Cat burglar Henry Clarke and his accomplices the Moreaus attempt to steal diamonds from the chateau of millionaire Salinas.
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Best movie of this year hands down!
People are voting emotionally.
Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay
The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one
The only thing I can figure out from this melange is that Bryan Forbes was attempting to make a sort of Lord Of The Flies substituting adults for children but his talent was woefully short of his ambition. On the 'oooh' counter Forbes allowed Michael Caine to refer openly to Eric Portman as a 'queer'. This was irony on time-and-a-half because Portman was seriously gay off screen but like, say, Harry Andrews, a stream of 'macho' roles deflected viewer realization and Portman could quite happily have continued with 'rugged' roles indefinitely. John Barry turned in a wince-making extended piece which allowed Forbes to intercut it with the main heist sequence in which Caine and Portman silently break into the large, home of the mark, who is, of course, in the concert hall watching the performance. Any credulity achieved by the sequence is blown sky-high when the mark jumps into his car and returns to his home the INSTANT the last note fades away rather than socialising with his friends for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Not this time, Forbesy.
If one draws a map of Bryan Forbes' directorial career it is obvious that it went through a winning streak that ended in less than ten years. Once an actor, Forbes declared in an interview that an actor had to have "arrogance, conceit I would never have made it as an actor, but I still have conceit." Unfortunately this conceit was probably the cause that led him from solid dramas to concoctions as «Deadfall», a crime melodrama with a touch of James Bond's gymnastics among the rich in Mallorca, set to John Barry's ponderous score. The effort turned out to be a hard fall. Forbes was also a fine screenwriter, and he signed scripts for others, as Guy Green's «The Angry Silence», Seth Holt's «Station Six-Sahara», and 1964's «Of Human Bondage» (a troubled production with three directors, including Forbes for a week), as well as his own, all resulting in good movies: «The L-Shaped Room», «Séance on a Wet Afternoon», «King Rat», «The Wrong Box» and «The Whisperers». But then came this international project based of a novel by Desmond Cory and produced by American Paul Monash, and Forbes gave his wife Nanette Newman (a good actress) a small role with top credit, and led her through embarrassing scenes (as dancing proto-disco in a millionaire's villa), he gave composer Barry carte blanche (including a quite visible role as orchestra conductor), and --inspired by the James Bond craze and by Cory's flair for secret agents' tales-- he entered the territory of male chauvinistic fantasies, with a leading character Henry Clarke (Michael Caine) who is a bland, homophobic fool endowed with abilities beyond any human being's (except Bond, Dracula, or Cory's own Johnny Fedora, of course). Forbes had used incredibility in realistic plots since his first movie, «Whistle Down the Wind», a fable among children (almost ruined by Malcolm Arnold's score), which worked for its good performances and the sincere portrayal of children's innocence. This time, taken or not from Cory's novel, the script contains no innocence at all, and has instead a parade of peculiar characters with secret agendas, all in a single plot: a romantic thief, an adulterous wife, a homosexual husband, an alcoholic millionaire, an ill-mannered gay hustler, a British informer lost in Mallorca, an aspiring actress or whatever she wants to do in films not to mention a Polish actor passing for a Spanish doctor. Of all the actors portraying these people, Eric Portman is the best thing in the movie, because Caine and Giovanna Ralli are unconvincing as lovers, with no evident chemistry between the two. Newman, David Buck and Carlos Pierre all look pretty, while Barry overflows the proceedings with sickly sweet violins and guitars. They were all now in the international spotlight and that was good for them, because in spite of its shortcomings and excessive running time, «Deadfall» somehow worked, thanks to Forbes I guess, who followed this with another balloon filled with stars, «The Madwoman of Chaillot» which was not an improvement at all. He had to wait until 1975 for the fine «The Stepford Wives» which was undeservedly besieged by confused feminists and William Goldman.
At first sight, it may look like a comedy thriller from the late sixties, in the line of GAMBIT. And Bryan forges was not a real crime film maker. And Michael Caine was for this kind of British heist movies the same Gary Cooper was for westerns. So, I repeat, this film is not a comedy. It's a drama thriller with some romantic involvements. The heist sequence is a pure jewel, thanks to the terrific editing that reminds a little the Godfather trilogy, a couple of years later, concerning the climaxes sequences. And don't forget the John Barry's score, and the Sirley Basset song too.An underrated must see.
I knew if I came to the IMDb there would be the usual litany of "neglected gem" "undiscovered masterpiece" "not as bad as you've heard" that every bad and awful movie seems to get. No comprende, I'm afraid. This thing was critically lambasted and the public that bothered to see it hated it. Why? Because it STINKS. Bad script, pretentious and unnecessarily arty direction, a terrible performance by its female lead, and I could go on but why bother. This is part of a three Caine DVD release from Fox, and they're three of the worst movies ever made - I'm sure when I go look up the other two - Peeper and The Magus - that there will be more of "neglected gem" "undiscovered masterpiece" "not as bad as you've heard" from the great unwashed or the film school pedants. I mean, sorry, this is a BAD movie.