An all too familiar story in our world: A professor with too much time on his hands plots a diamond heist and enlists the help of a New York mobster and a team of nefarious experts who's specialties run the spectrum of various prerequisites for daring jewel capers, such as safe-cracking, etc. No surprises here- although one member of the team is a professional playboy- and are there really such things? How does one earn the title of playboy?- who's only job is to seduce the icy secretary with the key to the vault! You'll probably see the twist coming but they keep their cards close to the vest so there's still a tinge of surprise at the end. Fans of Kinski will not find a heck of a lot to snicker about as they watch their favorite crazy-friend-of- Herzog plod through another flick he probably just did for money. While Kinski isn't quite plausible as a hardened military man, he does a pretty fine, straight job in this role. Good times, all around.

Been spreading the word around the neighborhood about this forgotten cultural curiosity like a virus! The amount of clichés and stereotypes in this piece make the entire thing hilarious and a good deal of fun to watch. Rio becomes this absolutely exotic venue, with non-stop carnivals and pageants, strange folk a galore and people who go by the name of "Stetuaka" (?!?!) - believe me, I have been born, raised and lived a good part of my life in Rio and have never, ever known anyone by the name of Stetuaka (played simply by one "Jussara" - may the Almighty bless her whoever she is!). But, and this is the main point of interest and solely for this I give it a ten, there are some exceptional external takes that give us a very good glimpse of Rio de Janeiro when it was still a breathtaking city and an incredible place to live (and not the violent, crime-infested & decadent urban disaster it is today) - excellent shots from the pre-expansion Copacabana Beach, Downtown, the Pavãozinho Slum and, most amazingly, a still pristine Barra da Tijuca, a very far cry from the horrendous scenario it has now become. For those of us, who live here or know Rio, a very nostalgic piece, not to be missed. Oh, yes, almost forgot...there's also some sort of a loosely built plot, about a heist around a handful of diamonds, but that's really secondary, of nil interest.

Did anybody fall for this in 1967? In that year I was eight years old, and I already hated this kind of crap. I would have been yelling at the screen. I yelled at the screen last night.Perhaps this was the first heist film that used laser beams in a vault as an obstacle to thieves, but why did they do it so badly? The laser beams, which criss-cross the vault like a spider web, are done in an ostensibly clever way: translucent tubing filled with light. But when the thieves climb over the beams with a fancy telescoping ladder rig we can clearly see the laser beams sagging! Not just a little, either. Worse, we can see a connection point where two pieces of tubing were joined. It's a friggin' close-up! This kind of sloppy craftsmanship really takes you out of the film.It gets worse. The safe is rigged with a delicate noise detector. The sound of a cigarette lighter is enough to set it off. The solution? Lift the entire safe with pneumatic lifts, stick on little wheels, soundproof the wheels with shaving cream (I kid you not), and push the safe ten feet away from the sound detectors. Then start drilling those titanium doors. Then blow it with nitro glycerin. Then silently push the safe back up the ramp and into the vault (more shaving cream), disconnect the pneumatic lines, cart away your seventy-five pounds of equipment, and close the vault door. All without making as much sound as a Zippo.This film was co-produced by Spanish, German, and Italian film companies. Is it possible that in an audience of, say, 100 Spaniards or Germans or Italians, no one made a huge PUK-SSHHH! sound when those air hoses were disconnected? Maybe not. Maybe they were better at suspending disbelief than an eight-year-old American.Compare this to the new gold standard for technical competence in that era of film-making, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Although history has unspooled very differently than as predicted in "2001" (no cities on the moon, no manned exploration of other planets), those cinematic predictions were very carefully executed. The craftsmanship was exquisite. If the Americans and British who made "2001" had been as clumsy as the hacks who made "Grand Slam," there never would have been any discussion about the religious or spiritual meaning of that bizarre last act. Those questions were discussed very seriously in the late 60's (and still are) because "2001" was a believable world where our powers of disbelief remained suspended for 2 1/2 hours.Now, of course "Grand Slam" is just a heist movie. It's doesn't have any deep pretensions. Does that excuse its technical shoddiness? Of course not. Even a frothy story needs to keep us within the walls of the story, so that we can be lied to convincingly. When fundamental facts are ignored, the movie is over. The Confederate army can't wear blue. You can't drive to Australia. And laser beams can't sag.Maybe this is why the United States was the technological powerhouse of the world in the 1960's. We cared about getting it right. And we still do. Even bad American movies are produced with a technical brilliance that outstrips the stupidity of the above-the-line talent. And web sites like MovieMistakes.com help keep our standards from flagging.Maybe "Grand Slam" deserves credit for inspiring better films, such as "The Italian Job" two years later. Perhaps you can insist that "Ocean's Twelve" owes its dancing laser beams to "Grand Slam." But at least in "The Italian Job" when things blow up they go BOOM!, and in "Ocean's Twelve" the laser beams don't sag.

Released in the USA by Paramount as GRAND SLAM in the late sixties, this slickly-made heist film is a first-rate effort exploiting the Jules Dassin classic, RIFIFI. The all-star international cast is exceptional, with Klaus Kinski being the standout. One of the best of it's kind, and still enjoyable today. Ennio Morricone wrote the eclectic score, featuring some catchy bossa-nova tunes to complement the location. Thanks to Image Entertainment, the picture is now available on DVD in a widescreen version to capture all the excitement! Check it out.