Jules Dassin (director of the afore-mentioned Rififi) returned to the caper genre nine years later, but this time he decided to go for a much more playful tone. Melina Mercouri (who would later become Mrs. Dassin) stars as a thief who recruits her ex-lover (Maximillian Schell) and a motley crew of experts (including Robert Morley) to rob the treasures of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. Peter Ustinov, who won an Oscar, steals the show as a hapless con man forced by the police to become an accomplice and informant, despite the fact that he’s too thick to figure out what everyone else is up to.