When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

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.

My second Jules Dassin's film after NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950, 7/10), and out of my expectation it's an exotic Turkish heist adventurer with a blithe tone and meticulous detail- solidification with regard to the theft action.The film starts with a tawdry but foxy Melina Mercouri (Dassin's muse and future wife) enigmatically introducing her craving to steal the most precious jewelled dagger from Topkapi museum, her kitschy costume and the settings are antiquated enough to divert the film into a burlesque frivolousness, but when her entire team assembles (including the male-counterpart mastermind Maximilian Schell), with an additional interlope, a small-con "schmo" (the Oscar- winning Peter Ustinov), the film regains its vigour and flair in its strongest form to manoeuvre a seamless treasure-replacement theft, benchmarks an exemplar of its genre which haven't been overshadowed since then, the escape strategy during a Turkish old-wrestling (Kırkpınar) pageantry is no less pleasant to watch against the trickery's predictability, and far more thrilling is the actual stunts which thoroughly generate a gravitating magnetism on the screen lest as little as one needle's dropping would scupper the plan. But the pathos-bathos irrefutably comes in the end, in the public media, where no one should dare wrote an ode to theft, no matter how benevolent those convicts are in person, thus the finale has to be a received compromise which still is in line with the filmic light-hearted air. Ustinov, is so congenital and always oozes a screen-friendly affability and warmth in his presence, whose second Oscar win of a borderline supporting role is well-earned by lifting the entertainment-heavy film onto a stratum of character-engaging experience. An appearance combo of Debra Messing and Anne Bancroft, the nymphomaniac Melina Mercouri stands still as the shallow and narrow-written role of an anti-femme fatale brain, and a gorgeous Maximilian Schell is shamefully eclipsed by his chubby sidekick, whose circumscribed performance nevertheless at least arouse my curiosity to delve into his filmography a bit deeper.

"Topkapi" is a very good film, but I noticed that a reviewer thought this film was better than director Dassin's earlier brilliant caper film, "Rififi". Well, I certainly would not go that far, as "Rififi" is probably the best or one of the very best robbery films of all time. It is interesting, however, how Jules Dassin seemed to almost make a specialty of these sort of films! What it does have that "Rififi" does not is a sense of humor, but that just isn't enough to make it better than the earlier French film noir masterpiece.Possibly the best thing going for "Topkapi" is the locale. After all, it's wonderful to see the wonderful city of Istanbul showcased like this--and scenes with the crooks on the rooftops looking at the cityscape are just breathtaking--so much so I would have loved to have seen this on the big screen. The other good things the film has in its favor is a masterful director, a very good ensemble cast and an interesting script--though one clearly derrived from similar films that preceded it (apart from "Rififi", also "The Killing", "Big Deal on Madonna Street", "Bob le Flambeur" and even "The Pink Panther"). In fact, because the film is a bit derivative, I had to knock a point off my vote. Still, it's a nice film and the heist sequence was done well---very tense and meticulous.By the way, although the film never seemed to get much attention, another very good caper film is "Grand Slam" (1967). Again, it suffers a bit from being a not wholly original idea, but it's a dandy film as well.

Topkapi is a great example of those silly ass, slapstick comedies of the 60's, that look like a vaudeville cabaret, and not like a movie. Those films were not funny enough to be a straight forward comedy, and were too silly to be taken for a crime, thriller or any other genre it was supposed to be. Topkapi is a such case in it's purest form. The character that should have carried the comedy part here is Peter Ustinov, and he just can't do it, first because he's no Peter Sellers, and second because the script has very few punch lines for him, so the comedy part rests solely on circus acts, clown and acrobatic, and that makes the whole thing look rather stupid.Maximilian Schell is the only one who looks half as decent and the casting of Melina Mercouri is the biggest mistake of all. I know that she was director's girlfriend, at the time the movie was made,(later his wife) but come on? Could they have hired more inappropriate actress for this role in those days. She looks like a wicked witch of the east, and ruins any comedic pleasantry that this movie could have possessed with her sinister gaze that chills you to the bone, and laughter that sounds like it's been taken from a Roger Corman horror film. And she uses both with no restrain, so after a while it makes you really sick. You can think of any other major actress of the day, and she would be more appropriate for the film that is supposed to be funny and nice to look at. There is no story for 120 minutes here, so it goes nowhere most of the time, and the dreary Turkish scenery doesn't help at all. Avoid.