With beautiful camerawork in Istanbul and Greece and an equally intriguing plot, Jules Dassin brings to the screen a film worthy to be considered alongside his masterpieces "Du rififi chez les hommes" and "Naked City". Peter Ustinov follows up his Oscar-winning performance in "Spartacus" with a second award for best supporting actor, while playing a "schmo"--a lowly, disgraceful, British rogue living in Greece as the self-proclaimed "un-crowned king of the nightlife": Arthur Simon Simpson. Getting involved in much more than he bargained for, Simpson enters a ring of double-crosses as an informer for Turkish Intelligence while still hoping to line his pockets with filthy lucre.

The show, however, is stolen by the seductive, raspy-voiced Elizabeth Lipp, played by Greek beauty Melina Mercouri (who was also in the starring role of Dassin's "Phaedra" two years earlier--as well as "Pote tin Kyriaki" (1960), "La Legge" (1958), and "Celui qui doit mourir" (1957)--and whom the director would marry two years later). The curvy enchantress draws in Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell) and Cedric Page (Robert Morley I), offering them their cut on the biggest heist ever--the theft of the sultan's jewel-encrusted dagger from the Istanbul Museum.

However, there is a problem. The museum is impenetrable, equipped with a state-of-the-art alarm system that requires a strong man to hoist an acrobat from above the museum and slowly lower him into the treasure trove while avoiding security (à la "Mission Impossible" and "Oceans Eleven"). An unattended, even ironic, ending makes this film a classic in the genre as the dénouement keeps the viewer attached to the screen all the way up to the credits.

Not quite the masterpiece of a "Bob le Flambeur" or "Rififi", this film is in the top ten of its genre and is crucial in its intrigue and influence on future heist ("casse") films. Highly enjoyable, with the right balance of humor, suspense and allure (thanks to Melina Mercouri) to establish it as a touchstone in the genre, Dassin's caper is a cinema classic.

In the pantheon of fine thriller and adventure novelists of the 20th Century, Eric Ambler has always been in a shadow. He began writing in the 1930s, and continued turning out novels (and screenplays) until his death in the 1980s. With a few exceptions these novels were all quite good. But he was in the shadow of his fellow Britain Graham Greene.

Greene (like Ambler) wrote political thrillers and spy novels, but Greene (a serious supporter of Catholicism) was able to examine the universal hold of the Catholic religion in his novels like "The End Of The Affair" and "The Power And The Glory". In particular, like Alfred Hitchcock, Greene enjoyed looking at how guilt makes us all shared sinners - like his Candide traveler innocent Holly Martins plunged into betraying his old friend Harry Lime in "The Third Man".

Ambler never (sorry to say this) had that kind of depth in his writing. He did reveal the hidden connections between economic realities and international politics in books like "A Coffin For Demetrios", or "Cause For Alarm" or "The Intercom Conspiracy". But he was not pushing a religious agenda and philosophy in his novels. So while he had (and still has)deserved popularity and readers, he never could achieve the thoughtful criticism that Greene could (and still does) arouse.

His 1963 novel, "The Light Of Day", was a kind of break from his usual. Instead of concentrating a plot dealing with the political realities of Europe or the Far East, "The Light Of Day" was a first person narrative of one Arthur Simpson (played in the film by Peter Ustinov). Simpson is a small time con-man, who is hired to transport a car secretly full of illegal weapons to Istanbul from Greece. As relations between the two countries were fragile (and still are), it would not be good for him to be caught by the Turkish Secret Service with those weapons. Unfortunately for him he is so caught. The mastermind of the crime has set things up for the registration of the car and the bill of sale for the arms to be in Simpson's name. But the frantic man manages to convince the Turkish officer interrogating him to believe he knew nothing about the weapons. Simpson has to continue on his way to Istanbul to keep an eye on the people behind this. He is kept on as a chauffeur, and subsequently discovers that the weapons are not part of an assassination plot or a plan to overthrow the government, but part of a robbery scheme.

That is the plot of the novel. But Ambler makes Simpson an engaging rogue, and one fully ambivalent to the forces that make him feel like a tennis ball. By the time the novel is finished one does not care for the cynic who plans the crime, or for the Turkish police official. Both only see the fruition of their plans as important. Simpson is quite amusing, first in his honesty in seeing what a lowly toad of a small-time crook he is, and secondly his repeated abilities to create situations that make him believe he is controlling events when he really is not in such a position. As a comic novel, this may be Ambler's masterpiece.

When the novel was turned into this first rate crime caper comedy, Jules Daissin had been making films in Europe for over a decade. Starting in Hollywood in the late 1940s, his best work ("The Naked City) suggested a major career in film here. But Daissin had left wing political ideas, and he was blacklisted. Unlike many of the victims of the blacklist, Daissin moved to France and continued movie making. His biggest hit was "Rafifi", his painstaking look at a crime heist (a jewelry robbery, no less), where he played the lead role as the safe cracker. The movie also showed the success of the robbery collapse when the thieves fall out over personal matters.

After his marriage to Melina Mercouri, Daissin moved to Greece, and would make his two masterpiece comedies "Topkapi" and "Never On Sunday" (again he starred as Homer, opposite Mercouri in that film). But Daissin also took advantage, when he made "Topkapi", to alter the script.

In the novel there is no character like Mercouri's Elizabeth Lipp. The scheme is totally planned by the male character that Maximillian Schell plays. The weapons are involved in the jewel robbery scheme, but here there is a difference that Daissin brought into Ambler's story. Simpson (in the novel) never goes into great detail about the robbery - he is only there as the chauffeur for the getaway car, so he is sitting outside when the robbery takes place. But for the creator of RIFIFI, Daissin could not resist creating a second complicated robbery scheme, involving setting up an alibi at a public wrestling match, delaying the movement of a lighthouse, using pulleys and tackle to lower a man through a window into the main room of a museum, and criss-crossing the Topkapi Palace/Museum roof without being seen. He does this very well. The cast ably assists, with Mercouri as an honest nymphomaniac who loves jewelry, Schell as her partner and sometimes lover, Robert Morley as a mechanical genius who manages to wipe axle grease on his face in a quick comedy highlight, Akim Tamiroff as a drunken Turkish cook who hates the foreigners (except Simpson) and only likes the British, and best - Ustinov as the sweaty, hopelessly over-his-head Simpson. It was a role that won Ustinov his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

I notice there is a lament that, despite the ending, there was never any sequel film. I suspect this was due to Ambler, who did write a second novel narrated by Simpson, about a land grab in Africa. It is not as good as "The Light Of Day", and has never been filmed.

"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.