A heist caper classic just got a new lease on life — after languishing in so-so encodings for 50 years, Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri’s colorful escapist thriller dazzles once more. Peter Ustinov, Maximillian Schell, Robert Morley and Akim Tamiroff help Melina knock off the Topkapi museum in Istanbul, in a breathtaking midnight raid involving an insane acrobatic trick. Manos Hadjidakis’ wonderful music score puts the right feeling of fun and excitement on the lavish enterprise, filmed entirely in Turkey. The new video remaster is more like a revival, a resurrection.

Topkapi
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1964 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 120 min. / Street Date November 12, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, Maximilian Schell, Robert Morley, Jess Hahn, Gilles Ségal, Akim Tamiroff, Titos Vandis, Ege Ernart, Senih Orkan, Ahmet Danyal Topatan, Joe Dassin, Despo Diamantidou, Jules Dassin
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Sets: Max Douy
Visual Effects, Main Titles: Jean Fouchet
Costumes: Deni Vachlioti
Film Editor: Roger Dwyre
Original Music: Manos Hadjidakis
Screenplay by Monja Danischewsky from the novel The Light of Day by Eric Ambler
Associate Producer Roger Dwyre
Produced and Directed by Jules Dassin

Our opinions of films change from time to time, and we don’t always know exactly why. Sometimes an improved video version makes an important difference. This is what happened with Jules Dassin’s  Topkapi. We cut video promos for it at MGM in the 1990s, with truly miserable video transfers. Back then that was the case with most everything we had. The NTSC format wasn’t ideal in itself, and film-chain video transfers could be pretty funky. We remember that in 1993 The Ultimate Wizard of Oz laserdisc set was considered state of the art. I wouldn’t look forward to seeing that presentation today.

We last reviewed Topkapi in 2014, and the master used was old even then. Kino’s new Special Edition adds a good new commentary but the real draw is the digital remaster by MGM Amazon. It’s like watching a whole new movie. The scenery is brighter and suddenly the jokes are funnier. We now have a greater appreciation of Jules Dassin’s direction.

Jules Dassin was one of the directors hit hardest by the blacklist. He self-exiled to Europe along with the talented Joseph Losey, John Berry and Cy Endfield. All three had difficulties maintaining careers. Dassin arrived in France with an impressive reputation, but our State Department and the American Legion worked from afar to keep foreign producers from hiring him … for four long years. Dassin’s fortunes turned for the better with  Du Rififi chez les hommes, a superb crime tale that became an international hit. At the Cannes Film Festival he met Greek actress Melina Mercouri — she became the love of his life, his muse and his collaborator both in France and Greece, in  He Who Must Die,  Never on Sunday,  Phaedra and  10:30 P.M. Summer. Dassin ended up with a unique film career split between continents.

Rififi had been the ultimate expression of noir misery and defeat, a heist story populated by luckless crooks facing the cops, merciless competitors and weakness from within their own ranks. Dassin himself played a downhearted informer, in a sympathetic performance that now seems an act of generosity to those that aided and abetted the witch hunters. Nine years later, after movies about political murder (He Who Must Die), sadistic ‘civic games’ (The Law) and a doomed romance sprung from Greek myth (Phaedra), Dassin’s Topkapi plays like a work by a spiritually revitalized man. It’s a replay of the basic Rifii caper tale, only as a cheerful escapist romp updated to the ‘international’ flavor of the 1960s. It must be the happiest film ever made by a blacklisted director.

Filmed in bright color (original prints were in Technicolor) and adorned with the teasing music of Manos Hadjidakis,  Topkapi is set in the exotic city of Istanbul. Dassin’s beloved Greek Life-Force Mercouri plays a siren who loves any man that can help her obtain the priceless jewels she covets. We like these thieves even when they set up a ‘schmo’ to possibly take a fall. All’s fair in this Love & Rubies fable. Jules Dassin again plays a small role. Instead of a lowly squealer, this time he casts himself in a bit as an honest cop.

The manic dream of sensationalist-adventuress Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) is to steal a jeweled dagger on display in Istanbul’s Topkapi Museum, a former seraglio to royalty. She recruits her old cohort-lover and criminal genius Walter Harper (Maximillian Schell) to help her do it — apparently purely for sport. Harper insists that they hire amateurs without prison records. Elizabeth’s charm helps recruit strongman Hans Fischer (American expatriate Jess Hahn), human fly / acrobat Giulio (Gilles Ségal) and mechanical genius Cedric Page (Robert Morley). They hole up in an Istanbul villa, with the rather untrustworthy Gerven (Akim Tamiroff) serving as their cook.

Elisabeth and Walter trick petty crook Arthur Simon Simpson (Peter Ustinov) into transporting a weapon needed for the heist into Turkey, gambling that he won’t be caught and arrested as a terrorist. They refer to him as a patsy, a ‘schmo,’ and the Turkish police do indeed catch him. The chief Harback (Titos Vandis) suspects terrorists and forces Arthur to act as a police spy. Walter and Elisabeth continue to plan the wildest caper of all time; when one team member is forced to drop out, Arthur becomes an official part of the heist. The reluctant double agent is having trouble deciding which side he’s on, but it may not matter: Walter’s master plan has provisions for amateur screw-ups.

Topkapi has fun, jokes, intrigue, suspense and a good helping of travelogue vistas, all soaked in the infectious Manos Hadjidakis music. It even has the odd spectacle of a hundred or so oiled Turkish wrestlers in stadium combat, all at once. Its most famous image would be a toss-up between our playful thieves sneaking across the rooftop of the Topkapi Palace with the Bosporous in the background, or the sight of the acrobat Giulio suspended upside-down, using an odd set of tools to lift a heavy glass case from the coveted jeweled dagger.

The first ‘official’ caper film — a crime picture focusing on a single key ‘impossible mission’ heist — was likely John Huston’s original classic  The Asphalt Jungle. Defeating burglar alarms in the postwar era meant dealing with modern electronics. Asphalt Jungle’s thieves had to dodge electric eye traps, and the efforts of Jules Dassin’s thieves to deactivate an alarm in Rififi was the high point of an intense robbery scene without dialogue. From that point forward every caper needed a gimmick, all the way to the fantasy burglary of Fort Knox in  Goldfinger. This picture outfits the ancient Topkapi Museum with pressure sensors in the floor, necessitating Giulio’s aerial approach. He can’t touch the floor, and if he drops anything the jig will be up. Cedric Page shows how the sensors work by bouncing a ping pong ball — every tap on a test floor hits the alarm, an effect well-demonstrated with sound effect cutting.

In 1964, the sight of Giulio suspended upside down and manipulating keys, suction cups and a web of cables, was breathtaking. The gag is now a familiar trope: Steven Soderbergh’s much later  Ocean’s Eleven remake uses similar acrobatic magic. Brian De Palma’s 1996 Mission Impossible has Tom Cruise copy Giulio’s human fly tricks in every detail … De Palma never shied away from borrowing entire scenes from other directors’ films.

Topkapi’s value as a tourism booster must have secured a lot of cooperation for Jules Dassin. Even the Turkish cops are great guys, and their prisons are a lot more pleasant than depicted  elsewhere.

The character interactions are consistently amusing. Melina Mercouri is bigger than life, and maybe a bit too much for some viewers. She wears a lot of makeup and plays every emotion and gesture broad and loud. At 44 she’s pushing the outer margin to play an irresistible fox, yet she can’t be categorized as a diva-in-denial, like Joan Crawford. All-woman and on her game, Elisabeth enjoys herself mightily at all times. Her cohorts seem to be in on the crime just to hang out with her. Mercouri radiates warmth and, well, ‘alive-ness.’  Jules Dassin always said she was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Until Topkapi the late Maximillian Schell was mostly known in America for playing conscience-stricken Germans. Here he’s a charming delight, whether holding a victim at gunpoint or blithely sneaking his crew in under the noses of the Turkish cops. Schell’s Walter and Mercouri’s Elizabeth seem drawn to the heist for its very beauty, as if Stealing Big were the kind of activity that makes life worthwhile. Robert Morley played more than his share of bumbling fools. Cedric’s various clockwork trick devices, including a mechanical parrot, make him seem like a happy toymaker. Dassin may have considered Morley a good luck charm for this sort of thing, owing to his big role in the only previous movie to surpass Topkapi carefree thriller irony, John Huston and Truman Capote’s  Beat the Devil.

The great Peter Ustinov picked up a second acting Oscar for Topkapi after his endearingly shifty Roman in Kubrick’s  Spartacus. Ustinov’s Arthur Simon Simpson is a truly lovable stooge. The way he comes around to trusting his fellow crooks, it’s as if he’s just having too good of a time not to join in. Arthur becomes a last-minute replacement when he proves that he can lift and pull a fairly heavy object. His job on the museum roof is to be the anchor holding Giulio on the end of a rope. Just as all seems under control, Arthur is yanked off his feet and shoots helplessly down a drain pipe. The entire audience jumps in surprise when he almost slides clear off the roof. Dassin’s wise choice was to let his comics be amusing, but to make the actual crime a fairly serious affair: no Jerry Lewis crossed eyes or wacky screams.

We confess that some of the broader comedy and Maximillian Schell’s suave manner didn’t appeal that much on earlier viewings. Peter Ustinov and Akim Tamiroff go in for some outright clowning at the crooks’ villa hideout. This time they both were hilarious, even when veering into slapstick and face-making. We’re convinced that the much-improved image on this disc just raises one’s spirits.

Composer Manos Hadjidakis’s music for Dassin’s Never on Sunday was a big hit worldwide; the  catchy Topkapi theme is today almost as well-remembered as the film. The main title sequence by Jean Fouchet is a complicated optical collage with kaleidoscopic, magical animation effects. Fouchet was primarily a master film editor, credited with René Clément’s classics  Les maudits and  Jeux Interdits. He helped Jules Dassin put together the trend-setting Rififi and continued on all of the director’s European pictures, on this film advancing to associate producer. Topkapi is of course edited for suspense, and Fouchet makes a big creative contribution to its overall impact. Location scenes in Istanbul cover busy streets, a bazaar, a traveling circus and that weird stadium mass wrestling match. It’s all so well edited as to make us forget that a filming crew was present. By the time that the thieves are scrambling across the museum roof, tiptoeing around the domes and minarets, we’re convinced that everything we see is real.

A sidebar on Melina Mercouri: she was also a prominent Greek patriot, who later served as a Minister in the Greek Government. One of her pet causes was a crusade to induce England to return the fabled  Elgin Marbles to Greece; they had been taken by a British Ambassador in the early 1800s, and placed on exhibit in the British Museum. Mercouri’s character pays a visit to them in London in  Phaedra, and they are also seen behind that film’s main titles. Dassin might have considered making a caper film about stealing the Elgin Marbles, but the Greek art treasure was never a laughing matter to Ms. Mercouri. In recent years there has been renewed talk about the  possibility of their return.

Topkapi is a movie about happy people, made by happy people. It contrasts sharply with the appallingly grim endings of Jules Dassin’s  Brute Force and  Night and the City; it seems more than obvious that Dassin’s aim is to embrace joy and have a good time. A caper film that appeals to every viewer’s inner thief, Topkapi finishes with a set of fantastic, gloriously carefree epilogue-end credits.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Topkapi is exactly what we hope for in a remaster, a visual improvement so great that a movie we once thought ‘okay’ suddenly becomes a special item. All video versions we’ve seen before have been a little dull, a little grainy and with a lot of minor damage, like splices that bump across cuts. The flashy animated titles were scratched and dirty. It’s bright, colorful and sharp throughout. The colors look so good in the location scenes, one would think that Istanbul had been art-directed for color coordination.

The disc is from Amazon MGM Studios. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan was the driving force behind this new restoration, which was performed by The Film Foundation. When shown at film festivals, the movie opens with a card acknowledging the work of Nolan and the Foundation.

The sound has also been improved. Back in 1989 or 1990 when the studio was for a short while called MGM-Pathe, some executives had an entire vault of secondary UA printing elements destroyed. Sound elements, music masters, split-track mixes, alternate versions, foreign versions, longer cuts … there’s no inventory of what was thrown away. We’re glad this title wasn’t a major casualty. Manos Hadjidakis’ magical music score is really a treat. Nothing could prepare us better for diverting crime fun in an exotic locale.

Kino adds an informative, conversational commentary with writer Julie Kirgo, aided and abetted by Peter Hankoff. There’s certainly a lot to talk about in this picture. It’s Jules Dassin’s last major hit, although 10:30 PM Summer has its good points — in that show Melina Mercouri plays opposite Romy Schneider and Peter Finch.

Jules Dassin’s son Joe Dassin has a small role in the movie. By this time he had become a well-known pop musician in France. His 1965 song Bip-Bip became a  2003 short subject of the same title.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Topkapi
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Very Good ++
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 24, 2025
(7303topk)

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