The Great Communist Bank Robbery

What might have been one of the oddest bank robberies in history took place on the other side of the Iron Curtain in Bucharest in 1959, when the Romanian National Bank was held up in a daylight raid for 1.6 million lei (roughly $250,000). After weeks of investigation, the state police eventually arrested five men and a woman, all members of the Romanian Communist Party. Whether or not the sextet was actually guilty is still debated, especially given their high positions in the Romanian government, but bank robbery was punishable by death in Romania at the time, and the six convicted party members all agreed to play themselves in a state-sponsored film reconstruction of their crime, hoping that this might spare their lives. For five of the six, it made no difference—they were executed after the filming was completed—while the woman received a commuted sentence of life imprisonment, but was released in 1964 and emigrated to Israel in 1970. Alexandru Solomon's fascinating documentary revisits this long-forgotten and still baffling episode of Romanian history, drawing on interviews with the surviving members of the film crew and the police officials involved in the case, who all offer insights into the warped world of Communist Romania (the fact that the robbers were all Jewish only served to reinvigorate Romania's state-sponsored anti-Semitism). The 1959 movie reconstruction is also included here and it is amazing—the robbers were obviously not comfortable on camera, but the film is shot with a surprisingly visceral energy closer to film noir than Marxist propaganda. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)