Since the museum's floor is completely pressure-alarmed how come it did not trigger when the glass case was lifted!!! Brilliant movie otherwise, ending needs time to digest. Great - Locations Music Editing Photography & Peter Ustinov 10/10.Quite a feat for the sixties and the bold attempt with robbery as the focus fantastic.Scenes from this movie copied all over but not with the same result.The cook also performed well,albeit a bit over acted in some parts.All characters well chosen and screenplay and dialogues top class.The editor is the real winner here because of the tension that s generated in the final scenes.Definite watch for all who like a solid performance with lot of location and humour.

First off, Jules Dassin is still, even with all of the attention he gets for being one of the Hollywood Ten, one of the most underrated autuers to ever originate from Hollywood. This seemingly lighthearted work may have been received as minor, but in fact in encapsulates the themes apparent in Dassin's oeuvre and moves his political critique in a bold new direction.Dassin's ability to construct suspense is, I think, worthy of comparison to that of Hitchcock. His appreciation for architecture as an extension of natural landscapes reminds me of that of Antonioni. He again lives up to those comparisons with this film. This movie brings many of the qualities of Dassin's best, older films together: the on-location semi-documentarian urban intensity of "Naked City", the concern for Classical values being turned against themselves as manifested by Greco-Roman wrestling from "Night and the City", and the appreciation of crime as a collaborative and conspiratorial art form previously depicted by Dassin in "Rififi". It seems to me no wonder Dassin would admire conspirators. Did not the Blacklist force him and his fellow commie artists to conspire against the oppression they faced in '50s Hollywood? What is unique about this movie in relation to Dassin's other work is his comfort here with female desire. The lead character, a lady thief, becomes visibly desirous of the athletic, male wrestlers, as well as of wealth. With this piece of work, Dassin's political message, if a bit more allegorical than it was pre-Blacklist, is both more despairing and more hopeful than before. One of the first faces seen in the film is that of Stalin, but not the actual man, rather a puppet at a circus, equated with the marionette leaders of the capitalist world,Roosevelt and Churchill, sitting with Joe. The film ends with an idea of liberation suggested as such. What if, in addition to the sabotage of capitalist wealth and desire, someone tried to rob the Czarist jewels locked deep inside the Soviet Kremlin? Can such a purification of the socialist imagination be responsibly made? Dassin seems to think such a suggestion should be made, whether or not it should be realized. .

We all know that a film can look good on paper as long as there are film fans who have not seen it.It is only by watching a particular film that a film fan is in a position to decide whether it is a masterpiece or a terrible piece of entertainment ? "Topkapi" is known as a brilliant heist film but film critic Lalit Rao could not really get to appreciate it as this film's lead players choose to spend their time in pursuing other pleasure activities instead of concentrating on their heist plans.It is due to this and other plot related inconsistencies that Topkapi can be considered as an absolutely weak effort by maestro of heist film genre Monsieur Jules Dassin.He is known to have made better films where action spoke louder than words. While watching "Topkapi",one can surely notice that there are too many nice views of Turkey.It is not known whether it was all intentionally relevant or director Jules Dassin wanted to achieve a kind of exotic nirvana in order to find spiritual enlightenment in Istanbul.It is due to these reasons that there are moments in this film where it appears as if it is nothing but a glamorous propaganda film made for Turkish government with a sole objective of giving a boost to local tourism industry.It is only for 20 minutes of its heist sequence that "Topkapi" is able to cement interest in viewers' minds.Alas,by that time viewers must surely have made up their mind to stop paying any attention to what is happening with the film.

Jules Dassin's film version of Eric Ambler's book "The Light of Day" seems more like a light-hearted variation of his French heist-drama "Rififi" from 1955. A glamorous Greek thief and her Swiss lover concoct an ingenious plan to rob an emerald-studded dagger from the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul with help from a disparate group of wily characters. Peter Ustinov (wonderful) received the Supporting Actor Oscar as a British con-artist in Turkey who is initially recruited by Turkish security to keep an eye on this raffish team. The picture works mostly on a visual level, with a bravura use of color coupled with spiky editing to propel the story. If only the screenplay had been wittier, Dassin and company might have turned out a masterpiece of the genre. The movie simply isn't as sharp or funny as one might hope. The heist sequence is breathlessly intricate, and the sardonic finale is also a dandy...and yet there is a puzzling feeling of dissatisfaction which hangs over the end results. **1/2 from ****