Freshly retired from a school in Rio de Janeiro, history professor James Anders (Edward G. Robinson, see?) will not go gently into gardening and bingo games. Instead, he returns to New York with a proposition for a childhood chum who’s grown into an über-wealthy corporate criminal (Adolfo Celi, Thunderball): Let’s steal $10 million in diamonds from the place across the street where I used to work, whaddayasay?

Twice a year on the dot, as Anders has noted across three decades of observation, such shimmering loot arrives for lock-up. The upcoming transaction happens to coincide with Rio’s annual Carnival celebration, which could provide welcome distraction for a team of hired experts to carry out the mother of all heists. One of the young guns is an arrogant prick played by real-life arrogant prick Klaus Kinski (For a Few Dollars More).

The value of any heist film, needless to say, resides in its heist sequences, and here and elsewhere, Grand Slam delivers on the promise of its title. Our master thieves have allotted themselves nary one second beyond 20 minutes to crack the safe. It’s newly equipped with a series of super-sensitive microphones that trip an alarm upon the slightest sound, and their way around it involves toilet plungers, shaving cream and, in a roundabout way, Janet Leigh’s genitalia.

Directed with an inordinate amount of superimposed frames by Machine Gun McCain‘s Giuliano Montaldo, Grand Slam could have gotten away with letting Rio’s sunny backdrop do the legwork, but chooses to go all in, thereby establishing a solid framework for many a colorful caper to follow. It’s not perfect — from one character’s immediate about-face, the twist is evident in the first hour — but it comes damned close, placing it among the all-time heist classics. It also contains what is, for my money, Ennio Morricone’s all-time greatest theme. To hear it is to know joy. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.