Deadfall

There was a time when all you needed to make a movie was a sexy couple and a jewel heist, though it helped if you had a decent script to mark time between the story beats. Alas, this flaccid 1968 thriller has nothing but the couple, the heist and some tiresome "shock” elements that come off as merely tedious. Michael Caine stars as the primary heister, a recovering alcoholic who is one day visited by the mysterious Giovanna Ralli. She leads him to her supposedly gay husband Eric Portman and from there they strike a deal to loot a rather difficult target. The caper itself is marginally interesting for being intercut with a concert, as in The Man Who Knew Too Much, but director Bryan Forbes is no Hitchcock and he fails to provide a modicum of tension before and after this sequence. Once the heist is completed, there’s nothing left to watch, just the boring, adulterous romance between Caine and Ralli, and an 11th-hour confession of indecency by Portman. The main event is really the posh costumes and expensive houses of the rich and dissipated, and if you’re the kind of person who digs that sort of thing then have I got a movie for you. But if not, you’ll find Deadfall to be a film lost in time and out of date, to say nothing of borderline offensive in its deployment of that final shock. Still, it will bore you before it offends you and if you’re lucky, you’ll have bailed long before that revelation knocks the impressionable off their socks. Extras include a decent featurette on composer John Barry and, apropos of nothing, an isolated music and sound effects track.