Short Round: Gambit (1966) ****/*****

If you’re in the mood for an unassuming but fun caper movie full of good actors and memorable moments, then checking out Gambit is a good bet. It popped up in my radar because the Coen brothers are currently at work on a remake of it, so I figured I would give the original a try, and after watching it, it’s pretty clear where their interest in it stems from. This isn’t quite as screwball as the Coen’s more light hearted crime capers usually get, but with one of their patented radical rewrites I’m sure that it very easily could be. All of the building blocks are in place. You’ve got characters with very opposing personalities clashing against each other in very ridiculous circumstances, you’ve got a case of unreliable narration that makes you question the validity of everything you’re seeing, and you’ve got a wealth of opposing motivations leading to a fun series of double crosses, fake outs, and go behinds. And apart from what this movie has to offer as the source of a potential remake, it’s also got Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine in its lead roles poking and prodding at each other and falling in love in only the way people as charming as a young Michael Caine and a young Shirley MacLaine can. Really, it’s the interactions between these two late in the movie, where an increasingly ballsy MacLaine keeps calling the usually unflappable Caine on his B.S. that made the movie for me. Watching them go back and forth while trying to steal priceless and heavily guarded artifacts is what the movies were made for.