The cougar loves emeralds

Topkapi 1964 U.S. (120 minutes) directed and produced by Jules Dassin; screenplay by Monja Danischewsky based on Eric Ambler’s novel The Light of Day; music by Manos Hatzidakis.

Topkapi is a fun classic caper story with comic inflections done in the jet-set style of the 1960s, with a great heist sequence and tones and bright colors that since have become hallmarks of camp.

The story is a light and lively reworking of popular thriller writer Eric Ambler’s novel The Light of Day. Ambler’s narrator is Arthur Abdel Simpson, the Cairo-born son of a non-commissioned British Army officer, a middle-aged loser living by his small-minded, little-Greene-man wits in Athens. Walter Harper, an English-speaking ‘German’ bad guy (this was less than twenty years after the end of the war) hires Simpson to drive a new Lincoln Continental automobile from Athens to İstanbul.

The money is good. Unfortunately for the hapless Simpson, his expired passport prompts Turkish authorities at the border to take a closer look at the Lincoln. This leads to Simpson becoming the Turkish military’s ‘agent’ inside the plot.

Ambler draws readers into his story as he winds the unknowing Simpson closer and closer to a scheme that is not revealed until its execution. He keeps readers guessing as Simpson—and Turkish military officials concerned about a ‘political act’ such as assassination—try to figure out what Harper and his associates are up to.

In Jules Dassin’s movie, the narrative voice shifts to the criminal mastermind behind the plot, Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri). The stylishly coutoured Miss Lipp cuts to the chase when she introduces the story by telling the audience that she loves emeralds; a dagger on display in the Topkapı Palace treasury in İstanbul has four enormously valuable emeralds on it and she plans to have it. The tone lightens considerably from the novel.

Lipp and her partner Harper (Maximilian Schell), a James Bondesque debonair freelance intelligence operative, assemble a team of ‘amateurs’ to do this heist—‘amateurs’ mainly in the sense that these skilled specialists are unknown to police.

Cedric Page (Robert Morley) is the technical wizard. Hans Fischer (Jess Hahn, an American expatriate often cast as an American heavy in French films) provides the muscle. Guilio the Human Fly (Gilles Ségal) is a mute acrobat. Josef (Joseph Dassin, the director’s brother), is the team’s local man on the ground.

Arthur Simon Simpson (Peter Ustinov), with a new middle name, is the stooge hired at first only to drive the gleaming Lincoln from the northeastern Greek port Kavala to İstanbul. One of Simpson’s quirks is a fear of heights. Dassin plays this anxiety to titillating effect when Simpson must take over for an injured Fischer on Topkapı’s rooftops.

This motley crew, led by the emerald-loving cougar Lipp, makes for a chummier gang than Ambler’s cabal of ruthless German/Swiss German jewel thieves. In a similar manner, the portrayal of Major Ali Tufan (Ege Ernart) and the movie’s Turkish military authorities and operatives tends toward a humorous Eastern bureaucratic stereotype neither entirely serious nor condescending.

In a sequence worthy of a silent film, a critical message works its way up the Turkish chain of command, beginning with a navy blue jacket cuff with one gold band picking up a telephone receiver. Cut to a cuff with two gold bands picking up a receiver, then three gold bands, then four gold bands. The camera briefly tracks along telephone lines outside to Major Tufan’s ringing desk phone. 

Akim Tamiroff lends to the comedy as Gerven, the gang’s grouchy alcoholic local cook. Jules Dassin himself appears briefly in an uncredited role as a stickling Turkish policeman at the İstanbul Hilton.

Although Bruce Geller, creator of the original Mission: Impossible television series, reportedly drew his inspiration for Mr. Phelps and his highly technical proficient associates from this film, this caper’s ‘tech’ is decidedly low with the eccentric, baby-blue-eyed, bushy-browed comedian Uncle Bob Morley in charge.

In both book and film, the emphasis is on chance and the human element. The devil is in the details.

The heist scene is a deft mainstream Technicolor reprise of Dassin’s famous thirty-minute, black-and-white silent sequence (the alarm in that story’s jewelry store was sound sensitive) in his classic French heist movie Rififi (1955).

The shots of tourist İstanbul—panoramic views of the city, the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara, Topkapı grounds, Sultan Ahmet [Blue] Mosque, Hagia Sofia, and so forth—are as picture-postcard lovely as the views of contemporary street life. The second unit shots put the viewer on the street by picking out individuals among passersby; we see the old-time hamals, hawkers and donkeys, and a rich contrast between billboards advertising modern goods and services and antique streets and wood-clad neighborhoods.

To elude police, the gang attends a traditional ermeydanı (heavyweight) oil wrestling tournament in which male contestants wrestle slathered in olive oil. This unusual event is done in nearly documentary style, but Dassin may have taken liberties putting it in Istanbul. According to Fodor’s, there is an annual tournament of yaglı güres—oil wrestling—in late June or July, at Kirkpinar in Edirne, where it has been held since 1362, the long ongoing sporting event in the world.

Manos Hatzidakis’ soundtrack uses the kind of Greekified Turkish folk music called ‘éntekhno’ which he and composer Mikis Theodorakis (Zorba the Greek 1964) made popular in movies of that era set in this region. Hatzidakis won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for the theme song to Never on Sunday (1960), also directed by Jules Dassin and starring Melina Mercouri.

Ambler’s thriller and Dassin’s comedy caper end in different places, but each in its own way spins a satisfying yarn to its just deserts.