From rock star to train robber

Press, 27 January 1988, Page 32

From rock star to train robber

By.

TIM PULLEINE

In 1963, Britain gave the world Beatlemania, the Profumo affair, and the Great Train Robbery, when a commando-style attack on the Glasgow to London night mail train netted the then big-gest-ever haul from such a crime.

A quarter of a century later, the event has been recreated for a forthcoming film, "Buster.” It is an index of intervening inflation that the movie’s budget of around £4 million is substantially more than the £2.5 million the robbery itself bagged. “Buster” offers a dramatised account of the rise and fall of Ronald “Buster” Edwards, one of the prime movers of the robbery, who subsequently escaped to Mexico, only to return to London three years later and give himself up after his wife found exile in Acapulco too much of a not very good thing. He served nine years of a 15-year stretch and now runs a flower stall near Waterloo Station.

The film’s producer, Norma Heyman, and director, David Greene (maker of numerous TV documentaries as well as the

undervalued comedy, “Car Trouble”), are at pains to point out that while Buster includes a reconstruction of the robbery which is as authentic in detail as possible, it is not intended as documentary in spirit. Rather, they see it as an ironic love story set against the “never had it so good” days of the early 60s, in which wealth fails to bring happiness, and the Edwards’ marriage all but falls apart under the sun-baked strain of exile.

Only half-jokingly, Heyman professes that the moral of the story is that crime does not pay. More practically, she says it was "the Dickens of a job” to cast the leading role: the problem resolved itself when she and Greene saw an episode of "Miami Vice” in which rock singer Phil Collins made a guest appearance as a Cockney crook. They offered him the role immediately, and were even prepared to delay production for a year because' Collins was contracted for a world tour in the meantime.

On location at a block of flats in Victoria, where extras with bouffant hair-dos and stiletto

heels walk back and forth under manufactured “rain” cascading from 7-metre poles, Collins — in slimline 60s suit and razor-cut hair — seems a long way from a Genesis concert at Wembley, which was, in fact, where he met the real Buster Edwards. “We got on famously — there aren’t many guys shorter than me, but he’s one of them. What’s he like? Who knows, but he struck me as a hard grafter, and I gather his flower stall is a sort of tourist attraction,” Collins says. Sitting in the two-tone Ford Zodiac which he drives in the film — not, he says, without difficulty — Collins recalls that at about the time of the robbery, he was playing the Artful Dodger in the stage musical of Oliver, having been pushed into auditioning by his mother, proprietor of a theatrical agency. That came to an end when his voice broke, and later he sometimes worked as a film extra. “I was an extra in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ —- Paul McCartney doesn’t believe me, but it’s true,” Collins says. After spectacular success in rock (“I’d been playing drums since I was five”), he still hankered after acting.

“When they asked me to sing on ‘The Two Ronnies,’ I said I’d only do it if they let me be in one of the sketches too,” Collins says. “With ‘Buster,’ I want to get away from music completely for a bit, which is why I’m not doing the score for the picture.” (The powers-that-be were still hoping, however, that he might change his mind about that.)

He says he has enjoyed the experience of film-making tremendously, though shooting the robbery, on a private railway line near Loughborough, was hard going. “It took us four nights to do what the real robbers did in about 10 minutes. It got bloody cold, and even for a rock musician, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. aren’t exactly congenial working hours,” Collins says.

The unit was unable to film at Leatherslade Farm, the robbers’ actual hideout. “The owners; have got sick of the publicity, but Bruce Reynolds (another of the robbers) came up to the location and said we’d found a better site than the original,” Collins says.

The film has been made on no less than 50 locations in England, plus two weeks in Acapulco and a week in the studio. Greene says that while ruthless authenticity was the order of the day for the details, he has sought an “enlarged” cinematic style. “I like to use a crane and a Steadicam, to put some movement into it. I can’t help feeling that all too often British films are expected to work on too

small a scale,” Greene says. The screenplay is the first work for the cinema of Collin Shindler, a TV writer and producer (and author of a thesis on Frank Capra), whose friendship with Greene dates back to the day they both entered Bury Grammar School at the age of 11. He jocularly suggests that Edwards’s split between domesticity and the high-rolling life reflects the contrasting life-styles of himself and the director. “I see it as a romantic comedy, not as a caper movie.” The story effectively ends with Edwards’s surrender in 1966, with a flash-forward epilogue at the flower stall, which for practical purposes has been somewhat incongruously relocated to the Embankment, just outside the Festival Hall. The role of Edwards’s wife June is taken by Julie Walters, who after playing Cynthia Payne in “Personal Services” (her favourite role), and Joe Orton’s mother in “Prick Up Your Ears,” might be thought to have carved out something of a niche in reallife characters.

“With a real person,” she says, “there’s obviously less freedom, but I didn’t model the character at all closely on June Edwards, although I did meet her. With ‘Personal Services’ it was rather different, ‘the clues there did come from Cynthia.” She says the script commended itself partly because it was not primarily a comedy: “I love comedy, but it’s nice to have a break.” She is full of admiration for her co-star: “Phil has an actor’s instincts, he doesn’t seem like a novice at all.” But she voices some reservations about working on location. “I look on the studio as something of a luxury. On location, it can get embarrassing if a lot of people gather around to watch. And it can take away from your performance. The other night we were down at Weybridge, and I’ve never been so cold in my life. The rehearsel went so well, but by the time we got to the closeups, the feeling just wasn’t there,” Walters says. Did she retain any memories of the Great Train Robbery taking place? “Well vaguely. I remember my dad saying something like ‘Brilliant.’ But I think at 13 I was more interested in the Profumo scandal — Christine Keeler, the man in the mask and all that,” Walters says. Nothing, of course, seems more distant than the recent past. But I think that for today’s overwhelmingly youthful movie going audience, most of them not born at the time of the robbery, the most astonishing moment in “Buster” might come in the script’s casual allusion to buying a house for £3OOO. — (C) “The Guardian.”