KALEIDOSCOPE (1966)

In a London traffic jam, American playboy gambler Warren Beatty (at right) meets cute with sexy young fashion designer Susannah York, though their date ends with them going their own ways. For Beatty, this means a trip to Geneva where he executes a well-planned scheme: breaking into the Kaleidoscope playing card factory, marking the card engraving plates with a code so he can read each card from the back, then making note of which casinos the cards will be shipped to. His plan is to play once in each casino, win a lot of money, and not go back so no one catches on to his ploy. In Monte Carlo, the plan works well, and as an added bonus, he meets up with York who becomes intrigued with him. Though he insists that she is his "lucky rabbit’s foot," she's pretty sure he's got something underhanded going on. As it happens, her father (Clive Revill) is a Scotland Yard inspector who is trying to bring down Eric Porter, a casino owner and big-time drug dealer (he got his start with morphine stolen from the British army at the end of WWII). York brings Beatty to her father's attention, but instead of arresting him, Revill blackmails him into helping out the Yard. Porter is in potentially ruinous debt, and Revill's plan is to get Beatty to play high-stakes poker with him and get him to lose everything. Eventually, Beatty works his way into one of Porter's big games and, thanks to the marked cards, wins big--until, by sheer accident, a new deck is introduced which is not a Kaleidoscope pack. Can Beatty still prevail? And, in any case, can he and York escape the vengeance of Porter if he loses everything?

This very Sixties caper movie was the last film Beatty made before the seismic shock of Bonnie and Clyde changed Hollywood and Beatty's career. He's a natural here as a charming romantic lead, and the sexy York is pretty much his equal, though her character, after some development in the first half, is pretty much just around for the ride. The plot is fairly outlandish as it takes Beatty from swinger to cat burglar to successful casino cheater to improbably good poker player--and, by the by, he's also independently wealthy and pulls the card cheat just for the challenge. The introduction of Eric Porter's character pushes the last half of the movie into James Bond territory; he's a somewhat campy bad guy who is practically a Goldfinger-esque supervillain by the end (he lives in a castle and he has a traitor in his group killed by flamethrower). But the improbable concluding sequence does give the film a nice action jolt, similar to the early scene of Beatty's break-in at the card factory. Clive Revill is fun as York's father--sometimes, he resembles Jerry Van Dyke. Murray Melvin plays Revill's assistant; a bit on the effeminate side, he is mostly a comic relief figure, though he's instrumental in saving Beatty and York from certain death near the end. I also thought I detected a playful, almost sexual, chemistry between Melvin and Revill. The film's visual style is understated psychedelica with lots of color and kaleidoscopic scene transitions. Despite plotholes, a pleasant time-passer. Best dialogue: on the run from Porter and his men, York petulantly announces, "I hate guns and I don't like fighting!" Beatty replies, "How does living grab ya?" [TCM]