How to Steal a Million (1966)

William Wyler's How to Steal a Million arrives from 1966 with its Givenchy wardrobe, its Parisian postcards, and its complete indifference to the moral instruction of later decades. Audrey Hepburn plays Nicole, the daughter of a forger, and Peter O'Toole plays the man she recruits to lift a fake Cellini Venus out of a museum before a forensic examination exposes the family trade. The premise is fraud. The tone is champagne. Nobody involved appears to have consulted a sociologist. It is a caper, and it knows it is a caper, and it declines to be anything else.

The film's pleasures are entirely of surface and craft. Hepburn models a succession of frocks. O'Toole smolders with the specific smugness of a man who has been told he is charming. The central heist, staged across a utility closet and a darkened museum floor, is engineered with real comic precision. There is a wealthy American collector who covets the statue and a father who mourns the insurance payout that will never come. Money is discussed constantly. Nobody in the screenplay is indicted for it.

We searched, as is our duty, for the markers of contemporary social consciousness. We found none. The cast is uniformly white and European. The women exist to be lovely and worried. Race, climate, class grievance, identity, and the question of neurodivergence go unmentioned and unexamined. The film has no thesis, no sermon, and no interest in improving anybody. It is an empty ledger, and the emptiness is, in its way, restful. A clean zero. Rare, and almost admirable.