Topkapi

Watch Topkapi (1964) online on iFILM — a heist comedy from director Jules Dassin, starring Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, and Peter Ustinov. The prize is the jeweled dagger of Mehmed II, locked behind layers of security in Istanbul's Topkapi Museum. The method: lower a man through the ceiling without touching the floor.

A mismatched crew assembles. Ustinov plays Arthur Simpson, a small-time hustler with a gift for being in the wrong place — he ends up involved because he knew too much to be left out and too little to be reliable. He took home the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for it, and the film is largely built around him: cowardly, charming, and genuinely funny. The heist sequence itself runs nearly silent — no music, no dialogue, just the mechanics of what can go wrong.

Dassin made this six years after Rififi, deliberately shifting the register: where that film was suffocating and dark, Topkapi is sun-drenched and playful, though the ending doesn't let anyone off clean. The rope-and-pulley centerpiece fed directly into what early Mission: Impossible borrowed. Stream Topkapi (1964) on iFILM.