SnoopyStyle Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) is enchanted by the emerald dagger of Sultan Mahmud I that is located in Istanbul. She recruits Swiss criminal Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell) who wants only amateurs unknown to the police for this job. Cedric Page (Robert Morley) is a mechanical genius. Arthur Simon Simpson (Peter Ustinov) is a small time hustler who they intend to use as a shmole. They hire him to drive a car packed with smoke bombs across the border into Turkey which the guards find. The Turkish secret police uses Simpson to spy on the group. Lipp and Harper are shocked when Simpson unexpectedly shows up. Simpson tries to tell the police that they are Russian spies. When a member of the team injures his hands, they reluctantly use Simpson.This is a fun little caper movie. I love the exotic locations. Melina Mercouri is quite a broad. The caper is a little bit confused and it takes some time to develop. Walking on the roof is great. The Turkish wrestling is fascinating but a bit too long. The hanging from the ceiling is long too but that is riveting. Ustinov is great as a second rate criminal. I'm still not sure why they send the car with the weapons. At the very least, why would they pick up the car at the hotel? It seems like a very difficult way to establish an alibi.

Robert J. Maxwell It's a lot of fun and it's suspenseful as well, if you haven't seen it before. The acting is sometimes outrageously hammy but it fits neatly into the general atmosphere, which is almost always excessive -- the music, the performances, the flamboyant tourist attractions, the stunts, the jokes, the impossible caper itself.The caper is, well, if not impossible, highly improbable because it involves the most intricate planning and is pulled off without practice and without a flaw. If you or I were to try it, scampering across the sky-high domes of museums in Istanbul, pulling ropes a predetermined number of millimeters, coordinating the escape plans, the first thing we'd do is fall off the roof and die.Maximilian Schell is the brains behind the burglary, an excellent actor who doesn't have much to do except show his mile-wide grin. Melina Mercouri is his girl friend who is treated as a semi-maniacal nymphomaniac, kind of unconvincingly, although she has a neatly assembled, lanky, supple figure. Her cracked, throaty voice sounds cured by years of smoking Papastratos. Peter Ustinov, the "schmo" who is inducted into the gang, provides most of the humor and he's very effective, especially in his dealings with the crazy, drunken cook played by Akim Tamirov. Tamirov, intoxicated and mangling his English, whispers hoarsely to Ustinov that he is here to identify Russian spies. "You mean -- are you here, umm, officially?" "Fishily? NO, NO, not fishily, I give you good MEAT. No FISHILY." And Tamirov brandishes a hideous wrinkled smoked fish under Ustinov's nose.The general impression is that the cast and crew had a good time, and the viewer probably will too.

Film_critic_Lalit_Rao We all know that a film can look good on paper as long as there are film fans who have not seen it.It is only by watching a particular film that a film fan is in a position to decide whether it is a masterpiece or a terrible piece of entertainment ? "Topkapi" is known as a brilliant heist film but film critic Lalit Rao could not really get to appreciate it as this film's lead players choose to spend their time in pursuing other pleasure activities instead of concentrating on their heist plans.It is due to this and other plot related inconsistencies that Topkapi can be considered as an absolutely weak effort by maestro of heist film genre Monsieur Jules Dassin.He is known to have made better films where action spoke louder than words. While watching "Topkapi",one can surely notice that there are too many nice views of Turkey.It is not known whether it was all intentionally relevant or director Jules Dassin wanted to achieve a kind of exotic nirvana in order to find spiritual enlightenment in Istanbul.It is due to these reasons that there are moments in this film where it appears as if it is nothing but a glamorous propaganda film made for Turkish government with a sole objective of giving a boost to local tourism industry.It is only for 20 minutes of its heist sequence that "Topkapi" is able to cement interest in viewers' minds.Alas,by that time viewers must surely have made up their mind to stop paying any attention to what is happening with the film.

jonb-29 This was a good movie except for the awful lead female. For at least 3/4 of the movie we were going "it's a guy in drag". Seriously, even in the 1960s sexy was sexy, but in this trans-gender casting we just couldn't tell. The story is good, maybe even very good, the script is OK, the score good and the cinematography excellent. Some of the more American actors grate but hey!, that's Americans for you. So, overall, this could have been a classic 60's movie. The miscasting of Ms X was a fatal flaw. We're sorry, but it's just not good enough. And it wasn't back then either. Why IMDb needs 10 lines I don't know, after all it's supposed to be a review not a step-by-step analysis of each and every scene in the movie.