Inspirational film

Topkapi, a 1964 film about a jewel heist, was the inspiration for both the TV series Mission Impossible, and for an actual jewel heist, very similar to the one that takes place in the film, which occurred a few weeks after the film's release. The film won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Peter Ustinov, who had won the same award four years earlier for the movie Spartacus). It got no other nominations.

Master thief Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) sets her sights on a jewel-encrusted dagger. With the help of former lover and sometime partner in crime Walter Harper (Maximillian Schell), she assembles a crew of amateurs - no criminal record, so less chance of getting them caught - to steal it from the heavily guarded Turkish museum in which it resides. The pair recruit small-time grifter Arthur Simpson (Ustinov) to unknowingly smuggle the weapons they need for the heist from Greece into Turkey. Simpson is caught by Turkish officers and recruited to help them determine the thieves' plans, and is also recruited by the thieves to take a more active role in the robbery than they had originally planned.

Ustinov here gives probably the best performance in a bad film that I have ever seen. The film is not particularly good at all. The keys to a good heist film are an interesting heist and a build-up to the heist that shows the assembly of the team, the coming together of the plan, and hints at the cleverness of the heist to come. This film has none of these elements. For the assembly of the team, the viewer is told that they are assembling a team of amateurs, and then the team is together, with nothing to show how team members were selected or why. For the coming together of the plan, the viewer is shown the object that will be stolen, and one or two of the details of the plan are glossed over, but for the most part, the viewer is left in the dark about the plan until the robbery is actually happening. In fact, not much is accomplished in the first three-quarters of the film. The heist itself is almost laughably simple, so ridiculously low-key that it could only be the easiest part of the plan in any other heist film I have ever seen. On top of that, the film is filled with visual styles that are hopelessly dated, and with mediocre performances that don't convey even a hint of what needs to come across in order for the audience to care what happens to the characters.

And then there is Peter Ustinov. In the midst of this film that I couldn't care less about otherwise, Ustinov crafts a character who is believable, compelling, and even heartbreaking at times. As bad as the film was other than his performance, I still found it worth watching, even if it was only to see one scene, the one in which Simpson is caught smuggling the weapons into Turkey, accused of being part of a terrorist plot, and his only defense is that he couldn't be a terrorist because even his own father could see that he would never be or do anything important. Surrounded by mediocrity, Ustinov delivers a performance without a single false note, a performance that is far and away superior to the film that encompasses it. Ustinov richly deserved the Oscar that he got here, though I have to wonder, if he was a supporting actor in this film, who was supposed to be the lead.

Movie trivia question: Alfred Hitchcock, though widely considered to be one of the greatest directors of all time, only ever directed one film that won a Best Picture Oscar. What was the winner?