Cinema: Nympholucrosmaragdomania

Toplcapi. Closing time. The gates swing to, the guards take a cigarette break. In the gilded halls of Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum no sound is heard. But in the flowery promenade—no doubt about it, the metal lid on that mulch pit moved!

It moves again, and this time an eye peers out from under it. “Let’s go!” a voice cries hoarsely, and in rapid succession three men (Maximilian Schell, Peter Ustinov, Gilles Segal) leap out of the pit, run crouching to a door, dart stealthily across a large dim room and go leaping up a narrow stair within the walls. Once on the roof, they make a risky traverse and arrive, with twilight coming on, at the brink of a sheer parapet interrupted here and there with iron-barred apertures.

“The rope!” Schell snarls. He attaches one end of it to Segal, who is rapidly lowered through a rainspout to the level of the uppermost aperture. Thirty seconds later, the bars suddenly rise roof-ward, and when they settle back into their sockets Segal is on the inside looking out. Sixty seconds later still, he is hanging head down in a high vaulted chamber. Thirty feet below him lies a large glass case. In the case a dagger is displayed. And in the handle of the dagger glitter four of the finest emeralds ever mined, each one of them worth a sultan’s ransom.

Inch by inch the aerial thief descends to cop the swag. Second by second the suspense intensifies. If the rope slips, if a tool falls, if so much as a large bead of sweat drops off the burglar’s brow and lands on the pressure-sensitive floor, the impact will inevitably stimulate tiny electronic centers and trip the general alarm.

“Aaaaaa!” cries the man at the other end of the rope. “It’s slipping!”

Obviously, Director Jules Dassin isn’t. In Topkapi, adapted from a tidy thriller (The Light of Day) by Eric Ambler, he has pulled off the niftiest caper seen on screen since the jewel job he engineered in Rififi. As in Rififi, unfortunately, the rest of the film seems a bit Dassingenuous. The director’s jokes are often too laboriously explained, and the camera’s adoration of Melina Mercouri, the great love of Dassin’s life, is sometimes boring and always embarrassing.

Still, it’s fun to watch the mercurial Mercouri play a nympholucrosmaragdomaniac who has similar and excessive reactions to men, money and emeralds. And it’s even more fun to watch Ustinov, a semi-Egyptian sphink who asks unseemly riddles (“Wanna buy some feelthy peectures?”), make like a male Mata Hari and look like a two-ton dip of coffee ice cream wearing baggy tweeds. When Ustinov is onscreen, Topkapi is top chop.