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Tuesday, May 30, 2017

How to Steal a Million (1966) [NR] ****

Starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole and directed by the great William Wyler, this is a light crime caper romantic comedy with a touch of drama. It falls somewhere between a pure romantic comedy and an art heist film and takes place in the Paris of 1965, in which everyone speaks English (which was not true – trust me, I was there).

Nicole Bonnet’s (Hepburn’s) father Charles (Hugh Griffith) is a master forger of all types of art with which he supplements his own collection. Many of his pieces have been sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he has yet to be identified as a forger.

He has just loaned out a family heirloom, the Cellini Venus, to a local Paris museum, as the centerpiece of a large exhibition. The piece is a fake that had been crafted by his father, Nicole’s grandfather around 1910, using Nicole’s grandmother as a model.

Later that same evening, Nicole surprises a handsome young gentleman (O’Toole) taking the fake Van Gogh her father had just finished painting off the wall. Nicole thinks he is trying to steal it and she accidentally shoots him with one of her father’s antique muzzle-loading pistols. Then, feeling guilty, she bandages his flesh wound and drives him home to his suite at the Ritz Hotel, in his lovely primrose yellow 1965 Jaguar E-Type convertible.

The next day a representative from the museum calls on her father to have him sign a form authorizing a million dollar insurance policy on the Cellini Venus. Then he tells him he’s authorized a professional inspection of the sculpture to insure that it is genuine.

Panicked, Nicole decides her only course of action is to steal the Cellini Venus from the museum, and for that she needs her burglar’s help. She contacts him at his hotel, they meet, and he begins to put a plan together to steal the sculpture.

The crime caper scenes are as much fun as the rest of the film and, in fact, provide an opportunity for more comedy. Naturally, the plan works and they get away with the sculpture, falling in love in the process.

In the end, Nicole finds out that her burglar, Simon Dermott, is actually a well-respected private investigator specializing in art forgery and in security systems for museums and galleries. He’s not a thief and, in fact, this was his first art heist too. The reason he was in the Bonnet house initially was to obtain evidence that Nicole’s father was an art forger. Naturally, Nicole fears that Simon will expose her father, but, instead, he convinces her father that it is time to retire. In the final scene, Simon and Nicole drive off down the streets of Paris, with a beautiful life ahead of them.


This is simply a delightful 1960s romantic comedy, and both Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole are terrific. There is reasonable romantic chemistry between them, although they played it the way it was typically played in the 1960s: O’Toole shows little emotion and focuses on the task at hand while Hepburn expresses the emotion and focuses on the relationship, hardly being able to keep her hands off O’Toole.


Blogger’s comment: This 1966 release was filmed in Paris between July and September 1965. By coincidence, I was a young USAF officer stationed at a USAF military base near Kaiserslautern, Germany. I owned a 1960 Porsche Roadster and Paris was only a 6-hour drive, partially on autobahn. I just happened to be in Paris for a week in July, 1965, so I was there while this film was being made and it brought back some wonderful memories.

Labels: comedy, crime, Paris, romance, Sixties
IMDb 76/100

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=70, viewers=82) 

 

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