Topkapi (1964)

I consider this film to be far from classic. I almost turned it off after the first few minutes. It starts with some horribly annoying credits. Then there is a bit where Melina Mercouri addresses the audience to explain where the final sequence of the movie will take place. This part feels like it was tacked on after filming.Then next portion of the film involves the setup for the final section. This part is uneven, but it does contain some humor.Finally, we get to the actual caper, a Mission Impossible-like, daring heist that plays out in real time, which I appreciate. The ending of the film feels unimportant.The best thing about this movie, besides the heist, is it seems like the cast is having fun. It's a great cast, even if they are somewhat underutilized. I know Mercouri's character is supposed to be sexy and mercurial, able to entice and seduce all the male characters, but I feel the character falls short in this area though, again, it seems like she is having fun.

It's a lot of fun and it's suspenseful as well, if you haven't seen it before. The acting is sometimes outrageously hammy but it fits neatly into the general atmosphere, which is almost always excessive -- the music, the performances, the flamboyant tourist attractions, the stunts, the jokes, the impossible caper itself.The caper is, well, if not impossible, highly improbable because it involves the most intricate planning and is pulled off without practice and without a flaw. If you or I were to try it, scampering across the sky-high domes of museums in Istanbul, pulling ropes a predetermined number of millimeters, coordinating the escape plans, the first thing we'd do is fall off the roof and die.Maximilian Schell is the brains behind the burglary, an excellent actor who doesn't have much to do except show his mile-wide grin. Melina Mercouri is his girl friend who is treated as a semi-maniacal nymphomaniac, kind of unconvincingly, although she has a neatly assembled, lanky, supple figure. Her cracked, throaty voice sounds cured by years of smoking Papastratos. Peter Ustinov, the "schmo" who is inducted into the gang, provides most of the humor and he's very effective, especially in his dealings with the crazy, drunken cook played by Akim Tamirov. Tamirov, intoxicated and mangling his English, whispers hoarsely to Ustinov that he is here to identify Russian spies. "You mean -- are you here, umm, officially?" "Fishily? NO, NO, not fishily, I give you good MEAT. No FISHILY." And Tamirov brandishes a hideous wrinkled smoked fish under Ustinov's nose.The general impression is that the cast and crew had a good time, and the viewer probably will too.

Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964) is among the highlights of the '60s caper-comedy boom, which also produced Charade, Gambit, Arabesque and How to Steal a Million. Helmed by Jules Dassin, the French filmmaker behind heist movie blueprint Rififi (with its legendary silent central set-piece - all 20 minutes of it), it's clever, stylistically showy and deliciously tongue-in-cheek. Maximillian Schell is the criminal mastermind who recruits a team of amateurs as he plots to steal a priceless emerald-studded dagger from an Istanbul museum. He's nicking it for Melina Mercouri, his nymphomaniac former lover, whose fondness for men is exceeded only by that passion for jewels. Schell's protegees include alarms expert Robert Morley, strongman Jess Hahn and human fly Gilles Segal, while whimpering, half-Egyptian tour guide Peter Ustinov and drunken servant Akim Tamiroff (one of the great character actors of the Golden Age, whose fans included Orson Welles) also buzz around. Ustinov's an unwilling plant for the cops, who thinks the group are terrorists. Tamiroff comes with the villa where they're staying; he's convinced they're "Russische spies". It takes a little while for the film's disparate pieces to slot into place, and the variety of European accents can be a struggle, but the second half is utterly superb, with a heist sequence that's tense, funny and mirth-inducingly ingenious, and a gem of an ending. Ustinov got an Oscar for his hilarious turn as the incompetent Arthur Simpson, but the whole ensemble does a neat job, and Tamiroff is very amusing as the bitter, suspicious, misguided, constantly slurring would-be informant. Particularly when he starts talking about fish.

This was a good movie except for the awful lead female. For at least 3/4 of the movie we were going "it's a guy in drag". Seriously, even in the 1960s sexy was sexy, but in this trans-gender casting we just couldn't tell. The story is good, maybe even very good, the script is OK, the score good and the cinematography excellent. Some of the more American actors grate but hey!, that's Americans for you. So, overall, this could have been a classic 60's movie. The miscasting of Ms X was a fatal flaw. We're sorry, but it's just not good enough. And it wasn't back then either. Why IMDb needs 10 lines I don't know, after all it's supposed to be a review not a step-by-step analysis of each and every scene in the movie.