Comment voler un million de dollars

A charming adventure comedy. It revolves around good-hearted art forgery and the need to set thing right. The basic plot is rather implausible, but it hardly matters. There is a great chemistry between the primary characters and the story is pleasantly devoid of attributes that would prevent the film from being enjoyed by anybody from 10 years-old and up. The blend of mild suspense, gentle comedy and a bit of romance is not too intellectually provocative, but it makes for great fun. It's a film I can sit down an watch with my teenage daughter, my younger son, my wife and my mother, and everybody has a good time and comes away feeling better than when they sat down.

HOW TO STEAL A MILLION is a romantic crime drama film which, through an illusion of fiction, merges art and fraud. A clumsy fraud, mixed with a pleasant romance, can quickly enter in our hearts.

Charles Bonnet is well-known as an art collector, but actually he copies famous works of art. His daughter Nicole disapproves his "work" and is also afraid that he may get caught. His replica of a famed Cellini sculpture is inadvertently displayed in an art museum, and he begins to worry that he'll lose his reputation once the experts evaluate the statuette. Nicole decides to steal sculpture from the museum with the help of a mysterious burglar. However, her assistant is actually a well-known private detective who investigates frauds of her father...

A simple story with lot flaws is enriched with a very thrilling twist. The film is full of fictional tricks, through which it develops a delicious romance. Mr. Wyler has managed to create a frivolous version of double deception. He has, through a healthy dose of humor, emphasized Mrs. Hepburn style. A scene with a key is probably one of the most memorable. I think that a key has a double meaning in this case. This is a key to the heart and the truth.

Audrey Hepburn as Nicole Bonnet is, as always, a magic woman, this time in the role of a romantic rich girl and morally sensitive daughter at the same time. Peter O'Toole as Simon Dermott is a calm seducer, between an eccentric detective and inexperienced burglar. All for love. There's good chemistry between the two of them.

Hugh Griffith as Charles Bonnet is funny an art counterfeiter. Eli Wallach as Davis Leland is crazed collector, who effectively shows the characteristics of a sexual perversion.

Every art is a kind of deception!? Each theft is a form of art!? However, it is very difficult to mislead or steal one's heart.

Somehow Audrey Hepburn made fluffy romantic caper movies look

like high art. Take this adorable trifle directed by William Wyler

with Audrey looking glorious in her trademark Givenchy clothing.

Audrey could have phone in a performance, but she's totally

enchanting as always, making us overlook the seams in the script.

She's beautifully supported by Peter O'Toole, who never looked

handsomer or more Cary Grant-ish in his life as Simon, the art

expert who gets talked into stealing Audrey's father's statue of the

Cellini Venus back from the museum when it is learned the statue

has to be authenticated for insurance purposes.

Hugh Griffith, as Audrey's father, is a delightful rogue of an art

forger and Charles Boyer and Eli Wallach just add to the fun. The

actual theft of the statue is quite ingenious, if a little too drawn out.

Still, here's two hours of pure enchantment. That Ferrari still looks

good nearly forty years later, and if Audrey was walking down Fifth

Avenue, dressed in Givenchy's stunning creations today, she'd

cause a riot. Check out that lace cocktail dress with the matching

lace mask at the bar of the Ritz in Paris! It doesn't get any chicer

than this.

What makes a movie like this so wonderful? It's probably just an age thing (I remember seeing this movie at the cinema), but when I saw it again recently I just felt a sense of joy and pleasure and, yes, optimism. Now these are words that may be almost incomprehensible to today's jaded, cynical and, often, brutalised audiences, and I am sure that many would see this movie as slow, naive and totally irrelevant.

But for me the effortless playing, the perfect timing and understated sophistication is so much more intelligent, witty and rewarding than the clunking, crude sign-posted so called "rom-coms" of today.

This is not their best film by any means, but to watch O'Toole and Hepburn playing off each other with such natural and fluent grace is simply magical. Lighthearted fluff like this completely works when the actors really know what they are doing.

And has there ever been anybody who is simultaneously so sophisticated and vulnerable as Audrey Hepburn? There is a scene where she is wearing a chaste little nightdress and she put on a pair of ordinary street galoshes. As she clumps across the room she displays more sex appeal and sheer class than any of today's moussed up, made up, blown up actresses could ever comprehend.

William Wyler crafts a delightfully frothy caper backed up by wonderful on screen chemistry between Peter O'Toole & Audrey Hepburn. It seems to me that Hepburn always managed to bond with her Male co-stars, and here the interplay between O'Toole and herself is wonderful. Check out a long sequence of events involving the pair hiding out in a closet, it's gold dusted cinema.

The film's central plot involves Hepburn & O'Toole planning a daring robbery from a Paris museum to keep her art forger Father (a delightful Hugh Griffith) out of trouble, at first the couple are purely business partners with no love lost for each other, but as the story plays out the pair are forced to get along and etc.

The burglary itself is dramatic, attention grabbing entertainment, and it's also the film's highest point, but overall the film as a whole is simply good romantic fun. Also helps that it features a very tidy shift for the finale to further reward the audience for their time spent with the movie. Throw in dapper turns from Charles Boyer & Eli Wallach too, and it's all good really.

Open the wine, sit back and relax with Pete & Audrey. 8/10