CONTOURS: How to Steal a Million (1966) / preceded by An Optical Poem (1938)

Paradise Theatre, Apr. 14 2024

Casting viewers into the high-flying art world of late-sixties Paris, William Wyler's How to Steal A Million is a playful, haut monde satire of propriety and its excesses. Audrey Hepburn plays Nicole, the socialite daughter of a renowned art collector who secretly doubles as a forger. In a bid to test the limits of the family's skill for forgery, her megalomaniac father loans out a Cellini Venus to a prestigious museum. Knowing that the sculpture will be subject to authenticity tests which would expose its fakery, Nicole—a persistent critic of her father's exploits—is left scrambling to keep the family's reputation intact. 

Enter fumbling and mannered proclaimed art thief, Simon (Peter O’Toole), who Nicole successfully enlists to attempt a heist of the Cellini Venus. Wittily attuned to how mutable social environments call us to mold ourselves into new personas, How to Steal a Million charmingly renders these quotidian charades through the romantic push-pull between Nicole and Simon. A Givenchy-clad Hepburn is captivating, gratuitously using the word “Papa” and plotting grand larceny in fine hotels. A film of delightful surfaces which are not quite as they appear, Wyler's glamorous and rollicking work uses gesture and social mores to blithely probe at what distinguishes the fake from the real.

Liner notes by Iman Bundu.

Event photography by Nika Thompson.

Artwork by Gabriella Shery.