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I missed How to Steal a Million (1966) the first time around, starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. Which is not to say I failed to be in love with Ms. Hepburn as a teenager in the 1950's, whose lovely pixie face atop a ballet dancer's body appealed to me enormously.
(All the following pictures are courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Audrey Hepburn Publicity Photo (1957), by Wikipedia
How to Steal a Million Movie Poster (1966), by Wikipedia
Just watching How to Steal a Million for the first time yesterday, however, I couldn't stop seeing Lawrence of Arabia (the goddam British lover of the desert, to paraphrase co-star Omar Sharif), in embryo as it were.
Lawrence of Arabia Movie Poster (1962), by Wikipedia
T.E. Lawrence Photograph (circa 1916), by Wikipedia
In How to Steal a Million, O'Toole plays a fake art thief with all the grace he had earlier perfected in the Lawrence extravaganza, a movie which both made and broke O'Toole in 1962, as the beautiful writer, warrior, and yes, lover of pain and presumed homosexual, T.E. Lawrence, which O'Toole portrayed so timelessly. Broke him, in that his Hollywood career began to fizzle after Lawrence, and indeed How to Steal provided only a temporary, light comedic relief from O'Toole's slide.
Howsoever, this blurb of appreciation is about the earlier masterpiece of movie situational comedies and slights-of-hand, How to Steal a Million, directed by the immortal William Wyler, and starring in addition to the two principals, a very young Eli Wallach and a typically one-wall-eyed and bushy-eye-browed Hugh Griffith.
How to Steal a Million is a delight, especially In These Times. See it on TV or get it from Netflix. If you lighten up and forget politics for a while, you'll love it.
