Artful to a Fault

How to Steal a Million. "It's only a day's work for you, but it's my first burglary," says Audrey Hepburn, her doe eyes alight with the giddy, girlish flame so often kindled in a very proper romantic heroine who has just discovered the joys of going gaily to hell.

That fawnlike look is Audrey's special domain as a comedienne, and her partner in crime on this elegant occasion is Peter O'Toole, also treading very lightly as a debonair art-world detective whom Audrey has mistaken for a fellow burglar. Together they hurdle a large chunk of plot by stealing a marble Cellini nude from a Paris art museum, armed only with a magnet, a boomerang and a mop bucket.

Thinly disguised for a time as a charwoman, Audrey plays the daughter of a fine old French family with a congenital weakness for forging old masters. Papa is Hugh Griffith, a shaggy rogue whose wickedly rolling orbs make him look like a cross between a pinball machine and a Rembrandt portrait. Griffith has turned Sunday painting into a world-famous collection of Cezannes, Van Goghs, Renoirs--all part of $100,000 worth of phony masterworks, especially commissioned to help Director William Wyler (The Collector) fashion this meticulous high comedy about ars graftia artis. Among the other experts at hand are Art Dealer Charles Boyer and a frenzied connoisseur (Eli Wallach) who yearns to whisk both Audrey and the nude Cellini back to his Stateside lair.

How to Steal a Million is tastefully directed and competently performed, but its glossy tone somehow brushes out any forward momentum. In a film that cries for wild hilarity and a heady spirit of adventure, everything that is going to happen happens according to long-established rules of the game, from the first skittish encounter to the last eager kiss. Its old-fashioned fun looks overpracticed, becoming merely another workout for a troupe of talented professionals who do their jobs with coolly measured skill rather than warmblooded will.

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