Mevkufsunuz!

On a tip from a random FB Friend, I made a point of catching TCM's broadcast of Jules Dassin's comedy heist picture Topkapi last night. About midway through, it dawned on me that I'd actually watched a bit of it before while flipping through channels, but I'd ended up picking both an excellent and a terrible spot to sample--excellent because it highlighted traditional Turkish oil wrestling, terrible because the action (the main characters establishing an alibi) made no sense out of context and failed to draw me into the movie.

The central heist is actually fairly lame by contemporary standards. The central conceit is what's come to be called a "cable drop", whereby an acrobat is lowered into a secure room with pressure-sensitive floors. It was memorably revived in the first Mission: Impossible film, so by now you've probably seen several iterations of it--each slicker and more stylish than the original stunt sequence with Gilles Ségal. This unfolds practically in real time, but without many of the tension-heightening touches later directors learned to add.

Overall, it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to accept that Maximilian Schell's dashing ringleader is an untouchable criminal mastermind, and not just because of the sloppy decisions he makes as things begin to go pear-shaped. If, for instance, you've gone through the time and trouble of fashioning a cunning imitation of a valuable item so you can be long gone before its loss is discovered, why would you plan on using on smoke grenades to cover your getaway? What's the point of recruiting "amateurs" in order to keep a low profile and then going out and being seen together with them in public repeatedly?

Instead, the movie gets by by on the goodwill engendered by its charming international cast: the aforementioned Schell and Ségal (played mute, perhaps due to a lack of English); Melina Mercouri as a purring "nymphomaniac"; Robert Morley, whose eccentric gadgeteer raises expectations the movie neglects to fulfill; Akim Tamiroff [pictured above] as a perpetually pissed agent of chaos any competent criminals would never have left alive; but most of all a youngish Peter Ustinov in the role of Arthur Simpson, a "shmo" so memorable that he won an Oscar for it.

He was the same age as I am now when he made this film, and the air of middle-aged failure he wears as he stumbles around wearing a hangdog expression (featuring those "beautiful eyelashes" Mercouri professes to find strangely alluring) is part of what makes him so endearing as he ricochets between cooperating with Turkish security and being coopted by the merry band of thieves.

In the end, though, what most sticks with me about the film is the amount of patience it demands of it audience. The opening sequence is an offputting jumble of blaring brass and needlessly trippy visuals. Music is used sparingly after that, and almost always ambiently, so the planning and execution scenes get no punching up from the soundtrack. This also gives the arrival-in-Istanbul and wrestling sequences an almost documentary quality, with a traditional musical accompaniment which makes no concessions to Western tastes.

But what really struck me were the accents, which are much heavier than what I think current moviegoers would tolerate. The only native English-speaker besides Morley and Ustinov, strongman-character Jess Hahn, delivers his few lines in a heavy German accent. Even I couldn't understand Mercouri at times, and Tamiroff was (perhaps deliberately) nigh unintelligible. He repeatedly breaks into German during his squabbles with Hahn; Schell does as well, at one point, and there are some surprisingly long stretches of untranslated dialogue in Greek or Turkish.

[Speaking of untranslated Turkish, the title above represents Simpson's introduction to the language and probably merits treatment in a separate entry.]

An arresting footnote

When I first looked for mevsufsunuz in my Turkish dictionary, I couldn't find it. It didn't help at all that I was hearing a /t/ in it that wasn't there. But even if I'd had the spelling correct, I would still have been SOL because it seems this particular form has become obsolete. I know what you're thinking--Topkapi isn't even half a century old. But that's the impact of the "catastrophic" pace of language renewal documented so well by Geoffrey Lewis.

In the context of the film, mevsufsunuz is translated as "You are under arrest". So I attacked it from the other direction, by looking up "to arrest" in the English-Turkish section. There I found the phrasal verb tevkif etmek. Etmek is a light verb, frequently used to give verbal force to borrowed nouns (e.g. mat etmek "to checkmate"). Tevkif wears its Arabic origins like a turban and Hans Wehr gives "arrest" among the meanings of توقيف tawqīf, a deverbal from the root w-q-f "stop". From this, it's simple enough to work forward and derive a passive participle of the form mafʻūl, i.e. mawqūf "arrested" (or--in Turkish clothing--mevkuf; -sunuz is simply a vowel-harmonised form of the second-person plural/polite present tense auxiliary ending).

But you'll look in vain for mevkuf in the little violet Redhouse I keep on the bedside table. As we've just seen, adjectives like mevkuf require some familiarity with Arabic morphology to relate to other derivatives of the same stem, and hence have fallen out of currency in a culture where Arabic grammar is no longer commonly studied. Moreover, tevkif etmek itself competes with the native calque tutuklamak (from tutmak "to stop" by means of a derived noun tutuk to which the verb-forming ending -lAmAk has been added).

So there's every chance that if Topkapi were being filmed today, what our hapless hustler would've heard shouted at him would be "Tutuklusunuz!" (Tutuk with the "adjectival" ending -lI plus the suffixed auxiliary mentioned above). That's how much difference a generation or two can make in a land which makes a fetish of linguistic purism.