When on form, Italian director Dino Risi and Hollywood’s Blake Edwards show remarkably similar filmmaking gifts & styles. (When bad, they're bad in their own way.) Here, with Risi pulling off a Napoli-set comic crime caper, just two years after Edwards’ THE PINK PANTHER*, they’re at their most alike; Romulus & Remus sharing a wolf teat in a perfectly composed shot. American gangster Harry Guardino, with deadly moll Senta Berger (excellent!), has a plan to rob the Jewels of San Gennaro, but needs local help and approval from various mob fiefdoms. The area in question run by Nino Manfredi, but he needs various approvals, too, including one from elderly, just released Totò (hilarious). Naturally, lots of Neapolitan flavor (real locations/'looped' dialogue; mid-‘60s Italian production standards). Most of the character support dead accurate, often very funny. Watch for Manfredi’s bull-like assistant. With a devious plot of close calls, suspenseful delays you can follow, a religious code-of-honor to find loopholes in, and a wedding feast interrupting the heist with ‘off’ shellfish. Plenty to keep you involved before Risi pulls out his slapstick directing chops in a brilliantly staged and perfectly paced race to the airport finale far more deadly than anything Edwards could get away with in Hollywood at the time. Now, with the film scheduled for an English-language remake, we’ll see how far they’ll go.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The explosion in gritty crime capers with meticulously detailed heists that blew into international cinema on the back-draft of Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI/’55 was shortly followed by burlesques like BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58. Peaking in 1964, with PANTHER and when Dassin got in on the joke with TOPKAPI. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/topkapi-1964.html
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