I love this movie. Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole are delightful in this sophisticated, comic romp.
It's a brilliant, romantic heist film directed by William Wyler (Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday, The Best Years of Our Lives) about an art forger who is in danger of being exposed. Charles Bonnet (Hugh Griffith) has been forging masterpieces for decades. He takes after his father who also forged sculpture. Boyer delights in selling his work to unsuspecting collectors for obscene sums of money.
In a moment of generosity he agrees to allow a sculpture, The Cellini Venus, to be put on display at the Paris museum. The sculpture has been in his family for years, since, after all, it was carved by his father.
Unfortunately, only after agreeing to the exhibition does he learn that the statue will be tested for insurance purposes. Any test will reveal it's a fake and call into suspect the entire Bonnet collection.
His daughter, Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is determined to prevent her father from being ruined, so she enlist the aid of art thief Simon Dermott (Peter O'Toole) to break into the museum and steal the statue before the authenticity tests can take place. Dermott must come up with a master plan to defeat the museum's high-tech anti-theft devices. Eli Wallach appears in an uneven part as an American millionaire and art collector and Charles Boyer appears in a brief role as an art expert.
After years of Hepburn being paired with men much older than her (Gregory peck, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Rex Harrison and Burt Lancaster) it is great to see her in a film with a romantic interest that is the same age that she is. It also helps that peter O'Toole is as handsome as she is beautiful. There are quite a number of close-ups of her big brown eyes and his baby blues.
The script by Harry Kurnitz and George Bradshaw is effortless in it's mix of comedy, drama, romance and suspense. The music is by a new composer Johnny Williams, nine years away from his successful work on Jaws.
At The Movie House rating ***1/2 stars
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