10 great films about forgers and fakes

Authenticity is the single most important question when buying and selling art – more than quality, which allows for a higher degree of subjectivity. Whether an artwork is being flogged for seven or eight figures at private auctions or hung up in galleries for neck-craning crowds, it has to be the genuine article to matter. 

But the art world is full of unseen processes, unfalsifiable backstories and conceited collectors that contribute to the myth of an artwork being uniquely special, and this is easily co-opted and manipulated by forgers and fraudsters taking advantage of an obsession with the unpinnable value of art. It’s an ambiguity that’s thrilled filmmakers through the history of cinema, which is filled with stories of deft con-artists and skilled counterfeiters who create believable facsimiles of valuable objects, proving their talent but pushing them to the margins in the process.

Enter The Christophers, the latest nimble and deceptive feature from Steven Soderbergh and written by Bill & Ted co-creator Ed Solomon. The two-hander is primarily set in the Fitzroy Square townhouse of retired painter-extraordinaire Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan), where young artist Lori (Michaela Coel) is on a covert mission to discover Sklar’s unfinished portrait series ‘The Christophers’ so she can fraudulently finish them to be ‘found’ after Sklar’s death. From there, the film questions artistic authenticity in more emotional and psychological terms, taking the director’s career-long fixation on deception in a new direction.

To mark the release of The Christophers, this list carefully inspects cinematic history to present 10 bonafide great films about forgers and masterpieces of fakery.

Director: Fritz Lang

Scarlet Street is a typically compelling noir from Fritz Lang’s career in Hollywood after he’d fled Nazi Germany. Edward G. Robinson plays Chris Cross, a meek cashier in a loveless marriage who is taken for a master painter (rather than the amateur hobbyist he really is) by the streetwise Katherine (Joan Bennett) and her criminal boyfriend Johnny (Dan Duryea). An elaborate humiliation plot ensues – when the besotted Chris agrees to support Katherine, he inadvertently gives the couple access to his paintings, which Johnny passes off as Katherine’s work, bringing her a new, fraudulent celebrity status. 

Robinson, Bennett and Duryea (who all starred in Lang’s The Woman in the Window the year prior) deliver striking performances as desperate people using each other, bound together by cruelty, desire and a deceitful art plot that’s fated to end tragically. Just like Chris’s eclectic artwork, these noir characters fatally lack perspective.

Director: Richard Brooks

An obscure early work from Richard Brooks, who would later direct Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and In Cold Blood (1967), this British noir packs many double-crosses and attempted cons into its 90-minute runtime. A sophisticated thief (Stewart Granger) steals a Renaissance painting in Italy, but by the time he smuggles it to his business partner (George Sanders) in Tunis, he pretends the loot was destroyed in transit and they ought to prepare fakes to sell to various clients instead. The forger is a young Italian woman (Pier Angeli) who becomes the thief’s eventual moral compass in his treacherous dealings with criminals, collectors and cops. 

The contrast between the painting’s religious significance and the criminals bartering over its sale eventually becomes the story’s guiding light. Brooks resolves a story marked by betrayal and deception with a denouement of real honesty and charity, as if harbouring a stolen Christian painting, and not love, was what changed the criminal’s heart.

Director: Godfrey Grayson

This modest British B-thriller concerns the theft of Da Vinci’s Madonna and Child from London’s docks en route to the Tate Gallery, prompting a search for both the thief and the forger linked to other recent Da Vinci heists. Prolific B-movie lead Dennis O’Keefe fits the bill as a handsome fish-out-of-water unfazed by stuffy English bureaucracy, and his investigator character wastes no time courting a guarded Tate employee (Coleen Gray) as a roundabout way of investigating her crotchety painter father (John Laurie). 

With some shadowy London-at-night sequences, The Fake comfortably hits the expected beats of an art-thief thriller, and the focus on forgeries adds some welcome wrinkles to the otherwise standard romance-crime plot – a highlight being Laurie’s performance as a proud and uncelebrated painter whose talents make him an unlikely criminal asset and an obvious loose end in the conspiracy. The Fake is also worth watching for being the first film shot in what’s now known as Tate Britain.

Director: William Wyler

Easily the most comic and frivolous collaboration between director William Wyler and star Audrey Hepburn, this Paris-set caper has a delightfully convoluted set-up: a high-profile art forger (Hugh Griffith) learns his fake Cellini statue must be authenticated by an expert before it goes on display, so his daughter (Hepburn) teams up with a burglar (Peter O’Toole) to steal the statue back to keep father’s criminal career a secret. 

A great match for O’Toole’s rakish wit, Hepburn is a gifted comic star, flitting between composure and panic as the hair-brained scheme escalates. Strangely, the heist is most compelling during an extended sequence where our romantic burglars are trapped in the museum’s cleaning cupboard. Still, How to Steal a Million offers plenty of comic insight on the moral contradictions of forgers who are proud of their successful deceptions, and is the rare heist movie to be about stealing something that’s actually worthless.

Director: Orson Welles

It’s the story of a French art forger, his fabulist biographer, with special insight on Howard Hughes, Picasso and the cathedral of Chartres – but don’t worry, in his essay film on fidelity and fakery, Orson Welles gets to discuss his own accomplishments as well. Dressed like a theatrical magician, Welles weaves together with virtuosic editing multiple stories regarding the charlatanism of authorship. The auteur relays the true story of painter-in-exile Elmyr de Hory and his disgraced biographer Clifford Irving in order to playfully question our faith in auteurship and expertise, as well as our hubristic belief that we would surely know that we were being tricked. 

“Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much,” muses Welles poignantly, gazing at the cathedral whose designers are unknown, before inventing a lengthy anecdote about one of the world’s most famous artists. To Welles, truth is a far more flexible concept in art.

Director: Robert Bresson

In Robert Bresson’s final film, the line separating those who are punished for being caught with a counterfeit banknote and those who get off scot-free is infuriatingly fickle. In the minimalist and flat affect style that Bresson had honed his whole career, we follow the circulation and consequences of a fake 500 francs note after two teenagers use it in a photo shop. When the owner realises it’s fake, he washes his hands of it by paying an oil delivery man, Yvon (Christian Patey), with the forged notes, ensuring Yvon’s arrest. 

In L’Argent, there is a moral weight to exposing a forgery; Bresson’s characters frequently protect themselves from the social implications of deceiving and being deceived alike. After the injustice experienced by Yvon, more serious crimes spread throughout L’Argent’s Paris, as if the counterfeit note exposes to the characters that the ethical responsibilities underpinning a civil society are fragile and illusory.

Director: William Friedkin

In making another film about bad cops hunting elusive, modern criminals, William Friedkin gave a Californian update to the down-and-dirty, New York-set The French Connection (1971), this time focusing on the hunt for fake money rather than poisonous narcotics. When Richard Chance (William Petersen) loses his partner in a standoff against cunning counterfeiter Eric Masters (Willem Dafoe), his policework takes a turn for the reckless – including an extortive sexual relationship, the slaying of a federal agent, and a car chase that goes bumper-to-bumper with all other vehicular stunts in Friedkin’s filmography. 

The scene where Masters meticulously prepares his counterfeit cash captures the forger’s icy artistry so effectively that the agents on his tail feel dangerously clumsy in everything they do thereafter. All forgers are defined by the irony that they could be as gifted as the artists they’re mimicking, but this artist-turned-forger is unsentimental about his artistic gifts – after all, what good is talent if you can’t make money with it?

Director: Steven Spielberg

A frontrunner for Steven Spielberg’s most likeable film, Catch Me if You Can tells the story of Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio), a cheque fraud extraordinaire who forged a series of professional identities before he was caught by an FBI agent (Tom Hanks) and put to work catching other fraudsters. At least, that’s the truth according to the real Abagnale – regardless of the facts, in Spielberg’s hands the con-man’s young career is a slick and moving insight into the hard work of forgery and its inherent lonely nature. 

Frank’s fixation on status-holders in 1960s America motivates his mimicry and forgeries, and plenty of his cons reflect a sincere desire to live a respectable, comfortable, if performative life on his terms. Spielberg gets a lot of sparky comedic mileage out of the the earnest rigour of Frank’s grift (as well as his inescapable immaturity) before rewarding his protagonist with the position and partnership he deserves.

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

In this least known (and least available) adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley series, director Roger Spottiswoode moves the action of the first Ripley sequel novel to contemporary London, where the young con-artist (Barry Pepper) spends his evenings with narcissistic art scene friends. His canny ability to cover-up crimes and coax co-conspirators comes in handy after their painter friend dies on the opening night of his first major exhibition. 

Ripley Under Ground does feel more like a television production than the actual Ripley series produced in 2024, but Highsmith’s playful and macabre plotting shines through. As Ripley conceals the artist’s death and oversees the production of forged new works – underestimating the scrutiny of a wealthy collector (Willem Dafoe) in the princess – we see new layers added to the great literary liars. In this film, Ripley assumes the role of a harried manager of a band of amateur criminals who lack his steely amorality.

Director: Marielle Heller

Marielle Heller directed Melissa McCarthy’s best performance in this funny and dour biographical drama about the literary forgeries of Lee Israel, who resorted to inventing correspondence between great writers to pay her bills. Can You Ever Forgive Me? takes place within the dusty walls of New York book collectors, whisky-soaked dive bars and Israel’s neglected apartment -–a far cry from the swish glamour seen in mainstream con-artist films. 

McCarthy’s gifts for outlandish comedy are sublimated here into a quietly devastating and darkly funny portrait of an alcoholic queer woman whose gift for writing is now dormant, resurfacing only for short, punchy epistolary extracts which adopt a more famous voice. At the heart of Can You Ever Forgive Me? is the relationship between Israel and Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), who is her friend, accomplice and hanger-on. Rarely has a forgery scheme felt so precarious and low-stakes at the same time.

The Christophers is in cinemas from 15 May.