User reviews

It deals with a cat burgler : Michel Caine who is hired by a rare and mysterious marriage : Giovanna Ralli , Eric Portman to execute a house theft . He has to carry out a cat burlar at a luxurious mansion at great risk to limb and life . Meanwhile , the burgler falls in love with the young wife of his gay accomplice .Michael Caine stood on a wall.. Michael Caine has a deadfall ! Michael Caine plunges into the world of the adulterious ... the treacherous ,.. and the perverse !

Thrilling and interesting film about house robbery with action , trills , emotion , a love story and replete with a Shirley Bassey theme tune . This is a stop-go thriller being slow-moving at times , but entertaining enough . Of course , the best scenes result to be when our starring bringing off a daring heist intercut with clips from the concert attended by the owners of the house he is stealing , otherwise the action is undermourished . Trio of protagonists are frankly well . Michael Caine is very good in his usual style as the resourceful stealer carrying out dangerous robberies . The beautiful spouse , the Italian Giovanna Ralli , is fine as the woman who has been mentally scarred by his dad's membership of the Gestapo . And Eric Portman steals the show as the good-manners and sophisticated thief . Along with these nice stars , there is a small group of secondaries appearing and delivering brief interpretations , such as : Leonard Rossiter, Philip Madoc , Vladek Sheybal , composer John Barry himself , cameo by prestigious writer who lived in Majorca and Nanette Newman who was Bryan Forbes' wife , as well as Spanish secondaries as Emilio Rodríguez and Santiago Rivero .

It contains a brilliant and colorful cinematography by Gerry Turpin, shot on spectacular location in Majorca Balearic Islands , Spain and Pinewood Studios , Buckinghamshire , England , U K. The motion picture was professionally directed by Bryan Forbes , though it has some flaws and gaps . Being the special mention for the haunting musical score by John Barry , adding a 20-minute guitar concerto to accompany the hold-up . Both , composer John Barry and filmmaker Bryan Forbes collaborated in six theatrical movies , being this Deadfall their final movie . Director Bryan Forbes was also a notorious actor who directed some acceptable movies , such as : "Whistle down the wind , The L-shaped Room, Seance on a Wet Afternoon , King Rat , The Whisperers , The Raging Moon, The Slipper and the Rose , International Velvet , Better late than never , The Naked Face" , among others. The picture will appeal to Michael Caine fans .

After spending most of the sixties specialising in low-keyed black & white slices of life this marked Bryan Forbes' chance to provide a slice of cake. The package of Michael Caine (sans glasses) playing a dashing jewel thief against a backdrop of glamorous Spanish locations with a score by John Barry obviously made it easy to get backing. Just so you get the message it also has a credit sequence complete with a song by Shirley Bassey.

Although the heist itself delivers the goods, the principals spend far too much time languidly talking (and talking) about their emotions. Vladek Sheybal (also a Bond veteran) offers an unsettling cameo as a psychiatrist (who manages to give hitherto unsuspected menace to the single word "ma-ssage"); while in addition to the inevitable Nanette Newman - at one point briefly seen snogging David Buck to Barry's theme from 'Beat Girl' - Giovanni Ralli and Eric Portman (in his last film) are memorably poisonous as Caine's partners in crime.

Sure, the late 1960s were a rather permissive time. Nudity and highly realistic violence had crept into films and once taboo topics were becoming more and more commonplace. Still, I think some of the plot elements in "Deadfall" must have shocked a few folks back then. That's because the plot involves more than just burglaries, as one of the main characters is gay---a novel idea for its time.

The film begins with Henry Clark (Michael Caine) in rehab for alcoholism. A pretty lady (Giovanna Ralli) shows up with a business proposition--she knows he's a top burglar and wants him for a job with her husband (Eric Portman). The trio join forces and their goal eventually is to go for a seemingly impossible job--but they do an easier one first. This job does not go smoothly, but seeing this portion of the film is the highlight of the movie.

By the way, although the plot left me a bit cold, the music by John Barry was great and the director's use of intercutting scenes during the first burglary are quite good. Along the line, Caine falls for his new partner's wife. This isn't a major problem, as her husband is gay. But, oddly, she is very loyal to him and won't leave him. However, there is an odd secret--something much stranger afoot that no one except the husband yet knows. What it is turns out to be kind of weird--and leads to a very anticlimactic and depressing ending. All in all, a creative caper film but one that is, at times, very talky and many won't like the downbeat ending. I think it's worth a look--a decent film but certainly not a must-see.

Watched this film tonight on the BBC for the first time. What an unusual film! Written and Directed by Bryan Forbes it certainly added some new twists to the usual thriller plotline. Some odd mixing of plotlines, particularly mixing up sexuality with perversion, which maybe didn't come off too well, but with some brilliant music by John Barry and a belting Shirley Bassey opening titles song this does deliver great entertainment with good direction from Bryan Forbes.

DEADFALL is a lushly photographed suspense story with a cat burglar theme, wallowing in a full bodied John Barry score--especially during the major heist involving MICHAEL CAINE's high climbing bit where he's breaking into a playboy's mansion. Clever editing permits cross-cutting between a concert hall suite and the burglary in progress. GIOVANNA RALLI is the pretty Italian woman married to the mastermind of the burglary--ERIC PORTMAN--an aged homosexual.

After the main burglary, the story sags from mid-point onward with talky scenes between Caine and Ralli where she talks about her failed marriage and revelations of a sordid kind. All of this leads toward a downbeat ending with explanations made that are supposed to be shocking but don't have the desired impact because by then the pace of the film has become too lethargic.

ERIC PORTMAN gets the best lines but the dialog is hardly up to the caliber of Tennessee Williams and that's what is needed here, considering the sort of material the story deals with.

Summing up: Handsomely photographed on locations in England and Spain, it's a so-so crime caper after a solidly suspenseful burglary. The John Williams score is its biggest asset.

It's a shame this movie was such a failure, because subsequently one of the greatest 60's film scores I've ever heard has been buried along with it. John Barry has never done finer work, and even appears on-camera to conduct one of the brilliant pieces he composed. If you ever get a chance to see this film on TV, and you get bored by it, just leave the sound on. You'll get quite a treat.

After seeing this, I could be persuaded why Caine's is so well known for making dud decisions as to the choice of his films. While comparisons are inevitably made with the earlier and strictly played for laughs Gambit, this is a thief movie with no humour whatsoever and as the film progresses from intrigue to jealousy, and then from drudgery to death.

Overdirected? Most critics say so, but in the main, this was one of the aspects I most liked about the film. An early scene where Caine talks to the a youthful Leonard Rossiter can be noted for the lack of any shot of them both together in conversation. Others however, are sheer melodrama and should never have made it to the final cut.

Interesting for early Caine fans only, as thereafter the attractiveness fades and only the director, Bryan Forbes, nice man as he is, can really be left to carry the can, so to speak. Speeding to a climax which is just plain odd, the film rather leaves too much detail unexplained. While it appears easy to fill in the gaps, not enough time elapses between the final revelations and the dramatic close, to believe that not one of the characters could have really thought sensibly about all of this, and therefore not taken such drastic actions. Bewildering though not without charm.

I have understandably always confused this film with Gambit. Both heist movies starring Michael Caine. I am a huge Caine fan but somehow never saw this until today. It is as I say a heist story set in Spain. No plot spoilers but it is not totally an action film,there is a romance and psychological angle.

The cast is great and the film makes Spain look fantastic. The soundtrack is wonderful. I don't understand why this film gets such bad reviews,it is as good as The Thomas Crown affair and similar films.

Michael Caine plays a typically taciturn cat-burglar hooking up with a shady couple to pull off some posh country-house robberies in this atmospheric thriller set amongst Europe's aristocrats. Some nice scenery and a few tense robbery scenes fill in between a complex relationship story at the centre of things, as Caine has an affair with his gay employer/partner's wife. Interesting, a bit weird but not enough for cult interest, no classic but a good little movie.

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.

Bryan Forbes is an underrated director, almost forgotten today for a string of well reviewed films that ended with this one. The good reviews did that is. Perhaps at the time the direction seemed "overboard" but by today's standards of course it is merely stylish. It features lots of interesting camera angles, almost like a Joseph Losey film at times visually, and a lot of well written dialog.

Caine is very good. He played a series of almost expressionless villains and near-villains in the late 1960's. This roll is one of those, crook who falls for the wrong woman, deals but he totally sells it. Even the tone of his voice is different than you'd expect. He also gets to display both surprise and rage towards the end which gives the character more of a place to go than in the more highly regarded say Harry Palmer films and the soon to be made and good but over rated GET CARTER. He really makes the film work.

The odd character relationships also help a great deal as does John Barry's music. Fans of his probably know the main robbery scene is inter cut with a specially composed piece of pseudo classical music he wrote and which the scene was edited to later. It's a fascinating sequence and not like anything else Barry ever composed and worth watching for any fan of film music, meaning music in a film connected and interacting with it, not just as a CD to buy and enjoy. The whole score has a touch of the Spanish setting the film lushly invokes. You do have to ignore the lyrics and slightly heard it before nature of the Title song.

This is not an action crime film, more of a corrupted souls and the crimes they commit type of approach with an interesting Spanish setting. It's disguised film noir with realistic occasionally funny dialog and cool oddball sinister angles and editing choices that maybe play better today than at the time. Well worth watching, but good luck finding it.

This is quite a curious film from Bryan Forbes. On the face of it, it's just a well produced "Topkapi" (1964) rip off without the humour or the style; but if you give it a chance it's a bit more sophisticated. Michael Caine is on good form as a petty thief who is recruited by the enigmatic Giovanna Ralli and Eric Portman (Fe and Richard Moreau) to carry out a heist that will net them millions of pesetas from a safe in Spain. This does't quite go to plan, indeed it's at time quite comical - but they then move on to an even more daring challenge and that's when the characterisations start to make more of an impact on the rather ordinary plot. Eric Portman is the star here for me. Even though his delivery can be a bit annoying at times, this was probably the only time I ever saw him playing a part that reflected his own personality, and as we discover more about the rather quirky, shall we say, nature of the marriage between the two then things begin to make a bit more sense and the film a bit more intriguing. It is way, way, too long - lots of beautiful photography that advances the story not a jot, and I didn't love the conclusion, that seemed unnecessarily finite, but for a film I'd never heard of until yesterday, I think it is well worth a watch.

I first came across this film in Ankara, Turkey in the 1970's and have been looking for it since. It's a "heist" film on the surface, a cat burglar after jewels. But it's far more than this, with troubling, dark sexual overtones. It features the actual "deadfall" against the background of Aranjuez' guitar concerto, and the suspense is terrific, especially the acting, with Caine at his underplaying best, and Eric Portman stealing the show with a subtle, great performance. Why this film is not a cult classic I don't know, unless its dark side is too much for viewers. It's really unforgetable, as proven by its 25 year hold on my imagination.

If one draws a map of Bryan Forbes' directorial career it is obvious that it went through a winning streak that ended in less than ten years. Once an actor, Forbes declared in an interview that an actor had to have "arrogance, conceit… I would never have made it as an actor, but I still have conceit." Unfortunately this conceit was probably the cause that led him from solid dramas to concoctions as «Deadfall», a crime melodrama with a touch of James Bond's gymnastics among the rich in Mallorca, set to John Barry's ponderous score. The effort turned out to be a hard fall. Forbes was also a fine screenwriter, and he signed scripts for others, as Guy Green's «The Angry Silence», Seth Holt's «Station Six-Sahara», and 1964's «Of Human Bondage» (a troubled production with three directors, including Forbes for a week), as well as his own, all resulting in good movies: «The L-Shaped Room», «Séance on a Wet Afternoon», «King Rat», «The Wrong Box» and «The Whisperers». But then came this international project based of a novel by Desmond Cory and produced by American Paul Monash, and Forbes gave his wife Nanette Newman (a good actress) a small role with top credit, and led her through embarrassing scenes (as dancing proto-disco in a millionaire's villa), he gave composer Barry carte blanche (including a quite visible role as orchestra conductor), and --inspired by the James Bond craze and by Cory's flair for secret agents' tales-- he entered the territory of male chauvinistic fantasies, with a leading character Henry Clarke (Michael Caine) who is a bland, homophobic fool endowed with abilities beyond any human being's (except Bond, Dracula, or Cory's own Johnny Fedora, of course). Forbes had used incredibility in realistic plots since his first movie, «Whistle Down the Wind», a fable among children (almost ruined by Malcolm Arnold's score), which worked for its good performances and the sincere portrayal of children's innocence. This time, taken or not from Cory's novel, the script contains no innocence at all, and has instead a parade of peculiar characters with secret agendas, all in a single plot: a romantic thief, an adulterous wife, a homosexual husband, an alcoholic millionaire, an ill-mannered gay hustler, a British informer lost in Mallorca, an aspiring actress or whatever she wants to do in films… not to mention a Polish actor passing for a Spanish doctor. Of all the actors portraying these people, Eric Portman is the best thing in the movie, because Caine and Giovanna Ralli are unconvincing as lovers, with no evident chemistry between the two. Newman, David Buck and Carlos Pierre all look pretty, while Barry overflows the proceedings with sickly sweet violins and guitars. They were all now in the international spotlight and that was good for them, because in spite of its shortcomings and excessive running time, «Deadfall» somehow worked, thanks to Forbes I guess, who followed this with another balloon filled with stars, «The Madwoman of Chaillot»… which was not an improvement at all. He had to wait until 1975 for the fine «The Stepford Wives» which was undeservedly besieged by confused feminists and William Goldman.

Arty and chatterbox movie directed by Bryan Forbes in 1968 only saved by the heist sequence, another one with no dialogues. And there is suspensful editing with the musician's concert and the heist at his place by Michael Caine. the orchestra is conducted by John Barry himself in this masterful sequence that saves that soporific movie. We also hear a short passage of the great intro of "Beat Girl" composed by the John Barry Seven with great Vic Flick on guitar (same guitarist on James Bond Theme).

I've never had an inkling of this film yet from the first few notes of the introductory music (John Barry) the singer (Shirley Bassey) and the opening credit animation were the all the hallmarks of James Bond. After that the story deteriorated into self indulgent scenes of, well, self indulgence actually. I did enjoy the the cameo scene of John Barry conducting the orchestra but unfortunately not the music. He hasn't changed since his days with the 'John Barry Seven'. A handsome man and usually a beautiful music maker.

I knew if I came to the IMDb there would be the usual litany of "neglected gem" "undiscovered masterpiece" "not as bad as you've heard" that every bad and awful movie seems to get. No comprende, I'm afraid. This thing was critically lambasted and the public that bothered to see it hated it. Why? Because it STINKS. Bad script, pretentious and unnecessarily arty direction, a terrible performance by its female lead, and I could go on but why bother. This is part of a three Caine DVD release from Fox, and they're three of the worst movies ever made - I'm sure when I go look up the other two - Peeper and The Magus - that there will be more of "neglected gem" "undiscovered masterpiece" "not as bad as you've heard" from the great unwashed or the film school pedants. I mean, sorry, this is a BAD movie.

Having only seen this movie recently I was surprised by some of the more negative reviews.

The film has excellent acting, very good music and many surprises along the way to keep you interested.

The sexuality angle was more integral to the story than modern day sensationalism.

I have always thought this a classy movie. It gets a bit convoluted before the end, but it's one I always remembered.

Set in Spain, cat burglar Henry Stuart Clark (Michael Caine) joins forces with veteran safecracker Richard Moreau (Eric Portman) and his delectable young wife, Fe Moreau (Giovanni Ralli), to break into the home of a mega wealthy gent named Salinas (John Buck).

Stealing jewels becomes almost secondary when Henry attempts to steal Fe. However there are complications and "Deadfall" has an ending that would be hard to get major stars to commit to today.

The robbery sequences smack of Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief", but "Deadfall" isn't as light, there is a dark side to this film.

However it's the concert, "Romance for Guitar & Orchestra", which takes place while Henry scales walls and drops onto perilous ledges during the first robbery that really conjures up the Hitchcock deja vu. The composer of the film's score, John Barry, actually conducts the on-screen orchestra, as did Bernard Herrmann in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much".

This is a tense sequence and Barry's score is one of his best. During the 60's he was one of the most innovative composers around, and the title song, "My Love Has Two Faces", sung by Shirley Bassey makes you realise how weak most songs written for the movies are these days - just listen to the nominations on the Academy Awards.

The film has terrific locations, Michael Caine at the top of his game and Giovanni Ralli, an Italian actress who is hard to take your eyes off. Even at 80, if recent photographs are anything to go by, she is still a serenely elegant woman.

Then there is Eric Portman. I would defy anyone to name an actor who had more gravitas than Eric Portman, although he probably wasn't well here; "Deadfall" was his last movie, he died shortly after.

Director Bryan Forbes came up with some intriguing movies in the 60's, "Seance on a Wet Afternoon", "King Rat" and "The Whisperers", a run that seemed to come to an end with "Deadfall"; things were more hit and miss after that.

But "Deadfall" is unique; it seems even better now than it did back then.

The first half of this movie is honestly pretty good. It has a nice energy, it's fairly well-paced, and I liked the big heist scene that it spends a good deal of time building up to.

The second half, unfortunately, didn't entertain me nearly as much. The story takes some strange turns which I can sort of appreciate, but it doesn't really work 100%. It also slows down a great deal when it comes to pacing, and feels a bit lifeless - almost as though it's limping towards the finish line.

Maybe that's a bit harsh. It's not like the other qualities of the film fall away entirely in the second half. It's still technically competent and the acting stays alright, but yeah... it's a shame it couldn't keep the energy it had in the first half going for all two hours.