[Originally published in Movietone News 23, May-June 1973]
The spectre of Blake Edwards hangs over The Thief Who Came to Dinner because two of his frequent collaborators worked on it and because Edwards himself might have made the film go, which Bud Yorkin hasn’t managed to do. Thief cries out for Edwards’s special knack of imparting a combined sense of cool, elegant modernity, subdued emotionality, and unpolemical bitterness that implies a previous history for the characters and a meaningful present-tense context for the generic games being played on screen. Yorkin and his screenwriter Walter Hill (who also worked on Hickey and Boggs and The Getaway) can’t decide whether to go for suspense, comedy, or romance (Edwards could have had all three with delirious simultaneity) and end by providing little of each.
The 1960s was filled with films featuring swinging single men (or even, God forbid, cheating married men), most of them between 30 and 50 living in lavish bachelor pads with fully stocked bars and a revolving door of younger women passing through to their bedrooms:Boeing, Boeing, A Guide For the Married Man, What’s New Pussycat, How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life, any James Bond movie and oh so many films with Dean Martin (the Matt Helm movies) and Frank Sinatra (Tony Rome and friends). These aren’t films about the sexual revolution, mind you. These men are unapologetic players and the women are either playmates or long-suffering good girls waiting for the man-boys to grow up and commit.