| Director: | Jonathan Kaplan |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Producer: | John E. Quill |
| Runtime: | 98 minutes[1] |
| Company: | Highgate Pictures |
| Budget: | $2 million[2] |
The Gentleman Bandit is a 1981 TV movie directed by Jonathan Kaplan and starring Ralph Waite.[3] It is based on the real story of Reverend Bernard Thomas Pagano.
A priest is accused of armed robbery by various eyewitnesses.
Until the eve of the first screening,[4] the working title for the film was The Bandit Priest.[5] [6]
The film was based on a true story of the Reverend Bernard Thomas Pagano[7] who was arrested in 1979 for five armed robberies and one attempted robberies. Eventually another man, Ronald W. Clouser, confessed to the crimes.[8] [9]
Writer Milan Stitt spent a week interviewing Pagano, his attorney, friends and parishioners in December 1979. He wrote the script in four days.[2] Pagano, a native of Newark, New Jersey, served five years as a chaplain at the VA hospital in Lyons and East Orange in the 1990s, according to Tom Malek-Jones, the chief chaplain for the facility.[10] Pagano, himself a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, was considered "a valuable asset for his work with veterans of that era and did not seem like a robber", Malek-Jones said.[10]
Filming took place in New York City and Westchester County.[11] It began on 19 January 1981. Pagano himself acted as technical advisor on the film.[2] Pagano later taught theology at Notre Dame High School in Easton, Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and early 2000s.