The Thief Who Came to Dinner *** (1973, Ryan O’Neal, Jacqueline Bisset, Warren Oates, Jill Clayburgh, Charles Cioffi, Ned Beatty) – Classic Movie Review 9,450

The 1973 film The Thief Who Came to Dinner is an often sparkling caper thriller, with an on-form Ryan O’Neal as Webster McGee, a charming diamond thief playing cat and mouse with Warren Oates’s canny cop, Dave Reilly.

Director Bud Yorkin’s 1973 film The Thief Who Came to Dinner is a fun, nimble and often sparkling caper thriller very typical of its early Seventies period, with an on-form Ryan O’Neal as Webster McGee, a charming diamond thief playing cat and mouse with Warren Oates’s canny cop, Dave Reilly.

Webster leaves a chess piece and a slip of paper with a chess move at his thefts as his calling card, and, oddly enough, is nick-named the Chess Burglar by the media.

The upper-crust young woman in the case is beautiful socialite Laura Keaton (a purely decorative Jacqueline Bisset), but better still are the obligatory Seventies star character players like Ned Beatty as a fence called Deams, Jill Clayburgh as O’Neal’s divorced wife Jackie, Charles Cioffi as corrupt businessman Gene Henderling, Austin Pendleton as the Houston Post’s elitist chess columnist Zukovsky, Gregory Sierra as Dynamite, John Hillerman as Lasker, and Michael Murphy as Ted. It is an excellent cast, with all of them on-form too.

Screen-writer Walter Hill bases his script on the novel by Terrence Lore Smith and shows a lightness of touch with a Raffles-type mystery that you would not expect from his later hard-nosed thrillers (The Driver, 48 HRS, Red Heat). Oliver Hailey wrote the first draft of the script but Walter Hill wrote a number of subsequent drafts and received sole screen-writer credit for the final screenplay.

Also on its side are the cinematography by Philip H Lathrop and music by Henry Mancini, as well as the copious location filming in Houston.

Hill recalled: ‘Warren Oates was very good in the movie, better than the movie was, though they cut a lot of things of his out of the movie they shouldn’t have.’

Yorkin said he wanted to make the film as a tribute to ‘that great Cary Grant escape period’. He must be thinking of To Catch a Thief. He later recalled: ‘I don’t think it’s the greatest picture in the world but it is very entertaining.’

Bisset recalled: ‘I think stealing is dishonest, but it’s only a movie. I thought shooting in Houston would be ghastly, but the people were so terribly nice to us. Their houses were just unreal.’

Bisset replaced a pregnant Charlotte Rampling.

Also in the cast are Alan Oppenheimer, Margaret Fairchild, Jack Manning, George Morfogen, and Richard O’Brien (American actor).

Release date: March 1, 1973.

Production company: Bud Yorkin Productions.

Distributed by Warner Bros.

Running time: 104 minutes.

The cast

The cast are Ryan O’Neal as Webster McGee, Jacqueline Bisset as Laura Keaton, Warren Oates as Dave Reilly, Jill Clayburgh as Jackie Johnson, Charles Cioffi as Gene Henderling, Ned Beatty as Deams, Austin Pendleton as Zukovsky, Gregory Sierra as Hector aka Dynamite, Michael Murphy as Ted, John Hillerman as Lasker, Alan Oppenheimer as Insurance Man, Margaret Fairchild as Mrs. Donner, Jack Manning as Tom Preston, Richard O’Brien (American actor) as Sergeant Del Conte and George Morfogen as Rivera.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9,450

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