Word: topkapi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ottoman sultans ruled an empire from Baghdad to Vienna for most of four centuries, but their personal lives back home in Constantinople's Great Harem of Topkapi were mainly a matter of bed and bored. One 17th-century sultan, aptly called Ibrahim the Mad, became so bored that he spent much of his time tossing gold coins to the fish in the Bosporus alongside the Topkapi Palace. One day, harem-scare-em Ibrahim ordered his 1,001 concubines trussed, weighted and tossed into the sea-and, of course, replaced. But between fits of madness, Ibrahim and the 24 other...
...palace houses the famed Topkapi jewels, long a must for tourists in present-day Istanbul, but the principal sight will be the intricate maze of grandly decorated apartments. They include the gilded, rococo Hall of the Sultan, where reigning monarchs reclined on a brocaded couch to watch dancing girls perform. Near by are the royal baths, which featured marble floors, golden faucets and slave girls to assist the sultan in his bath. Then there are the gilded and inlaid bedchambers...
...they still make movies like this. The question is why. Surely there is a considerable surplus of these caper epics, involving the intricate mechanics of some complicated robbery scheme and the assorted tensions and rivalries, professional or romantic, among the people who carry them through. Gambit, Topkapi, How to Steal a Millionthe list seems endless. But the genre is not, as Perfect Friday proves...
...Anderson Tape's is a standard "big caper" thriller (Topkapi, Rififi) in which a hungry hood just sprung from Sing Sing decides to strip a whole luxury Manhattan apartment house over a Labor Day weekend. He assembles a team of specialists to cut the alarm wires, finger the Klees and terrify any stray remaining tenants. The gimmick is that all the conspirators' haunts are bugged by various government agencies. Though it means that everything from a candy-store pay phone to Central Park itself has to be tapped, almost the whole novel consists of tape-recorded conversations instantly...