How to Steal a Million

Director: William Wyler
Year Released: 1966
Rating: 2.0

An exercise in colorful puffery: the daughter (Audrey Hepburn) of a notorious art forger (Hugh Griffith) enlists the help of a "burglar" (Peter O'Toole) to help her steal back her dad's "priceless" Cellini statue from a gallery in order to keep art experts and the authorities from realizing the statue's a fake and Ol' Pa is a criminal. While Wyler was all-too-capable at producing some powerful treasures (Dodworth and The Best Years of Our Lives being two of his best), plus he made a romantic classic with Hepburn years prior (Roman Holiday), this one lacks the same level of originality and wit: O'Toole and Hepburn don't have the same chemistry as Peck and Hepburn, and many of the script's particulars require intellectual oversight (the boomerang, the "insurance policy" Griffith signs without thinking, O'Toole's character's odious lack of ethics considering his real profession). You watch it, you overlook a lot, you forget about it an hour later: it's painless and unremarkable.