Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema TV review: UK's leading film critic gives mainstream cinema the respect it deserves

Plus: Inside the Factory (BBC2)

Kermode showed us every quirk and variation imaginable in a heist movie (BBC)

I’m one of those terrible curmudgeons who scoffs at the notion of “film studies”. It’s a form of inverted intellectual snobbery. If a film hasn’t got dinosaurs, talking apes or car chases in it, and preferably all three, then it ain’t worth seeing.

Not now, though. Not now that our very own public intellectual of film, Mark Kermode, has started delivering his illustrated lectures in film studies on BBC4. The first episode, last week, I freely admit, I could not bring myself to attend, concerned as it was with the romcom, a genre I find it difficult even to contemplate. So I dived into a documentary about toxic sewage instead.

This week though, Kermode made a raid on the conventions of the heist movie, and I think we can say with some confidence that he got away with it. It was a compelling watch because gradually every crime “caper” you’ve ever seen suddenly slotted into his minimalist structure, albeit one that sometimes gets twisted.

Thus, if you think about it, every film has a “mastermind” who, say, emerges from jail to do one last job, often as not a loveable rogue. He then assembles a team – driver, safe cracker, thug, electronics guy (few women get in on the act), psychopath, that sort of thing. They then have the classic planning session, most likely in a warehouse with toy cars and a scale model of the art gallery/bank/museum/jewellery store they’re about to do over. Then there’s the fatal, tragic error – bad luck, idiotic team member, woman double crossing someone. Then it falls apart, with them turning one each other. And then they end up dead or in jail and occasionally both. A bit like The Apprentice, I suppose.

From those basic components, everyone could make a crime movie, and it almost seems everybody has. Like the fast food industry, where you can guarantee success just by offering something with enough fat, sugar and salt in it, so the basic ingredients here are well tried and true, the interest lying increasingly in the more novel arts of the how the formula is put together.

As a fresher student in film studies, I learned much in this excellent lecture – there’s the right word for it – and that the filmic origins of the classic heist film can be found in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), an American noir directed by John Huston. It had all the usual building blocks, plus terrifically stylish cinematography and some almost Shakespearean lines, such as “crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavour” – which says it all, really.

The heist genre was given a little technological and stylistic enrichment a few years later in the French film Rififi (1955, directed by and starring Jules Dassin), which pioneered the intense “silent” sequence as the crooks attempt to break in and evade the traps to steal the gems – as later reprised by Nick Park in The Wrong Trousers and with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. When you see the sequences from the three films together you see how much they have in common – even the stray “bead of sweat” almost but not quite giving the game away by triggering an alarm. Quoting Truffaut on Rififi, Kermode gave us an even more economical summary of how to make a heist movie:

“Act 1; Preparation for the holdup.

Act 2: Consummation of the holdup.

Act 3: Punishment, vengeance, death.”

By 1960, the British masterpiece The League of Gentlemen, underrated, though not by Kermode, had perfected the “straight” version of the genre. In the scene when Jack Hawkins, as recently demobbed Lt Col Neil Hyde, assembles his troubled recruits, we find him discussing the copy of The Golden Fleece he had sent to them with the first instalment of their fees. And that, of course, was the ancient origin of the genre – Jason and his team of Argonauts pulling off a heist 3,000 years ago. Of course!

From Reservoir Dogs to Dog Day Afternoon, from Ocean’s Eleven to Dead Presidents, Kermode showed us every quirk and variation you could imagine – an all-female gang; skipping the heist itself (usually for budgetary reasons); applying it to a human mind rather than a bank (the recent Inception). He drew out the similarities, and struck the contrasts with such consummate ease I thought he might at least smirk with self-satisfied contentment, preferably in some sort of arty shot. But no such thing, professional as he is. He could have though, and no one would resent it.

I’ll concede that Kermode occasionally qualifies himself for an entry in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner, but what brainbox doesn’t? In his favour he managed to include numerous segments of the original The Italian Job without once quoting, directly or indirectly, “you’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”. He even had time to digress. There was quick sub-lecture on the car chase (the one in The French Connection, the best ever, being strictly speaking a car/train chase).

Through Professor Sir Mark Kermode (as he must one day surely be thus honoured) I discovered an early director named Edwin Porter who, in 1903 directed a film called The Great Train Robbery which invented the technique of “cross-cutting”, or parallel editing, where a sequence of, say, the action with burglars inside the vault dodging the lasers and the coppers outside staking them out are seen simultaneously, adding to tension and suspense and which will be a part of the next crime caper you go to see.

Now, I don’t want to be alarmist, but watching Gregg Wallace inside a Manchester toilet roll factory I suddenly realised the full horror of Brexit: Inside the Factory offered us a small but searing insight into our near future. Metaphorically and literally it will be a case of settling down onto the throne, ready to take back control, so to speak, with a copy of Auto Express, The Economist or Viz (I speak for myself), but, glancing across at the loo roll holder, realising there is none there.

You see, half of the raw material used for the 700,000 toilet rolls a day produced at the works comes from Sweden, which is in the European Union, that is the customs union and the single market. When hard Brexit arrives, the lorry from Scandinavia will be held up in some port or other for ages. There will be a toilet roll shortage. No one told us that in the referendum campaign.

Mind you, I always thought most of them wouldn’t be able to wipe their own backsides, so it’s appropriate really. If only we could, as Boris called it, have a bog-roll Brexit – soft and almost infinitely long. The real thing will be quite messy really, with more than a slight feeling of bowel-loosening panic accompanying it.