The Italian Job,” which he wrote at age 19.

How did Field choose to write another in-depth book about the film?

“‘The Italian Job’ was the first film I ever saw — the first movie to enter my consciousness,” Field says. “I saw it sometime in 1985 when I was 4 years old. My dad showed me the 15-minute Mini Cooper chase, and I immediately fell in love. We were a Mini family — my parents had owned them, and both my grandmothers drove a Mini 1000. I would spend hours sitting on the driveway, clutching the steering wheel of my Nan’s Mini, lost in my own ‘Italian Job’ dream.”

The 1969 classic served up one of the best car chases in film, in addition to plenty of advertising for the original Mini cars, which were already a hit in Europe. The film starred Michael Caine, Noel Coward, Raf Vallone, Benny Hill, Rossano Brazzi, Margaret Blye, Irene Handl and Tony Beckley in the main roles, but also featured a number of background character actors more recognizable to British audiences.

The film is best known in car enthusiast circles for prominently featuring Minis, but few enthusiasts know that they just as easily could have been Fiats. The Italian automaker offered a whole fleet of cars plus cash, while British Leyland offered just a handful of Minis, not enough for filming. Actually, the production crew had to go out and buy the rest at dealerships.

So “The Italian Job” could have turned out far more Italian than it did, but Minis won out despite production difficulties.

One other famous bit of trivia — we’re not really spoiling anything here — is that two Lamborghini Miuras were used in the film instead of one, and that the car that was destroyed was a “spent” example that was not really usable. No Miuras were harmed in the making of this feature, as movie credit disclaimers say. The tale of what happened to the roadworthy Miura deserves its own book, but let’s just say it was not easy to locate decades later.

We expect the book to be filled with more trivia than is possible to memorize — it is 335 pages, after all — and thankfully it won’t be about the U.S.-produced remake starring hip hop artist and Chevrolet dealership owner Mark Wahlberg.

But even the remake was a signal of the film’s popularity, a popularity that has only grown over time to the point that the film was voted “the greatest British film ever made” by 2,000 moviegoers in the U.K. just a couple of years ago. That’s a high bar for a film made in the late ’60s, and the film’s own star credits nostalgia for the era in helping the film achieve that cult status.

“People often ask me why it has endured,” Caine writes in the foreword to the book. “The Italian Job is a snapshot of that time — the 1960s — and perfectly encapsulated the decade: the cars, the fashion, the fun and the optimistic attitude that was in the air.”

The book goes on sale June 1 by Porter Press International, priced 45 pounds in the U.K.

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