Topkapi, the movie, is a heist film which takes place at the Topkapi Palace, now a museum, in Istanbul, Turkey. It was directed by Jules Dassin and features his wife Melina Mercouri (recently Minister of Culture in Greece) of Never on Sunday fame, which he also directed and acted in. The museum contains a remarkable dagger encrusted with huge emeralds and many diamonds. This was the object of the heist. Peter Ustinov plays a kind of fool who is recruited to help with the heist. The movie is funny and suspenseful and features the museum as a building of unusual form and design. One of the great attractions in the museum is The Apartment of the Holy Mantle and Sacred Relics which contains the mantle of Muhammed. If you go to Istanbul, be sure to see Topkapi and the Hagia Sophia Cathedral. For more information, try this site: http://www.frommers.com/destinations/print-narrative.cfm?destID=350&catID=0350020332 Or type in Topkapi in a search engine. Here is part of a review of the movie by Daniel Fienberg: It's amusing how nearly every second of Jules Dassin's Topkapi feels familiar even if you've never seen the movie. To begin with, Dassin was, to some degree, parodying his own grand theft classic Rififi, which came out in 1955. But since Topkapi's release, it has become something of a blueprint for films in the heist genre. From Brian DePalma's explicit references in Mission: Impossible to John Woo's gentle allusions in Once a Thief to Frank Oz's debt of gratitude on The Score, any time a master criminal gets a gang together to steal that which can't possibly be stolen, it's hard not to tip your hat to Topkapi. Even Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's 11 seems to owe as much to Dassin as to the Brat Pack original. Surely all of this idolatry has to mean something. What it means is that *nobody* stages a robbery set-piece like Dassin. So you can rent Topkapi and sit through over an hour of stale planning and clumsy attempts at humor, but when the film has ended, somehow all of the earlier stuff has faded away and all you remember is the masterful robbery. The opening credits of Topkapi are shot through an emerald, playing tricks with light and perspective. These tricks of the eye become a visual theme in Dassin's film. The first character we meet calls herself Elizabeth (Melina Mercouri) and she takes us on a tour around a museum in Istanbul, pointing out the treasures of the Turkish Empire, before arriving at a bust of a sultan wearing a dagger in a shoulder holster. The dagger is studded with diamonds, but also contains the four Topkapi emeralds, flawless stones, each priceless. And Elizabeth has a plan to get that dagger. It starts with the suave Swiss Walter (Maximilian Schell), an ultra-successful robber who insists on only one thing the job must be done entirely be amateurs, people without police records. The first amateur brought on board is Cedric Page (Robert Morley), a Brit with a love of elaborate toys and an appreciation for complex electrical systems. Page explains that the challenge in getting the dagger comes from the ultra-sensitive alarm keyed to the floor of the museum. Even a ping pong ball is enough to set off the alarm. They set up a plan for circumventing the alarm and for no reason that I fully understood, they decide to smuggle their materials from Greece to Turkey in a fancy convertible. And then, even more confounding, they decide to get a heel to drive the car across. That heal is Arthur Simpson (Peter Ustinov), an academic now living in exile in Greece, offering tours of the local nightlife in desperation. You can read all of it here http://www.epinions.com/content_77023841924 Enjoy the movie if you can find it. |
