Topkapi (1964)

Directed by Jules Dassin
Written by Eric Ambler (novel) and Monja Danischewsky (screenplay)
Starring Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell

Don' t you hate it when you watch a movie and it is nothing like the book?

That's how I felt when I first started watching Topkapi, which was based on a novel by Eric Ambler, the father of modern spy novels. I guess I got into an espionage kick and read his book A Coffin for Dimitrios while I've been preparing to go to school. I don't know. Maybe with what I'll be learning I need to prepare myself for the posibility of writing spy fiction.

After Dimitrios I read Light of Day because I had read that they had already made a film out of it and that Pierce Brosnan was going to remake it as The Topkapi Affair.

Unfortunately, Jules Dassin, the director of the critically acclaimed 1955 heist movie Rififi--which I haven't seen yet--took a lot of liberty with the plot about a small-time English con-man in Athens named Arthur Simon Simpson who gets mixed up with upscale jewelry thieves who are planning a daring heist of the royal jewels in Istanbul. Along the way, Turkish security catches on to him and he is forced to spy on the thieves or else he'll get thrown into a Turkish prison.

While Ambler tells the story from Simpson's point-of-view, focusing on the espionage involved in taking down the gang of criminals, Dassin, who is American-born and was forced into exile in France after he was named as a communist before Congress, plays up the heist telling it from the thieve's point-of-view, with Simpson being just a part of the ensemble.

Peter Ustinov does an excellent job of portraying Simpson as the loser that Ambler portrayed him as. His mannerisms provide the heft of the subtle comedy in the film. During the heist someone tells him, I was afraid you lost you nerve. To which he replies, "It's not a question of losing my nerve; I never had nerve!"

The Austrian Maximilian Schell, who happens to be Angelina Jolie's godfater [I'll let the gentle reader decide what kind of a job he is doing], plays the Walter Harper, the Swiss leader of the gang, with a suaveness and surprises me that I haven't seen him in anything else. Melina Mercouri plays the femme fatale whose idea it is to steal the jewelry and tempts Simpson to join the gang. The Greek actress would marry Dassin and their marriage would last until her death in 1994. She was also became Greece's first female minister of culture in 1971.

I guess I might have reacted to the film differently if I hadn't read the book. Besides the change in the plot, even though there were comedic elements in the book it seemed like the film, as often seems to happen with films of that era, tried a lot harder to be funner and bordered on the slapstick. I don't know, maybe I just don't notice the comedy in books as much. It also didn't help that it began with the typical colorful 1960s imaginary that provided so much fodder for Mike Myers in the original Austin Powers.

Though Topkapi is apparently an acclaimed heist movie, I'm hoping that Pierce Brosnan--who was brilliant as a distraught hitman in The Matador--will stick closer to the Hitchcockian aspects of the book in his sequel to the The Thomas Crown Affair.