(On Cable TV, June 2021) In my own developing history of Hollywood movies, I’ve earmarked the 1960s as the decade where Europe came to the rescue of American filmmaking: you can clearly feel the stagnation of post-studio-era Hollywood in the decade’s first years, and the energy of filmmaking being concentrated in censorship-busting Europe. Much of those lessons crossed the Atlantic during the decade and culminated in a 1967 crop of movies that changed everything. In this admittedly incomplete historical summary, Topkapi finds its place as one of the films that regurgitated the American heist film into something slightly grander, slightly more colourful (literally, in this case) and with a different sense of style. It certainly makes sense that Jules Dassin would be the director to do the transition — a successful Classic Hollywood director during the film noir age, Dassin was essentially exiled from the United States due to the McCarthy blacklist and re-established himself in Europe. By 1955, he was making the classic Rififi and already adapting the American style to the French palette. Topkapi feels like an extension of this work, going even farther even as other American movies such as Ocean’s Eleven were starting to digest his lessons from the earlier Rififi. An exotic and lighthearted heist film shot in glorious colour in Istanbul, Topkapi goes through the now-familiar motions of its subgenre: Assembling the specialized members of the crew (often by unfortunate happenstance), having them describe the heist, suffering from an execution that flies off in all directions, and wrapping things up in a bittersweet but amusing conclusion. There’s intra-group conflict, an alluring prize (a jewel-encrusted dagger), elaborate plans and freakish deviations getting bigger — in short, everything you’d want from that kind of film from a narrative perspective. It does help that Dassin knows what he’s doing behind a camera, and that he managed to bring together an impressive number of actors — with a lot of attention paid to Peter Ustinov’s bumbling hustler inadvertently brought into the plot (a role that earned him an Oscar), and Maximilian Schell as a master criminal having to deal with smaller fry. You can see bits and pieces of heist film DNA being put together here, most visibly the acrobatic tricks that would later be amplified in the first Mission: Impossible film. For twenty-first century viewers, the impact of all of this is curiously mixed: While impressive by mid-1960s standards, Topkapi suffers from being so successful and being imitated ever since. It’s fun to see where much of this started, or as part of an essential double feature with Rififi, but many viewers may shrug and ask about the hubbub if they compare it with its imitators. Still, it is a cinematic piece of history, and it’s still quite entertaining.
