Chuck Jones's wolf-and-sheepdog cartoons are as hard to tell apart as his coyote-and-roadrunners - there's no way of conveying to you "which one" this is; perhaps the question doesn't even make sense. But anyone familiar with the set-up won't care. Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog are not so much work colleagues as work adversaries: Ralph's job is to catch the sheep which it's Sam's job to guard and, like the Coyote he closely resembles, he resorts to ever more elaborate Acme contraptions in his futile quest to do so. But it's strictly a nine-to-five job for each of them.

(This print provided courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive)

This film, at the time of writing, has not been released in Australia, which is only to my advantage because I get to go on a total nostalgia trip and damn the review. I grew up on "Get Smart". It encapsulated, for me, the endless Sunday afternoon that is the essence of childhood, and, indeed, it always had a certain innocence about it that wove seamlessly into my early years. To describe the plot would be superfluous - Control (the good guys) does battle with Kaos (the bad guys, duh) when peace and stability and the apple-pie purity of American life are threatened by men with fearsome accents (one of whom, incidentally, is the great big hairy fat man from Borat - though, thankfully, fully clothed in this film).

I'm looking forward to seeing Steve Carrell as Agent 86 - he's demonstrated in a number of his other roles his capacity to portray the inept, endearing numpty exemplified by Maxwell Smart. Anne Hathaway, even in the trailers, conveys to perfection the long-suffering good sense that was the essence of 99.

This film provides pure escapism. If you're anything like me, it will evoke for you a time when good - no matter how inept - necessarily triumphed over evil, when the thought of a phone built into a shoe was utterly ludicrous, when a joke was only the funnier for being used every Sunday afternoon on a television that still had knobs.

Don't miss it - even by that much.

It's a familiar story. Girl sees jewellery. Girl wants jewellery. Girl rounds up a team of tacticians, gadget men, acrobats and grifters to ensure she can steal it. Did I mention the jewellery in question is an emerald-encrusted scabbard in a Turkish museum that is fitted with a state-of-the-art alarm system? And that the Turkish police are keeping a very close eye on the girl and her crew?

You may be thinking, ho, hum, another gang of international thieves pull off a caper movie, what's new? Well, for starters, this is by the master of the genre - Jules Dassin, who made the similarly-themed Rififi. Plus Mercouri is an incredibly glamorous leading lady. Peter Ustinov won a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance as the low-end con-man who gets entangled in the scheme, and pretty much steals the movie as he gets more and more implicated in the various plots and counterplots. Plus the climactic robbery sequence has been much-imitated but never quite equalled. So, ; international glamour, intrigue, fun, and shiny things. Enjoy!

(This print provided courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive)