Gambit upends the crime caper and that’s reason enough to watch it. It also features Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine playing exquisitely to type – another. Caine one year after Alfie and the same year as The Ipcress File is the smart, cocky working class guy in a hurry; MacLaine halfway between Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce and Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity is the streetwise operator who’s sharper than she’s letting on.
Short story: Harry (Caine) recruits dancer Nicole (MacLaine) because she is the spitting image of the dead wife of Shahbandar (Herbert Lom), the richest man in the world. Together Harry and Nicole pull off an elaborate heist after working their way into Shahbandar’s inner sanctum by posing as British aristocrats.
It’s such a perfect heist that by 30 minutes into the film it’s all wrapped up. Harry is dropping Nicole off at the airport, having paid her off. She is boarding a flight with a fistful of money and a new passport. The End.
But. It turns out that what we’ve been watching is not the heist at all. Instead it was Harry’s imagined run-through of his plan. The bit in a heist movie that usually comes right near the end, just before the heist itself, where the mastermind gives us chapter and verse on how things are going to play out.
The rest of the film is what actually happens when Harry and Nicole do it for real, without Harry’s mansplaining. With interventions by fate. Plus input from the victim himself – Shahbandar is not as big a sap as he was painted. The perfect ideal versus the dirty reality.
In the fantasy version, Harry is a slick operator who’s not just come up with a brilliant plan but is perfect as boorish, jingoistic toff Sir Harold Dean. Reality tells a different story. The minute Shahbandar wanders off what Harry imagined would be the script – enquring about his education or talking about art – Harry is lost. Luckily, dizzy airhead Nicole has more up top than Harry gave her credit for…
And that’s the film – reality sucks, but you can make it work for you if you’re really good, which Nicole actually is and Harry patently isn’t.
As for the rest of it, it’s a 1960s heist movie. There is some cat burglar business involving abseiling down a tall building on a wire. There is an electronic-eye system that must be neutralised for the heist to come off. The real heist comes with some snafus.
And there’s Caine and MacLaine, great together, he doing a lot of Michael Caine shouting, she doing a lot of the breathy girly stuff but with an expression suggesting Nicole is humouring Harry the entire time. The jokes are not rib-crackers but nicely observed small ones, MacLaine and Caine extracting the maximum from them with perfect comic delivery.
Herbert Lom comes in two distinct varieties. There’s the Shahbandar of Harry’s imagination – wearing a fez and a bit slow off the mark. And the one of the real heist – much more urbane, smart and dressed just like Lord Harold, really.
On top of all the switcheroos, with everything promised in part one countermanded in part two, a heist that’s actually rather good – tense, problematic, requiring quick thinking and solutions to situations that don’t quite stack up if we stop and think about them.
Ronald Neame directs. The great all-rounder who produced David Lean’s Great Expectations, was cinematographer on Blithe Spirit and directed The Poseidon Adventure makes it a slick, bright affair. All the lights are on and everything can be seen, which is handy in a heist movie.
It doesn’t have the world’s greatest rep, this movie, but there’s a lot to like if you want to spend the afternoon eating hot buttered toast and getting crumbs down your front. And it’s a lot better than the 2012 remake written by the Coen brothers and starring Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz.
Gambit – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
