Hope the pain is gone or down to a minimum.īTW – I wrote my first blog film review on Joseph Losey’s THE PROWLER – an excellent and disturbing noir just released this year on DVD in a beautifully restored print.Ī bad peformance by Edward G. So nice to see you “back in the saddle” as it were. The cast certainly made this one more enjoyable than I expected it to be. I was on a caper flick kick several years ago and remember watching this and Topkapi (a re-viewing actually), Rififi and several others over many successive nights. But being no particular fan of the Rat Pack myself, I’d recommend this one over its more direct contemporary, even though it’s not nearly as well known, even before the remake of Ocean’s crew at work came along and made the earlier version even more famous.Ĩ Responses to “Movie Review: SEVEN THIEVES (1960).” The heist itself? While complicated, rather ordinary, I’d have to admit. There is some interplay between the members of the gang, some more committed than others, but mostly between Robinson and Steiger, whose character needs a lot of convincing to come in on the job, then later on an attraction between Steiger and Joan Collins begins to bloom. She is a dancer in a jazz nightspot in Thieves, brunette, beautiful, slim, lissome and slender, with her two sensuous dance numbers well choreographed by Candy Barr, one of the most well-known true strippers of the day. Joan Collins was also in fine form, and here I’m speaking physically as well as performing her role well. Steiger himself seems a bit out of place among the other members of the gang, a miscellaneous group to say the least, but he’s quite effective, and (surprisingly) quietly so. Robinson ever gave a bad performance, and he’s in fine form in this one as the disgraced elderly Professor who puts the details of the theft together, with Rod Steiger coming on board to keep the other players in line. And yet the ending, while perhaps persuaded in the direction it takes by a board of censors, goes down smoothly enough – save the very last scene, where sheer luck seems to be involved more than bad happenstance, if there is a difference, and I believe there is. Meticulous detail, timed to the second, but while nothing ever seems to go exactly to plan, and a lot of sweat appears on everyone’s brows, there is little to fear that anything goes seriously wrong.īut of course it does, and I will refrain from telling you just when it does, assuming that you will one day wish to watch this picture. I will not be the first to have pointed this out, I am sure, but what plot behind the caper in Thieves reminded me of most was those that appeared every week on the Mission Impossible television show. Even the twists in the plot are leisurely. But for a suspense film, it runs a leisurely course from nearly beginning to end. We’ve said that before on this blog, and Thieves in the long run is no different. Something always has to go wrong in caper and/or heist films. Thieves is also not nearly as good, plotwise, as Thief, but it is better than Eleven (filmed in color) but whose fame depends on the actors playing in it than the rather disposable details of stealing all that money from the Las Vegas casinos, all to no avail. Why not have followed Hitchcock’s example and gone with color as well? Monaco is such a beautiful place. As befitting a “noir” film, one supposes, but then why was it filmed in Cinemascope? The noir aspects are minor. Only problem is, Thief was filmed in beautiful Technicolor, and Thieves is in “glorious” black and white. Of course you can’t really consider To Catch a Thief as a caper film, not in the strictest sense of the word, I don’t think, and there were a number of others that were that came in between, but since both it and Seven Thieves take place in Monte Carlo with the Casino a major part of the plot, it was of course the film I first thought of when I began to watch the latter. Seven Thieves beat the latter to the gate by a few months, its first showing being in March that same year. To Catch a Thief was filmed in 1955, while Ocean’s Eleven premiered in August 1960. Robinson, Rod Steiger, Joan Collins, Eli Wallach, Alexander Scourby, Michael Dante, Berry Kroeger, Sebastian Cabot.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |