Another armoured car robbery. Will these men never learn?

Apart from being one of the all-time great British comedies, The Ladykillers tells the story of a gang of hardened criminals attempting to rob an armoured car.

Our next film starts with an identical premise, but what happens next is completely different.

Payroll deals with the planning, execution and aftermath of a violent armoured car robbery in Newcastle (filmed on location). The robbery is successful in that the gang gets away with the money, but there are casualties on both sides, and (inevitably) everything begins to unravel very quickly. 

There is emphatically no Mrs. Wilberforce in this film, and at first glance it might seem like an unusually macho selection for a film series entitled Ordinary Ladies. The robbers are all men, as are the drivers of the armoured car and the police who conduct the investigation. But that is exactly what makes the film interesting.

Having dealt with the robbery, the film deftly pivots and carries on in a completely different direction, and it quickly becomes apparent that the true hero of the story is someone who - up to that point - had only been a "stock" background character.

Much attention has been given to the "Bechdel Test" over the years; Alison Bechdel's three-question-test to evaluate the female presence in a given film. Contrary to some slightly regressive pushback, the test does not advocate "female quotas" in films. Bechdel was not insisting that film-makers simply "garnish" their films with gratuitous female characters merely to bump up the averages. What the test (hopefully) illuminates is the sheer number of films in which any female characters are only included to advance the stories of The Men.

Rather than existing as characters on their own terms, with lives and ambitions of their own, female characters all too often are only included to be "the wives" or "the girlfriends" or "the mothers" of the male characters. As the screenwriter Fay Kanin very succinctly put it, women are often merely the "wallpaper" around men's lives.

For the first half of its running time, Payroll gives every indication that it is going to fall squarely into that template. But once the robbery is over, the film takes a very unexpected turn, and proceeds to tell a very different type of story. 

Spoiler alert: There Is No Wallpaper.

We will be screening Payroll on Thursday, the 30th of June at 7.30 at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.