Heist pictures in the mid to late 1960s were a dime a dozen, but this Michael Caine/Shirley MacLaine (nice ring to it) vehicle seemed poised in every way to transcend the genre. Caine had just won fame from his role as wiseacre cockney playboy Alfie Elkins in Alfie while MacLaine had already left a trail of memorable performances behind her, including The Apartment, Irma La Douce, and Two for the Seesaw. The Caine/MacLaine combo in Gambit manages to be believable enough as the clever globetrotting crooks out to infiltrate the palatial home of the richest man in the world (played by the Pink Panther franchise mainstay Herbert Lom) and steal a particularly valuable sculpture from him.
Caine, playing breaking-and-entering specialist Harry Dean, who poses as a jet-setting international man of mystery (using the same upper-class British accent he utilized to believable effect in Zulu) schmoozes his way into the good graces of Shabandar and his uber-posh milieu by using exotic-looking cabaret dancer Nicole (MacLaine) to help soften him up: as it happens, Nicole closely resembles Shabandar’s late wife and has a mesmerizing effect on him. As things develop, the cracks in Caine’s upper-crust guise begin to show, stirring up suspicion among Shabandar and his handlers. Unaware of said suspicion, Harry and Nicole carry out the cockamamie caper as planned, but not without some last-minute bumbling.
The real problem with the movie is not the plot but the lack of comic relief in the film and too much deadweight dialogue. The last-minute romance between Caine and MacLaine seems unnaturally shoehorned into the script, and as a couple, the two usually charismatic stars never achieve any sort of inspired romantic spark—certainly nothing like MacLaine had with previous onscreen love interests like Jack Lemmon and Robert Mitchum. Still, the film’s comfortable averageness does manage to yield a few surprises, but the caper’s conclusion, while not exactly predictable, is certainly anticlimactic and improbable.
A bit more careful work in the editing room might have livened things up a little, but mainly it’s the oil-and-water pairing of Caine and MacLaine that makes Gambit just another colorful but mediocre Swinging Sixties heist flick. Optional for classic film collections in public libraries.
Discover more titles with our list of comedy movies.