HOW TO STEAL A MILLION (1966) *** It's been a long time since I realized that probably the single thing that I like best about most modern art is that it creates an opportunity to shift millions of dollars from unimaginative rich people to aging art students. I like that. Of course not all art students are cool and not all rich people are gauche, but you've got to start somewhere and not only is it a good dynamic, but it's self-regulating and very funny when you think about it. I was once thrown out of the La Jolla Museum of Modern Art for laughing. It's nice to think that much of the cash is changing hands into men as worthy, and tasteful, as Hugh Griffith, but he's not really much of the point. It's an all-time all-star elegance pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole that makes this film so memorable and worthwhile. The '60s are always going to be associated more with the charisma of people like Marlon Brando and Raquel Welch, but elegance is eternal in the sense that it stands outside of time (as do the qualities of Brando and Welch, but I digress...). The chemistry between Hepburn and O'Toole owes more, really, to intellect and spirituality than it does to physicality...the philosophical implications are either an evolution or devolution from Rousseau, and in some sense a displacement. Not to say that there's no electricity, but it maintains something of a withdrawn modesty at all times, neither hinting nor even acknowledging what might lie inside the covers beyond the curtain. There cannot be said to be an erotic tension in even the lustier scenes, so much as a graceful incapacitation of the filters. That being said, they're in a kind of love that's more real than a lot of other kinds, and that's always more interesting than trying to figure out which way the money's going. And higher art.
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