How to Steal a Million

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.

This movie could have been more fun that it is, but I still liked it - Audrey Hepburn, swathed in the height of chic as usual, tries to save her art forger father (the incomparable Hugh Griffith) from exposure as a fake, by stealing a statue of Venus carved by her grandfather for an art exhibition. To help her in this she enlists the help of a society burglar (the young and impossibly blue-eyed Peter O'Toole) and in the course of all this, they fall in love. It's predictable but enjoyable to watch (and it helps that the two stars are extremely easy on the eye), but with few surprises and some slow moments, it isn't up to William Wyler's better efforts. Really just a one-dimensional story of the 1960s beautiful people, like so many other movies of its time.