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, and is dubbed the Chess Burglar.

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).

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

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9,450

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