Wonderfully offbeat film!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Writer & director Bryan Forbes' psychological thriller "Deadfall" lives down to its name. Essentially, "Deadfall" is a dead fall. This atmospheric but pretentious yarn about a master jewel thief, Harry Clarke (Michael Caine of "Too Late, The Hero"), who involves himself with an older thief, Moreau (Eric Portman of "Moonlight Sonata") and Moreau's wife, Fe (Giovanna Ralli of "The Mercenary"), who have been keeping tabs on him. As the story unfolds, sly Harry has entered Dr. Delgado's sanitarium for alcoholics where he chums around with another patient, millionaire Salinas (David Buck of "Mosquito Squadron"), who is there for the treatment, too. One day, Fe shows up and starts to take shop with Harry, but Harry is discrete and refers to his thievery as photography. Eventually, Fe convinces Harry to meet with Moreau, and they decide to go into business together. Harry finds himself attracted to Fe and learns that Moreau is a homosexual with a World War II background; he served in the Gestapo and he knows a lot about stealing, too. Meantime, Moreau wants Harry to work with them so much that he persuades his wife to sleep with him. Bryan Forbes has made his share of good movies, but "Deadfall" certainly isn't one of them. The film contains one suspenseful heist scene. After they feed the guard dogs at an estate with knock-out drugs, Moreau and Harry go after a safe. The owner of the estate is away at a concert. Initially, Forbes cross-cuts between Moreau and Harry trespassing on the property with the concert. Some of this is actually pretty good, but-like the two-hour length of the movie-it loses its suspenseful flavor, because the concert isn't trying to bust them while they fiddle with the safe. Unfortunately, when they arrive where the safe is housed, Moreau is upset because it is a different safe, and nothing that he pulls out of his bag of tricks enables him to open it. He is prepared to withdraw in failure, but Harry isn't similarly inclined. Indeed, he takes hammer and smashes the wall around the safe, and he hauls the entire safe out of the house. Harry manages to get the safe off the premises just moments after the guard dogs recover and come snarling after him. Mind you, this is the best scene in the movie, even if the suspense is flawed. During one moment, Harry leaps from one side of the building to another, grabs a finger hold on the ledge, and then drops himself down to the next window ledge. Basically, he does what Jet Li would do decades later in "Cradle 2 the Grave."Most of the time, "Deadfall" seems like a soap opera, with Harry intent on luring Fe away from Moreau. After all, Fe and Moreau sleep in separate beds! The bombshell falls in the last 30 minutes when Harry learns that Fe isn't Moreau's wife but instead his daughter. Forbes never explains this plot surprise. Meantime, Harry goes after Salinas, and it looks like he is going to loot the millionaire. It seems that Salinas doesn't trust safes. Instead, he keeps his treasures hidden in plain sight. "Deadfall" may have been the first movie to use this ploy. After he breaks into Salinas's mansion, Harry cracks the safe and finds it empty. Alarms sound, and our hero tries to escape, only to be shot by a sentinel. Harry is dangling from a window ledge when he takes a bullet and plunges to his death. The Spanish locations are exotic, and Giovanna Ralli is gorgeous, but "Deadfall" is too muddled to qualify as anything less than a forgettable potboiler. Gerry Turpin's cinematography with all those Dutch-tilt angles is as impressive as John Barry's moody, enigmatic score. Yes, composer John Barry plays the concert conductor during the concert, and his orchestral score is brilliant. Forbes' wife Nanette Newman has a peripheral role as a character known only as "The Girl" who is trying to launch a career as a film actress. The cast is better than the material. Forbes has a couple of good lines, but these may have come from the novel that it was based on written by Desmond Corey.

All of the sexual politics - which is what this piece is REALLY about - has dated to the point where it's farcical now. But this movie is still worth watching for...The Heist. The family piles into the Merc 600 and heads for town to attend a concert, leaving the servants behind to listen to it on the radio.What we then get, is a sequence where the legendary John Barry (Forbes convinced him to make one of his RARE appearances) steps up onto the podium to conduct his own Rodrigo-style concerto, with a lovely woman playing solo guitar, while Caine and co do their botched robbery (in the real World, they usually are) back at the family's house.And of course, by switching back and forth from the concert to the house, The Job gets a SOUNDTRACK! Then, when the piece is over, the family gets BACK into their Merc and returns HOME - PASSING the escaping heisters (is that a word? I'm sure the SpellChecker will say no).But what I LOVE about this sequence is the sheer IMPRACTICALITY of the whole thing. Like the bit where Caine DROPS two floors and catches a window-sill with his FINGER-TIPS. His arms are at full stretch, which means it would have been IMPOSSIBLE!And what about the concert itself? Barry's concerto is shown as being the ONLY item on the programme - and it lasts (in REAL TIME) just SEVENTEEN MINUTES! Whoever heard of a concert that only lasted seventeen minutes?And the family don't even go ON somewhere afterwards (like a restaurant or club). Apparently, they BOOKED tickets, got DRESSED up, TRAVELED into town, PARKED up, got to their seats, sat - then REVERSED the process - for a SEVENTEEN MINUTE CONCERT. BONKERS!!!You've GOT to love it.

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

This may not be Michael Caines worst film,but it is almost certainly his worst performance.It has to be said the writing does not help him ,he comes across as a charmless cad with little to no humanity in evidence.Eric Portman as the sexually challenged partner in crime tries hard,but can find nothing in the script to help make a rounded character.Although caine was only in his 30s when he made this some of the physical abilities required in this crime movie would be beyond the efforts of a professional athlete.All in all a really bad movie with a dreadful if not deserved ending.Most movies have something going for them in this case it is the music.