Penelope

Penelope Elcott is the restless wife of a busy bank president, James Elcott, who has little time for her. Bored and neglected, she turns to stealing, first in small ways and then on a much larger scale: disguised, she holds up her husband's own bank and makes off with sixty thousand dollars. Her psychiatrist, Gregory Mannix, learns what she has done and, because he is in love with her, tries to help by returning the money, but he abandons the attempt when the police appear. Penelope then decides to confess, and neither her husband nor the authorities are prepared to take her word for it.

The film is a comedy directed by Arthur Hiller, the first of the seventeen features listed for him in chronological order, ahead of Love Story in 1970. George Wells wrote the screenplay, Arthur M. Loew Jr. produced, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer backed it with a budget of four million dollars. Natalie Wood plays Penelope, with Ian Bannen as James, Dick Shawn as Dr. Mannix, Peter Falk as Lt. Horatio Bixbee, Jonathan Winters as Professor Klobb and Lila Kedrova as Princess Sadaba. Thirty-eight cast members are credited.

Released in November 1966, the film runs 98 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.2 from around 2,500 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 5.4 from a much smaller base of 24 votes, so the two scores rest on very different levels of participation.