From the Rental Vault: Trio Classico

Take Audrey Hepburn, add Peter O'Toole, and stir them into a very lightweight heist comedy of mistaken identity, and you have the very charming 1966 movie How to Steal a Million.

And charming is probably the best word for it. Hepburn had been a star for more than a decade; O'Toole had made the switch from a long stage career to movies and had already earned two Academy Award nominations. Both had more charm and audience appeal than they knew what to do with, and longtime director William Wyler used that and their off-screen friendship to his best advantage.

Hepburn is Nicole Bonnet, whose father is a very skillful knockoff artist. He's made more than a living trading off the reputation of his collection of rare works of art, which are almost indistinguishable from real paintings by the masters whose names he signs to his canvases. He comes by it honestly, as his father forged sculpure the way he forges paintings, and his decision to exhibit one of his father's works brings trouble as the museum intends to test it in order to get the insurance papers settled properly.

So Nicole engages the services of Simon Dermott, whom she believes is an art thief. In reality, he's a private investigator hired by museums and collectors to determine whether or not the paintings they buy are fakes, but she convinces him to try to steal the statue her father donated before it can be tested. At first interested in nabbing her father, Simon actually agrees because of his growing feelings for Nicole.

As mentioned, this movie is so lightweight a balloon would sink it, but Hepburn and O'Toole make it not only bearable but fun. It's about a half-hour too long, but without this pair of leads it would have been about an hour too long. They save it and make it a great romp, but still one that's forgotten before long.

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Although we tend to think of Rudyard Kipling in Victorian England terms, especially as he connected to England's colonial rule and culture in India, he actually lived into the 1930s -- long enough to prevent most of his stories and poems from being adapted for Hollywood movies. His widow, on the other hand, had far fewer problems with the idea and sold the rights to his famous ode to a heroic native water-bearer soon after Kipling's death. The movie would be delayed more than once until filming finally began in 1938 for the 1939 release of Gunga Din.

Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., are three sergeants in Her Majesty's army, stationed in India in the 1880s. At times more interested in treasure and pleasure than good order and discipline, the three are nonetheless called on when a village communications post goes silent and telegraph lines are down. They learn of a resurgence of the murderous cult of the Thuggee, who worship a goddess of death and are determined to terrorize both their own people and the British until they rule all of India. The trio, along with their water-bearer Gunga Din, are captured by the cult and must escape to bring news of its headquarters' location to their commander before they begin a murderous rampage.

The Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur story is mostly an excuse for Grant, Fairbanks and McLaglen to have a blast as scoundrels, rapscallions and devil-may-care swashbuckling fighters. All three accept their part of the bargain whole-heartedly, daringly doing derring-do until well-done. In the title role, Sam Jaffe is interesting and not too cringingly incorrect -- at least for 1939.

Gunga Din couldn't get made this way today -- Kipling's imperialism would get in the way of realizing his poem really does praise Gunga Din and fault the Englishmen who didn't appreciate his bravery until too late, and possible connections between the Thuggee cult and Indian independence movements might prevent their being seen in such starkly villainous terms. Even as an artifact of its time, though, it's one of the top adventure films ever made and a worthy part of one of Hollywood's greatest years.

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Eleven years later, Jaffe -- the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and not a bit Indian -- would get fifth billing in John Huston's noir heist caper The Asphalt Jungle, based on the 1949 novel by W.R. Burnett (who kind of invented the gangster movie when he wrote Little Caesar, the book on which the Edward G. Robinson movie was based). He plays Erwin "Doc" Riedenschneider, a career criminal who starts planning an elaborate jewel heist not long after getting out of prison.

Doc sells his plan to criminal lawyer -- in both senses of the term -- Alonzo Emmerich (Lous Calhern) to finance the scheme and hire his crew -- safecracker Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), driver Gus Minissi (James Whitmore) and muscle Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). But not everyone's motive is as it seems, and both double-crosses and unforeseen problems complicate the job -- endangering both its success and the crew.

Even though Jungle is a pretty classic piece of noir, Huston skips the shadows and cramped shots usual to the genre and fits it into wider rooms and relatively open views. He's sometimes celebrated for showing the heist crew not as drooling degenerate criminals but as professionals, each as skilled in their work as any legal craftsman. Of course, they're not legal craftsmen, and their insistence on cutting life's corners to get what they want dooms them to lives of limitations and failure. For all their supposed celebration of darkness and ambiguity, noir movies have a pretty bleak view of what happens when corners get cut.

The cast handles their roles well, breathing a little life into what could be stereotypes -- Jaffe is cerebral and meticulous, Hayden blustering and good-natured behind his gruffness, Calhern scheming and self-centered, and so on. Even though Jaffe and Huston won Oscars for their work, the genius of Asphalt Jungle is less in pure acting or directing and more in its creation of atmosphere and the feeling it offers that this same kind of low-level malefaction is going on all over the place.

It's also an interesting trivia answer, as arguably the most famous person connected with The Asphalt Jungle isn't even in the featured cast on the poster. In an early role, Marilyn Monroe brings an unexpected weight and dimension to the minor part of Angela Phinlay, Emmerich's mistress. It was one of the bit parts that began to bring her some notice among studio executives and directors