Too Many Thieves (1966) User Reviews (3)

Well...

[myriamlenys · 5/10 · 6 September 2023]

An American lawyer is strong-armed into performing a job for the Macedonian consulate. He is supposed to retrieve the fabled "Victor Emblem", a source of Macedonian pride, which was stolen some time earlier. The lawyer does not know that the various thieves fell out with each other. As a result he is in for an unpleasant surprise when ever more people turn up, all of them claiming to be the real intermediary...

A blend of thriller and comedy, "Too many thieves" tells a story about a gang of thieves fighting over the loot, with varying degrees of ruthlessness. Peter Falk, as the increasingly bemused lawyer, is reliable as always but on the whole the movie lacks oomph, imagination and conviction. For instance, the thieves are supposed to hail from a foreign country, but they don't look, speak or think all that differently from the American characters. Moreover, little effort has been made in order to make "Macedonia" look interesting.

Might have been more successful if the various makers had pulled out all the stops and gone for an exuberant farce/pastiche in the "Police Squad" style.

Not enough story

[JohnSeal · 4/10 · 16 March 2002]

A compilation of episodes from Peter Falk's long forgotten Lives of O'Brien TV series, Too Many Thieves has a good cast and little else to speak of. David Carradine is a robotic villain, Britt Ekland a beautiful maiden in distress, and Falk is lawyer O'Brien. The most interesting thing about Too Many Thieves is seeing Falk lay the groundwork for his wildly popular Columbo character. O'Brien wears a raincoat (albeit less rumpled than Columbo's) and speaks in the same peculiar circular way in order to ensnare the villain. A curiousity indeed, but of mild interest at best.

A painful experience!

[JohnHowardReid · 1/10 · 5 April 2018]

"Too Many Thieves" is the wrong name for this pretend-picture. Too Much Talk would be more apt. The characters simply never stop talking. Yak, yak, yak. Yak, yak, yak. Yak, yak, yak. Mighty boring, isn't it? Particularly when they've really got nothing of the slightest interest to say.

Peter Falk was never one of my favorite actors. Here he is particularly charmless. He seems to go out of his way to be deadly. Seeing Falk in action is like watching a slow-moving snail climbing the wall of a maximum security prison. True, the snail does finally - finally - make it to the top, only to take off with even less speed down the other side!

To make up for the lack of action, the photographer and set designer have chosen bloated background colors which literally smack the audience like a blow on the forehead. These gentlemen are not simply maladroit craftsmen or people who have no taste, but artists who have deliberately chosen the most jarring color combinations they could find.

No doubt they felt that these color combinations would keep an audience's eyes glued to the theater or TV screen. And the colors no doubt looked appropriate and even quite fascinating on the studio's comparatively small screen. But when the film is projected on a large theater screen -- which is where I saw it -- , Too Many Thieves is not just a marathon bore for the ears, it's a downright painful experience for the eyes.

P.S. According to some sources, the movie was originally telecast in the USA in 1966 as two episodes (entitled "The Greatest Game") .