Topkapi

Topkapi is a 1964 American adventure comedy crime film directed by Jules Dassin, who also produced it from a screenplay by Monja Danischewsky. Melina Mercouri plays Elizabeth Lipp, a woman determined to acquire a priceless jeweled dagger kept in Istanbul's Topkapi Palace Museum. She assembles a team for the job, among them her lover Walter Harper, played by Maximilian Schell, plus a British gadget specialist, Cedric Page, an acrobat named Giulio, and the hapless Arthur Simon Simpson, played by Peter Ustinov, a small-time crook who gets caught up in the scheme. The gang gathers in northern Greece to prepare the operation, which requires slipping into the heavily guarded museum and carrying out a precisely timed theft. An unintended complication threatens the plan.

Dassin's filmography runs from Brute Force in 1947 through The Naked City, Thieves' Highway, Night and the City, Rififi and Never on Sunday in 1960. Topkapi is his seventh directed feature and his second following Never on Sunday, made after the earlier crime thrillers and the Greek-set comedy that came before it. The cast also includes Robert Morley, Jess Hahn and Gilles Ségal.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.9 out of 10 from around 12,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.5 out of 10 from roughly 225 votes. A film critics' rating of 8.2 out of 10 from 21 reviews places critical opinion noticeably higher than the general audience response.