SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Edgar Soberon Torchia 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.

GUENOT PHILIPPE At first sight, it may look like a comedy thriller from the late sixties, in the line of GAMBIT. And Bryan forges was not a real crime film maker. And Michael Caine was for this kind of British heist movies the same Gary Cooper was for westerns. So, I repeat, this film is not a comedy. It's a drama thriller with some romantic involvements. The heist sequence is a pure jewel, thanks to the terrific editing that reminds a little the Godfather trilogy, a couple of years later, concerning the climaxes sequences. And don't forget the John Barry's score, and the Sirley Basset song too.An underrated must see.

Prof-Hieronymos-Grost Henry Stuart Clarke (Michael Caine) is a cat burglar who has his work down to a fine art. While under cover in a retreat for recovering alcoholics, he is approached by an alluring woman Fé Moreau who has a proposition for him, he's suspicious but agrees to meet her aging husband, Richard,(Eric Portman)himself a professional burglar who is now struggling to pull off the big jobs due to his age. Together they agree to pull off a seemingly impossible heist. Derided on its initial release, Forbes' film is nonetheless an interesting if slow film, especially if you like films of its ilk, its also beautifully filmed and makes wonderful use of the stunning Spanish setting, it also has a memorable score by the great John

pstumpf With Shirley Bassey wailing a "Goldfinger"-ish song over some stylized credits featuring a seagull, one looks forward to viewing one of those great 60's heist movies. But "Deadfall" soon falls far short. Despite fine cinematography (by Gerry Turpin) with some offbeat angles, Bryan Forbes is too stodgy a director for this material - and the whole thing could have been edited down by half an hour. The cross-cutting in the first heist scene, for instance, just goes on for too long: OK, we get that the robbery is taking place during the duration of the concert - there's really no need keep cutting back to the concert hall until the very end of the sequence - especially just to focus on the performers and not the (oddly anonymous) victims of the crime. Not to mention that the suspense is undercut by the absurdity of a program which consists solely of one 20-minute guitar concerto; unlikely - no, impossible - that an audience would dress to the nines and pay for such a concert.Best aspects of the movie are the score (very much in the Bond mode)of John Barry, the swell Spanish settings, and Michael Caine's performance. What a sexy screen presence he had, with his heavy-lidded, sometimes cold (almost reptilian) eyes and cocky, self-confident voice conveying a mixture of indifference and condescension, which combine to equal utter cool. Caine's love scenes with the rather charmless Giovanna Ralli, however, lack warmth and spark, so the romance between them fails to convince; the bedroom scene is possibly one of the worst ever filmed (Ralli's phony emoting and the sheet between their two bodies put to pasture any notions of passion). Eric Portman makes a fine foil for Caine in their scenes together; but his character ends up being simultaneously over-complicated and underwritten, causing the last third of the movie to become, for me, just plain bewildering. Nanette Newman's role as "The Girl" is utterly pointless and she is so wooden (that dance scene!!!) that it's obvious that she's there only in the capacity of director's wife.A big disappointment. As someone mentions elsewhere, see "Gambit" instead.