Deadfall (1968)

The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The only thing I can figure out from this melange is that Bryan Forbes was attempting to make a sort of Lord Of The Flies substituting adults for children but his talent was woefully short of his ambition. On the 'oooh' counter Forbes allowed Michael Caine to refer openly to Eric Portman as a 'queer'. This was irony on time-and-a-half because Portman was seriously gay off screen but like, say, Harry Andrews, a stream of 'macho' roles deflected viewer realization and Portman could quite happily have continued with 'rugged' roles indefinitely. John Barry turned in a wince-making extended piece which allowed Forbes to intercut it with the main heist sequence in which Caine and Portman silently break into the large, home of the mark, who is, of course, in the concert hall watching the performance. Any credulity achieved by the sequence is blown sky-high when the mark jumps into his car and returns to his home the INSTANT the last note fades away rather than socialising with his friends for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Not this time, Forbesy.

With Shirley Bassey wailing a "Goldfinger"-ish song over some stylized credits featuring a seagull, one looks forward to viewing one of those great 60's heist movies. But "Deadfall" soon falls far short. Despite fine cinematography (by Gerry Turpin) with some offbeat angles, Bryan Forbes is too stodgy a director for this material - and the whole thing could have been edited down by half an hour. The cross-cutting in the first heist scene, for instance, just goes on for too long: OK, we get that the robbery is taking place during the duration of the concert - there's really no need keep cutting back to the concert hall until the very end of the sequence - especially just to focus on the performers and not the (oddly anonymous) victims of the crime. Not to mention that the suspense is undercut by the absurdity of a program which consists solely of one 20-minute guitar concerto; unlikely - no, impossible - that an audience would dress to the nines and pay for such a concert.Best aspects of the movie are the score (very much in the Bond mode)of John Barry, the swell Spanish settings, and Michael Caine's performance. What a sexy screen presence he had, with his heavy-lidded, sometimes cold (almost reptilian) eyes and cocky, self-confident voice conveying a mixture of indifference and condescension, which combine to equal utter cool. Caine's love scenes with the rather charmless Giovanna Ralli, however, lack warmth and spark, so the romance between them fails to convince; the bedroom scene is possibly one of the worst ever filmed (Ralli's phony emoting and the sheet between their two bodies put to pasture any notions of passion). Eric Portman makes a fine foil for Caine in their scenes together; but his character ends up being simultaneously over-complicated and underwritten, causing the last third of the movie to become, for me, just plain bewildering. Nanette Newman's role as "The Girl" is utterly pointless and she is so wooden (that dance scene!!!) that it's obvious that she's there only in the capacity of director's wife.A big disappointment. As someone mentions elsewhere, see "Gambit" instead.

It's a shame this movie was such a failure, because subsequently one of the greatest 60's film scores I've ever heard has been buried along with it. John Barry has never done finer work, and even appears on-camera to conduct one of the brilliant pieces he composed. If you ever get a chance to see this film on TV, and you get bored by it, just leave the sound on. You'll get quite a treat.

After seeing this, I could be persuaded why Caine's is so well known for making dud decisions as to the choice of his films. While comparisons are inevitably made with the earlier and strictly played for laughs Gambit, this is a thief movie with no humour whatsoever and as the film progresses from intrigue to jealousy, and then from drudgery to death.Overdirected? Most critics say so, but in the main, this was one of the aspects I most liked about the film. An early scene where Caine talks to the a youthful Leonard Rossiter can be noted for the lack of any shot of them both together in conversation. Others however, are sheer melodrama and should never have made it to the final cut.Interesting for early Caine fans only, as thereafter the attractiveness fades and only the director, Bryan Forbes, nice man as he is, can really be left to carry the can, so to speak. Speeding to a climax which is just plain odd, the film rather leaves too much detail unexplained. While it appears easy to fill in the gaps, not enough time elapses between the final revelations and the dramatic close, to believe that not one of the characters could have really thought sensibly about all of this, and therefore not taken such drastic actions. Bewildering though not without charm.