Konterr Brilliant and touching

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

tomsview I have always thought this a classy movie. It gets a bit convoluted before the end, but it's one I always remembered.Set in Spain, cat burglar Henry Stuart Clark (Michael Caine) joins forces with veteran safecracker Richard Moreau (Eric Portman) and his delectable young wife, Fe Moreau (Giovanni Ralli), to break into the home of a mega wealthy gent named Salinas (John Buck).Stealing jewels becomes almost secondary when Henry attempts to steal Fe. However there are complications and "Deadfall" has an ending that would be hard to get major stars to commit to today.The robbery sequences smack of Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief", but "Deadfall" isn't as light, there is a dark side to this film.However it's the concert, "Romance for Guitar & Orchestra", which takes place while Henry scales walls and drops onto perilous ledges during the first robbery that really conjures up the Hitchcock deja vu. The composer of the film's score, John Barry, actually conducts the on-screen orchestra, as did Bernard Herrmann in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much".This is a tense sequence and Barry's score is one of his best. During the 60's he was one of the most innovative composers around, and the title song, "My Love Has Two Faces", sung by Shirley Bassey makes you realise how weak most songs written for the movies are these days - just listen to the nominations on the Academy Awards.The film has terrific locations, Michael Caine at the top of his game and Giovanni Ralli, an Italian actress who is hard to take your eyes off. Even at 80, if recent photographs are anything to go by, she is still a serenely elegant woman.Then there is Eric Portman. I would defy anyone to name an actor who had more gravitas than Eric Portman, although he probably wasn't well here; "Deadfall" was his last movie, he died shortly after.Director Bryan Forbes came up with some intriguing movies in the 60's, "Seance on a Wet Afternoon", "King Rat" and "The Whisperers", a run that seemed to come to an end with "Deadfall"; things were more hit and miss after that.But "Deadfall" is unique; it seems even better now than it did back then.

Chrid Mann This movie has been described as a heist movie. May you be warned, dear reader, there is very little heisting here. The one real sequence, which comes after about forty minutes of turgid and unnecessary build-up, is intended to be tense and exciting, as the director cross-cuts repeatedly between the heist action and a concert hall (where house-owner is) with a performance of an absolutely horrendous Barry-composed piece for orchestra and guitar, in which the guitar is mostly drowned out by the loud and bombastic noises of the orchestra. The guitar music itself is very insipid, featuring mostly plain chords, with none of the fluid runs or flamenco riffs that one expects, especially in Spain, from the classical guitar. Nevertheless the performance receives thunderous applause and a standing ovation. Why?!As for the heist itself, we are expected to swallow a lot here. Firstly, the supposedly expert cat burglar (Caine) when shown a picture of his proposed entry window, opts for a torturous route whereby he has to use a grappling hook to climb up to the balcony of a higher floor and get himself over to the roof above said window, hang from the edge of this roof and then let himself fall and catch hold of the windowsill a floor and a half below - a marble windowsill mind which is not square but is ribbed and rounded at the edge! Caine then has to pull himself up from this position – and remember, he's a very big man – and onto the windowsill. When you're watching this you go WTF! All they needed to do was have a small extending ladder with them and he could have got to the windowsill in a fraction of the time, without having to risk his life to do it.Once inside he lets the old man in, whose job it is to open the safe, but he complains that the old safe has been replaced with a new one. Time ticks by, the concert is finishing (signalling return of house owner). Safe cracker admits defeat but not Caine, who proceeds to noisily smash the surrounding brickwork with a hammer and chisel. We now have to swallow that the three servants in the house hear nothing of this because they are eating and listening to the concert on the radio!Caine lugs the safe out to the car and they avoid in the nick of time the previously drugged but now awake guard dogs along with the returning house-owner.After this 'heist' Caine and the old man's wife start to get friendly, Caine gets a snazzy E-type and the film descends into a series of conversational set-pieces which totally fail in their desired intention of instilling fascinating and thought-provoking dramatic content into the movie. To give an example: Caine in one scene is lying motionless on his back on the bed and listening to the lead actress, who with mask-like expression (perhaps adopted to evoke high drama but more probably an expression of the actress's complete lack of personality) is droning on and on and on about some old personal history that is meant to be hugely significant but which is so boring that you (I did anyway) just turn off and stop listening and you see Caine lying there and you see that he's done the same and is presumably daydreaming about getting his final scene wrapped so he can collect his cheque and get out of there.The film stretches on in similar manner until the 'sad' and 'dramatic' ending where you don't feel sad but happy because it finally finished and you can leave the cinema/switch off the TV! Would have given this film two points but have to give three because of the beauty of the E-type Jag!

Prof-Hieronymos-Grost Henry Stuart Clarke (Michael Caine) is a cat burglar who has his work down to a fine art. While under cover in a retreat for recovering alcoholics, he is approached by an alluring woman Fé Moreau who has a proposition for him, he's suspicious but agrees to meet her aging husband, Richard,(Eric Portman)himself a professional burglar who is now struggling to pull off the big jobs due to his age. Together they agree to pull off a seemingly impossible heist. Derided on its initial release, Forbes' film is nonetheless an interesting if slow film, especially if you like films of its ilk, its also beautifully filmed and makes wonderful use of the stunning Spanish setting, it also has a memorable score by the great John

whitesheik I knew if I came to the IMDb there would be the usual litany of "neglected gem" "undiscovered masterpiece" "not as bad as you've heard" that every bad and awful movie seems to get. No comprende, I'm afraid. This thing was critically lambasted and the public that bothered to see it hated it. Why? Because it STINKS. Bad script, pretentious and unnecessarily arty direction, a terrible performance by its female lead, and I could go on but why bother. This is part of a three Caine DVD release from Fox, and they're three of the worst movies ever made - I'm sure when I go look up the other two - Peeper and The Magus - that there will be more of "neglected gem" "undiscovered masterpiece" "not as bad as you've heard" from the great unwashed or the film school pedants. I mean, sorry, this is a BAD movie.