Deadfall (Bryan Forbes, 1968) Middling Bryan Forbes drama starring Michael Caine as a cat burglar hired by a safe-cracker (Eric Portman) for a nearly impossible job. Actually, the burglar, Henry Clarke had been casing this job for awhile and has checked into a sanitorium to get close to his target, but he's lured into working with the much older safe-cracker by the man's much-younger wife (Giovanna Ralli). Consulting with the couple, the Moreaus, it is decided that they will do a trial run robbing the strong-box of another socialite, with Henry scaling the walls, gaining entrance and then letting the husband, Richard, into the house to break into the safe. The socialite couple will be attending a concert on the prospective night and while they're safely enjoying the performance, the two men will do their night-time prowling, which will involve drugging guard dogs, and Clarke scaling the outside of the mansion, having to perform a maneuver, called a "deadfall", where he must drop from a rooftop to a lower ledge without benefit of a supporting rope.
Now, just the fact that I mention that should alert anyone that Clarke is taking more risks than he should. He does, after all, use a rope to scale the outside of the estate—couldn't he, then, move the rope (or take a second one) to avoid having to perform that risky maneuver? But, no, it doesn't happen that way for the sake of ginning up the suspense, the task of a night robbery being risky enough.
But, then, the whole movie is like that. There are so many lost opportunities and so many unnecessary risks in this less-than-perfect crime that you wonder why nobody questions the job, the partnership, anything for what looks, on the face of it, to be a hopeless enterprise.
Most of the blame must fall on Forbes, who wrote and directed, and had the interesting idea to stage that first robbery to a concert performance. His favored composer, John Barry, wrote an original piece for the film—"Romance for Guitar and Orchestra"—which would serve as the background for the robbery sequence, cutting back and forth between the concert, the robbery, and the villa's staff listening to the concert over the radio. It's the same strategy Alfred Hitchcock used for the meeting of the conspirators and victims at the Royal Albert Hall in his second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and as Hitchcock used his composer for that picture, Bernard Herrmann, to conduct on-screen, Forbes had Barry appear as conductor. Interesting little trivia item, and Barry wouldn't appear on-screen again until serving as an orchestra conductor in The Living Daylights, his last film as composer for the James Bond series.
It's a great idea—except that Forbes can't even do that right. Barry does his job—he'd been writing romance and action cues throughout the 60's, and he'd learned that he didn't need to ramp up the pace for action sequences. But, Forbes' penchant for unusual angles and POV makes the performance footage less than interesting. The interest is far more on the robbery, which is shot well, but is rather ruinous in what happens—at one point it becomes apparent to Clarke that Moreau can't open the safe and he begins yelling (Shhhh!) and comes up with a plan B to take the safe by hammering it out of the wall.
Okay, the shouting rather kills the mood of the music, a slight offense, but then, Forbes has Caine hammering the wall...in total silence. Wouldn't the noise—and vibration—alert the staff sitting, a couple hundred feet away, enjoying their dinner to something going on—even if they weren't depending on an alarm system that Clarke had already cut? Does the music playing over the radio—and the soundtrack—mask what is some very concussive noise? One cannot have it both ways and it's stylistically patting one's head while rubbing their belly. It's a very bizarre sequence And baldly contrived.
One wonders why he did it this way; there's a long history of film-heists done in silence and stealth, and this one has neither. Forbes was very much a part of the "Swinging 60's" period of British film-making, but his films were not revolutionary, despite his stagings and sometimes pointlessly arty framing. His films are curiosities, not classics, and every so often they seem to lose the point and get distracted by some half-hearted flippancy. Watching them, they seem to exist in a world that doesn't make much sense and half little to do with the real world.
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