The Master Touch (1974)

I didn't think this one sounded all that great, what with it being a Euro-crime film with a PG rating, but I was wrong. The Master Touch might not be as deliriously violent as, well, Violent Naples or Contraband, but it's got a certain charm to it thanks to the actors involved. Florinda Balken! Guilliano Gemma! Romano Puppo! And some unknown called Kirk Douglas, who manages to acquit himself nicely amongst those greats. Kirk is indeed a master safe breaker, just out of the jail after a three year stretch, and immediately offered another job by a mobster called Miller. Kirk's a bit torn about it (for about ten seconds) as his wife, Florinda, doesn't really want to be waiting for him to get out of jail a second time. Kirk starts preparing for a new heist in a seemingly impenetrable vault while giving Florinda the old 'I'm not up to nothing' whilst bringing under his wing trapeze artist (!) Guilliano Gemma. Gemma's got his own problems, having had a run in and a fairly mental punch up with one of Miller's goons, the late Romano Puppo, who chases Gemma all around Hamburg, out for a rematch.Kirk teaches Guillano the ropes while Florinda flounces around in a huff, and before they're all ready to go the film takes a left turn into one of the loopiest car chases I've ever witnessed. It's simply over the top Italian goodness, and starts off with yet another fairly violent punch up between Gemma and Puppo. I won't spoil it for you here, and all I'm going to say is that I watched it twice in a row. The heist is fairly tense and detailed too. Throw in a couple of twists and double crosses, and you've got yet another fine Italian crime movie, a genre they seemed to excel at.

Un Uomo Da Rispettare (or The Master Touch, as it is known in the English-speaking world) is a German-Italian crime caper which finds a big Hollywood star in the lead role. This was a common ploy with European films of the 60s and 70s, presumably with the aim of securing a wider market for their film… John Mills, Roger Moore, George Kennedy, Richard Burton, Oliver Reed and many other established talents all lent their names to one or more of these Euro-trash movies at some point or other. Here, the big name in question is Kirk Douglas, playing against type as a career criminal with his eyes fixed on one final score.Just released from a three year jail sentence, thief Steve Wallace (Kirk Douglas) heads back home to reunite with his wife Anna (Florinda Bolkan). Before he gets there, he is accosted by crimelord Muller (Wolfgang Preiss), who tries to persuade Steve to do a job for him – the near-impossible burglary of a million dollars worth of insurance money from a high-tech building in Hamburg. Steve refuses, pointing out that he always did well enough working for himself, and was only jailed in the first place after disastrously attempting to do a job for Muller. However, Steve is secretly intrigued at the prospect of going after this huge prize. He enlists a circus trapeze artist named Marco (Giuliano Gemma) and persuades him to carry out a small robbery at a local pawn shop, carried out at exactly the same moment that he plans to steal the fortune in insurance money. Steve's plan is to take the rap for the pawn shop job – a mere 18 months in jail – while in actual fact he has really carried out the much bigger insurance money robbery. Neither Muller, nor the cops, will realise he is responsible for the bigger crime and the money will be waiting for him when he is released from prison. But can he really trust his new partner in crime? And will his long-suffering wife wait another 18 months to be with her man?Although it contains an intriguing idea – deliberately getting caught for a small crime to disguise a large one – Un Uomo Da Rispettare is generally a lacklustre and disappointing affair. There's a good car chase halfway through and Douglas is in decent form as the villain, but apart from these scant pickings the film doesn't amount to much. The characters are thinly developed and hard to care for; Morricone's score is unexceptional (by Morricone standards, anyway); the robbery itself lacks any true sense of tension due to a confused and under-developed build-up. There are far better examples of these crime caper-style films out there… this one is for genre aficionados and Kirk Douglas completists only.

To insure some box office for this film released in America as Master Touch, Kirk Douglas was added to this Italian-German production filmed in and around Hamburg. I'm sure that Douglas did this one for the European vacation he was going to get. Master Touch is your average caper film that has elements of other films like Bullitt, The Asphalt Jungle and Topkapi. But it doesn't glide into the different moods of these films, it rather lurches uncomfortably.Kirk is a master safe-cracker who's just returned from a stretch in the joint. It's never really explained why this American is operating in Germany, so I assume it was a German prison. Wolfgang Preiss, a syndicate boss for whom he was doing a job when he was caught wants him for another caper. Douglas turns him down flat, but Preiss won't take no for an answer.In the meantime though he's pinched for cash so what to do, but back to the old trade and he decides to pull the job that Preiss offered on his own. He teams up with young Giuliano Gemma, a young circus performer who he saw best one of Preiss's hoods in a fight. In the meantime wife Florinda Bolkan pleads with Kirk to go straight.The best parts of Master Touch are devoted to the robbery and it is here the film most resembles Topkapi. The robbery sequences show that Kirk indeed had a Master Touch.What he didn't have is good judgment in people and that leads to a climax somewhat reminiscent of The Asphalt Jungle. I'm not about to give away any endings.Master Touch will never make anyone's top 10 list of Kirk Douglas films. Good in spots it still leaves quite a bit to be desired. But Kirk's fans around the world will like it.

If you love those 70's films, this has it all. The cars, the clothes, the "modern" machinery that is hokey today, and camera angles, etc. The best part of the film is one of the best car chases on film (perhaps top 10 best ever, really !), with no CGI, quick cutaways, etc., worth watching for this alone. The rest of the heist is pretty standard, but decent, with a complicated ending of course (it never just ends clean in these movies now, does it?). The movie takes place in Germany, although of course all of the text is in English, as if people in Germany speak English as a matter of course in their daily lives. It does not matter though, Hamburg is portrayed as gritty, again, that 70's gritty that we all miss and love to see in films.