In 1924, a 19-year-old girl in a seal fur coat strolled into a Brooklyn grocery, asked the clerk for a dozen eggs, and pulled out a gun. The newspapers went wild for the Bobbed Haired Bandit, and they mourned when Celia Cooney’s string of brazen thefts put her in jail. How dull. Cooney was the first famous female crook of the Hollywood age, a symbol of a major cultural shift where women left the home to earn an independent living just like a man. (Even illegally.)
Consider Cooney the wicked godmother of the all-female thieves in Ocean’s 8, a sequel to the hit heist franchise that stars Sandra Bullock as George Clooney’s ex-felon sister, Debbie Ocean. Together with Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter, Sarah Paulson, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina and Rihanna, she schemes to slip a $150m diamond necklace off actor Anne Hathaway’s neck at the Met Gala. Gary Ross’s slick comedy is designed for fabulous gowns, not factual accuracy. According to the FBI, while male thieves scheme in packs, criminal women tend to work either with a boyfriend or alone.
Still, Hollywood has drooled over girl gangs ever since, well, 1954’s Girl Gang, an exploitation flick about a Fagin-esque mobster who hooks beauties on heroin to manipulate them into doing his evil will. Fierce, yes – feminist, no. Soon after, schlock legends Ed Wood and Roger Corman got into the act with the B-movie nasties The Violent Year and Teenage Doll, which at least let brutal women call the shots. Like Rebel Without a Cause, these drive-in movies tried to tap into larger themes about nihilism and bad parenting. Unlike James Dean, the actors were cast for their ability to fill a push-up bra, and their films mainly marketed to men with taglines like: “See what happens behind the locked doors of a pajama party!”
These trash flicks claimed to be ripped from the headlines, promising audiences that real life wild women stalked the earth – and if you were lucky, you could be their next victim. The iconic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! makes that pledge upfront. Its opening narrator swears: “This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist – or a dancer in a go-go club!” Faster, Pussycat! director Russ Meyer knew his three buxom thieves were on the wrong side of the law, but the right side of the 1960s culture war. Sure, they’ve barged into an old man’s house armed with knives and cleavage to loot his hidden fortune. But to audiences, the coot deserves it for sniping: “Women! They let ’em vote, smoke and drive. Even put ’em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!”
Alas for Faster Pussycat! lead Tura Satana and her fellow femme fatales, they usually ended the film dead. Just like the hardliner judge who feared Cooney could inspire a generation of bombshell bandits, these early B-movies couldn’t let criminals go free. Not that actual women were running headlong into a life of sin. Today, only 7% of bank robbers are female, which makes real life lady villains so rare that many do get turned into flicks that can truly claim they’re ripped from the headlines.
Take the 1999 Kingwood stick-up spree where four middle-class high school girls grabbed rifles and robbed a string of fast-food restaurants in Texas. “We kept saying: ‘I can’t believe this,’” the arresting officer told People magazine. “It was like a movie.” Two years later, it was: the teen comedy Sugar & Spice, in which a clique of cheerleaders sticks up a bank in order to fund their best friend’s accidental pregnancy. The girls coordinate their plan with Barbie dolls and study Point Break like a blueprint. As ringleader Marley Shelton chirps: “All we have to do is watch a bunch of movies and learn from their mistakes.”
This time, the ladies live. So do the spoiled snots in The Bling Ring, based on the true story of a pack of gossip magazine-obsessed girls who break into celebrity mansions to steal Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan’s designer threads. Unlike the earlier exploitation flicks, today’s girl gang films are less interested in punishment or titillation. (Unless they’re the critically panned 2004 groaner Taxi, which concocted a posse of bank-robbing Brazilian supermodels headed by Gisele Bündchen just to watch them strip their disguises down to bikinis.) Instead, directors like Sofia Coppola are interested in the satire of a cabal of superficial kids stealing from people who aren’t much different. The joke is that no one deserves designer loot – and when chief troublemaker Emma Watson gets caught, she convinces the media that crime was merely part of her “spiritual journey”. To Coppola, society is the ultimate mark.
On the opposite end of the moral spectrum, F Gary Gray’s 1996 thriller Set It Off is an attack on how capitalism consistently finds ways to pay women less money than men, particularly women of color like leads Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Vivica A Fox and Kimberly Elise, who play four janitors desperately trying to scape together a living wage. To them, holding up a bank is fair revenge – banks and bosses have forever skimmed from their paychecks, too. In Set It Off, ladies steal simply because they don’t have better options, as though the promises of Celia Cooney’s generation of working women never came to be. Twelve years later in Mad Money, another semi-biographical flick riffing on the 1992 Loughton Bank of England thefts, where a female janitor at an incinerator convinced her co-workers to smuggle £600,000 in set-to-be-destroyed bills, woman are still weighing the cost benefits of being wives, serfs or crooks. When Queen Latifah (yes, again – she also stars in Taxi), asks Diane Keaton what she calls trading sex for money, Keaton quips: “A good percentage of marriages.”
What separates these all-girl gangs from all-guy heist flicks like Reservoir Dogs, The Usual Suspects and Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels is the sense that men go looking for a fight. Women in these films, however, are used to fights coming to them: a world that demeans their work, limits their opportunities, hooks them on smack, and forces them to single-handedly support their children. Crime is merely the best of bad choices. Even Tura Satana is just looking for a better way to make cash than go-go dance for goons – and you sense she’s been putting the con on men since puberty. Kidnapping and robbery are just the next level up.
Oceans 8 is the first all-female flick that makes crime look glamorous. Finally, Sandra Bullock’s girl gang is allowed to be smart, capable and sexy – a rare combination in an already rare illegal career path, which is what convinces her the ladies can get away with the jewels. As Bullock smirks: “We will not be the prime suspects.”
Soon, however, women like them will. Ocean’s 8 is launching a new trend in ladylike larceny. Next year, Elizabeth Moss, Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish will team up for DC adaptation The Kitchen, about a cabal of 1970s wives who take over a gangster syndicate when their husbands are sent to prison. Before then, Viola Davis and Michelle Rodriguez lead a four-lady team of bandits when their spouses are slain in Steve McQueen’s Widows. “The best thing we have going for us is being who we are,” swaggers Davis in the trailer, “because no one thinks we have the balls to pull this off.” If their crime wave is a bigger success than Celia Cooney’s drugstore muggings, maybe they’ll inspire more real-life girl bandit gangs – who in turn will inspire even more movies.
