HOW TO STEAL A MILLION (1966)

To the world, Charles Bonnet (Hugh Griffith) is a wealthy art collector who occasionally auctions off valuable pieces and lives with his grown-up daughter Nicole (Audrey Hepburn) in Paris. But in reality he's a forger who no longer does it for the cash but for the challenge. The film opens with a Cezanne of his selling for a good deal of money, after which he goes home to work on a Van Gogh forgery. Nicole has learned to live with his criminal behavior--after all, as he explains, only the rich are getting fleeced. But when she finds out that her dad is allowing a Cellini statuette of Venus that her grandfather forged to be displayed at a museum, she tries to talk him out of it since any cursory examination will show it to be fake. That night, she catches a cat burglar named Simon (Peter O'Toole) in the house, apparently trying to make off with the Van Gogh (though what we see that she doesn't is that he has scraped off a piece of the painting and kept it). Afraid that calling the police will subject her father's illegal activities to scrutiny, and because some mild sparks fly between them, she lets him go, even driving him back to his hotel. A couple days later, she finds out that her father has signed a million dollar insurance policy with the museum for his Venus, contingent upon an examination by an art expert. Nicole realizes that this will expose the statuette as a fake, and asks Simon to help her steal the statuette, which is protected by a sophisticated anti-theft system, back from the museum before the examination. From here on, the film becomes a caper story with lovey-dovey feelings building between Nicole and Simon. But when it turns out that Simon isn't exactly who he seems to, will that affect their budding romance?

This is a frothy confection that, for the most part, works well. At a full two hours, it's too long, with the last half of the movie dragging a bit, but caper movie fans will love it. I'm not really an Audrey Hepburn fan, but she's OK here, and she has great chemistry with Peter O'Toole who (sort of) does a great Cary Grant without actually trying to impersonate him; he gets the Grant romantic rascal persona down well. It's largely a 2-person show--Griffith is good as the father, but other supporting actors, including Eli Wallach and, in what amounts to a cameo, Charles Boyer, don't get to make much of an impression. The Paris scenery and the fancy house and museum sets are nice to look at when you're not looking at the leads. The best part of the heist is the moment when O'Toole and Hepburn, locked up in a small supply closet, ingeniously use a magnet to get a key to get them out. Mid-60s fun all the way. [TCM]