Topkapi (1964)

Official trailer

Topkapi is Jules Dassin’s 1964 American-British caper film adapting Eric Ambler’s 1962 novel The Light of Day. The film depicts an international gang assembled to steal an emerald-encrusted dagger from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. The team includes mastermind Elizabeth Lipp, electronics expert Cedric Page, planner Walter Harper, acrobat Giulio, strongman Hans, and hapless British petty criminal Arthur Simpson who’s blackmailed into participating without understanding the actual operation. Melina Mercouri plays Elizabeth Lipp. Peter Ustinov plays Arthur Simpson. Maximilian Schell plays Walter Harper. Robert Morley plays Cedric Page.

Akim Tamiroff plays Gerven. Gilles Segal plays the acrobat Giulio. Jess Hahn plays Hans. Monja Danischewsky wrote the screenplay. Filmways Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 2 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 9 million dollars on initial release. Peter Ustinov won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

I have more fun with Topkapi than with almost any caper of its decade, and most of that fun is Ustinov sweating his way through a crime he doesn’t understand. My reservation is the rest of the gang. They’re sketched thinly, and I wish the film gave Mercouri and Schell half the detail Ustinov gets.

Topkapi extends the heist film tradition that Jules Dassin had developed in Rififi (1955) almost a decade earlier. The film works more comedically than the brutal Rififi while preserving the procedural heist sequence that distinguished the earlier work. The famous central sequence depicts Giulio being lowered through a skylight on a rope while team members on the roof hold the rope steady. He must touch nothing inside the room because the floor contains pressure-sensitive alarms.

Countless directors who followed have imitated the sequence, most directly in Mission Impossible (1996). The Peter Ustinov performance as the bumbling Arthur Simpson won the Academy Award and gave the comedic heist film a central character who could hold the surrounding professional crime together. Dassin’s continuing European career produced consistent quality across the period.

The Skylight Sequence

The film’s central heist sequence depicts Giulio being lowered through a skylight on a long rope held by team members on the palace roof. The room below contains the emerald-encrusted dagger on display surrounded by pressure-sensitive floor alarms.

Giulio must descend slowly, touch only the dagger, and ascend without his body or his sweat reaching any other surface. The sequence runs approximately fifteen minutes with major detail about the operational mechanics.

The skylight scene is the reason I rate this film as high as I do. Fifteen minutes of a man hanging over a floor he can’t touch, and I’m holding my breath the whole way down. Nothing else in the film comes close, and none of the heist films that copied it have topped it.

The sequence has been imitated extensively. Mission Impossible (1996) opens with a recreation of the Topkapi setup with Tom Cruise lowered from the ceiling of CIA headquarters. Various other productions including Entrapment (1999), Sneakers (1992), and many others trace their raised-thief sequences to Topkapi.

The original sequence remains the reference point. Dassin’s specific decision to film the operation in real time without conventional musical score follows the approach he’d developed in Rififi. The work gives the heist procedural weight that conventional editing would diminish.

Ustinov as Arthur Simpson

Peter Ustinov plays Arthur Simpson as a small-time British conman blackmailed into participating in an operation he doesn’t understand. Simpson thinks he’s only driving a car into Turkey until customs finds the weapons hidden in it.

He gradually realizes he’s been recruited to help an international jewel theft operation. The performance combines physical comedy with the particular quality of a man whose continuous lies have produced a life he no longer fully controls.

I adore Ustinov’s Simpson. He’s a coward, a liar and a terrible smuggler, and every time he opens his mouth he makes things worse for himself, a fact he seems to grasp about two seconds too late.

Ustinov won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for the performance.

The character is the source of the comedic tone that distinguishes Topkapi from Dassin’s harder Rififi material. Conventional heist films typically separate professional criminals from comedic relief characters. Topkapi makes Simpson the protagonist whose perspective frames the entire operation. The structural choice gives the heist film comedic foundation without abandoning the procedural seriousness that Dassin’s approach required. The combination produces a film that works at the same time as caper comedy and as procedural heist.

The Turkish Setting

Topkapi was filmed extensively in Istanbul including considerable sequences at the actual Topkapi Palace Museum.

The Turkish government permitted location filming that other filmmakers might have constrained. Istanbul gives the film an atmosphere that studio reconstruction couldn’t have provided. The bridge sequences, the bazaar sequences, and the palace exteriors all use real locations instead of back-lot recreation.

The Istanbul locations do more for this film than any set could have. The bazaar and the palace look lived in, and I think the city is the best supporting player in the picture after Ustinov.

The 1964 Turkish setting captured a particular moment in the country’s post-war modernization.

Istanbul combines Ottoman architectural heritage with mid-century Turkish development. Later decades have transformed the city considerably. The Topkapi footage now lands as historical document of conditions that no longer fully exist. Location filming in certain places at distinct times produces material that becomes increasingly valuable as the locations change.

Does Topkapi still hold up?

Topkapi deserves its 8. Dassin keeps the procedural seriousness he developed in Rififi and wraps it in comedy, the skylight sequence is still the template every raised-thief scene copies, and Ustinov deserved his Oscar every minute he’s on screen. The point I hold back is for the rest of the gang, who never get the attention Simpson does. If you like heist films at all, see this one before the imitations.

Frequently Asked Questions