The trailers that get shown in US movie theatres over the summer can be pretty uninspiring. Either they’re desperate attempts to inject a little life into a film that didn’t make the summer cut; or they offer only the briefest of glimpses of some Thanksgiving or Christmas treat - usually little more than a single image, a logo, and that unmistakable basso profundo voiceover.

This summer, however, there was an exception: an extended series of comedy scenes from a film about a couple of charming bank robbers and the neurotic but equally charming woman they (literally) run into on the road. Part of the hilarity came from the realisation that the guy beneath the full head of hair was indeed Bruce Willis (Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett make up the rest of the trio). But mostly, it came from the verve and off-the-wall humour of the scenes included in the trailer, which stood out in a summer short on grown-up humour. For insiders, it was hard not to notice that the film was from MGM, which had produced the season’s other comedy sleeper, Legally Blonde (which was, of course, the cover story of our last issue).

Bandits, as the final blink-and-you’d-miss-it credit of the trailer revealed, was a Barry Levinson film - a movie from the director of such equally offbeat comedies as Good Morning, Vietnam, not to mention Oscar-winner Rainman and the four ‘Baltimore movies’, Diner, Tin Men, Avalon and Liberty Heights.

Should the trailer have got stuck in the projector’s gate, you might also have been able to pick up that Bandits was shot by the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dante Spinotti (The Insider, LA Confidential) and edited by veteran Stu Linder, who won an Oscar for Grand Prix in 1966 and has worked on all 16 of Levinson’s films. Clearly a quality undertaking.

The film is about a couple of charming crooks: man of action Joe (Willis) and his hypochondriac partner, Terry (Thornton). Known as ‘The Sleepover Bandits’, they are a latter-day Butch and Sundance who are gradually working their way south from Oregon to the Mexican border, across which they hope to escape to a new life made easy by a trunk full of ill-gotten gains.

The Sleepover Bandits’ modus operandi is simple. They call on the manager of the local bank the night before they intend to rob it, and take him and his family hostage (in the nicest possible way, of course). They stay to dinner, spend the night, then accompany him to work a little earlier than usual the next morning. That way there’s no need for a break-in: no ‘Everyone on the floor! This is a raid!’ - just a stroll through the back door, into the vault and hi-ho silver lining off towards the border.

It is an enormously successful scam. And, as they progress southwards through a series of small towns - the Oregon communities of Silverton, Lake Oswego and Oregon City were used in Bandits, as much as possible of which was shot on location, giving way to the Northern California burgs of Santa Rosa, Sebastapol, Tomales Bay, Dillon Beach and, finally, John Steinbeck’s home town of Salinas - The Sleepover Bandits become folk heroes: Americans have always been suspicious of banks and had a soft spot for those who rob them.

What Joe and Terry don’t expect is Kate Wheeler (Blanchett), who runs into Terry with her car and is so upset by the accident that she ends up riding along with them. Gradually, a three-way love affair develops: Joe and Terry both start to fall in love with Kate, while Kate decides her ideal man is an amalgam of Joe’s act-first-think-later philosophy and Terry’s need to think everything through in detail first. She can’t make up her mind.

In point of fact, it was this - rather than the heists - that first drew Levinson to the project. Indeed, he sees the film as belonging to a quite different genre.

Hair apparent: Cate Blanchett plays Kate Wheeler, who teams up with ‘The Sleepover Bandits’ - Billy Bob Thornton (left) and Bruce Willis (right).

“It was interesting - a romantic comedy with a real energy to it,” he recalls. “I particularly liked the idea of the two guys with this woman. The one thing that stood out in my mind was Kate saying she couldn’t choose between the two because together they made the perfect man. What an interesting dynamic!”

The concept for Bandits reached producer Michael Birnbaum by way of Michele Berk of Lotus Pictures. “The story was conceived as being about a man of action and a man of thought and the woman that comes between them,” says the former. “She has to make the classic choice between the thinker and the doer. Joe is this incredibly handsome guy who doesn’t really have to think before he acts but always ends up doing the right thing. Terry is this brilliant but neurotic man who can’t take a step without a plan. He has to know exactly what’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen before he can take action. There’s a great juxtaposition between these two men. They’re two halves of a great person.”