Deadfall

I’ve been trying to recall why I ordered this movie, what attracted me to it, and other than the fact that Michael Caine is in it, I just can’t remember. And now I regret it. He and the director, Bryan Forbes, had worked together two years before in The Wrong Box, a neglected gem. Forbes did some quite good movies in the ‘60s, then his career sort of petered out. This movie is derivative in almost any way you can look at it. The music is by John Barry and Shirley Bassey, and is so reminiscent of the James Bond films of the time I kept expecting somebody to order a martini, “shaken, not stirred.” (Yeah, right, James, as if you could tell the difference.) Jewel heist movies were in vogue at the time, so maybe I was hoping for Gambit or Topkapi. This one gets the heist out of the way at the end of the first hour (it happens during a guitar concerto recital, evoking—not to its credit—Hitchcock’s second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much), and then descends into an incomprehensible love affair and wildly unsatisfactory ending.