The Burglar

Really liked the idea for 'The Burglar', despite the title sounding pretty generic in my view, and do love films that have the tense and suspenseful approach that this film sounded like it would do on paper. Paul Wendkos was a cult favourite and went on to have a good career in television later. My main reason for seeing 'The Burglar' was the cast. Have always liked Dan Duryea particularly, who was often cast in villain roles and was extremely good at that type of role. 'The Burglar' had a good deal of things going for it and has a lot of great things. For all of that promise and good things, it is also heavily flawed and doesn't really gel. Loved the style, direction and Duryea's performance. Sadly the pace in the middle act, the script and the lacking acting of early-career Jayne Mansfield (beautiful if fairly limited actress, who suffered a horrific death in a car accident just ten years later) really bring the side down very badly. Beginning with what is good here, which is a lot actually, 'The Burglar' is beautifully and inventively shot, with plenty of style and grit. Enhancing the atmospheric and never cheaply used locations. The bold music score adds a lot too, the brassiness not being intrusive. Wendkos directs with panache, while the film starts promisingly with a lot of suspense and visual invention. And ends on a tense and gritty note. Furthermore, there are a few good lines. One of the best being Dellas' "she tried to sit on my lap when I was standing up". Enough of the performances are good. Duryea shows that he was as good at playing tormented characters, the type he plays here, as he was with playing villains. Martha Vickers and Stewart Bradley are terrific support. On the other point of view, there are a fair few big shortcomings and do feel bad saying this. The middle act is really dull, from a sluggish pace and next to no tension. The flow in the story and script also is very stop start. The script is a major flaw, it's too wordy, has too much extraneous fat, is very heavy-handed and can be too over-explanatory. Mansfield is the cast's weak link. She has the beauty for the role but her limitations as an actress badly shows, bringing practically nothing to it other than good looks and not really seeming properly engaged. In summation, above average with many good things but could have been a lot better. 6/10

As others have noted, the script is not well written. It's a good example of what can happen when a novelist adapts his own work for the screen. When it comes to editing, authors just hate having to kill their darlings, and so it was with Goodis leaving in those numerous dreadfully long monologues, which might be acceptable in a novel where the plot plays out in the reader's mind, but are inexcusable in a movie where the rule is 'show it, don't tell it'. Unless dialog moves the plot forward it needs to be excised. Goodis gave the director some real challenges, and what we end up with are characters not able to look at each other but instead stare without emotion while they babble on interminably about themselves, stopping the action dead. Otherwise the plot, apart from some logic holes, is a good one, and typical of Goodis. Casting is another problem for me. Mansfield's acting is simply atrocious. Durea is a fine performer but having to act like and say that his age is 36, when in fact he is and looks almost 50, jars. Peter Capell chews the scenery trying to depict Baylock. Stewart Bradley (Charlie) personifies evil. I enjoyed his performance. I think Goodis writes best when he's writing for the villain of the piece.

Paul Wendkos made his directorial debut with the Columbia Pictures release of "The Burglar" (1957) which was based on the David Goodis novel of the same name. Goodis penned the screenplay, too! This gritty, claustrophobic, black & white suspense thriller opens strongly during its stunning first half-hour before it degenerates into a lackluster crime-doesn't-pay yarn. Remember, before the liberated 1960s brought about change, most crime films belonged to the 'crime doesn't pay' variety. A gang of thieves burglarizes the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, mansion of a wealthy spiritualist, Sister Sara (Phoebe Mackay of "Splendor in the Grass"), late one evening, while the old dame is seated downstairs watching her favorite television news program. Nate Harbin (Dan Duryea of "Black Bart") steals a priceless necklace but gets sloppy and leaves the safe open. He scaled the wall of the mansion, entered a second-floor window, cracked a wall safe, and make away with the goods. Harbin is the leader of a gang that included two hoodlums-Baylock (Peter Capell of "Son of Hitler") and Dohmer (Mickey Shaughnessy of "From Here to Eternity")-along with a young woman, Gladden (Jayne Mansfield of "Female Jungle") who he has known all his life. Ironically, Nate and Gladden were both orphans raised by a compassionate thief, Gerald (one-time-only actor Sam Elber), who made Nate swear he would always look after Gladden. Initially, Nate dispatched Gladden to case the place, and Sister Sara gave her the grand tour. The night the guys break into Sister Sara's mansion, they leave their jalopy parked on the street. Two uniformed officers in a prowl car stop to check out the abandoned vehicle. Fearless Nate pauses in the middle of cracking the safe, climbs back down the building from the second-floor window, and saunters back to the two cops nosing around his ride. Nate complains audaciously about the shortage of mechanics up at that time in the evening. The two cops accept Nate's story about his car stalling out, so they leave him to sleep it off in the back seat until dawn. Stealthily, Nate returns to the mansion, opens the safe, and snatches the diamonds. Unfortunately, after he rifled the wall safe, Nate forgot to lock it up. Not long after Nate and his accomplices have left, Sister Sara discovers she has been burglarized because she found the safe door ajar. Worse, unknown to Nate, one of the two policemen who questioned him about his car parked along the side of the street is the corrupt flatfoot who wants to take the necklace off Nate's hands. Meantime, Nate and his accomplices sweat it out in a shack until Dohmer makes such a fuss about Gladden that Harbin packs her off to somewhere else. Eventually, they pull up stakes and head to Atlantic City. The corrupt uniformed patrolman, Charlie (Stewart Bradley of "Cool Breeze"), is hot on their trail, and he has been dating Gladden secretly before the guys arrive. Things get really tense after Nate learns about Charlie and Gladden. Although the second half-hour is tedious with the gang riling each other up, the third half-hour is a fireball. Suffice to say, everything that happens here afterward is exciting but the ending is a downer. The cast is first-rate, and Wendkos' direction is strong, but the material is predictable because we know the thieves are doomed from the get-go. The French remake proved much more entertaining, but by the 1970s, crooks would get away with their crimes and/or suffer less complications if they lost the loot.

Watching old movies makes painfully obvious the extreme efforts film makers have been making for decades to demonize police and normalize criminal behaviour. It started with crime dramas, but then our heros morphed from P.I.s, police & reporters to outlaws, vagrants, & thieves. This movie is truly awful.

This is a suspenseful and actually a pretty popular movie with Dan Duryea, femme fa-tale Martha Vickers, and a young, baby faced little starlet named Jayne Mansfield (a month before her Broadway triumph). Pure 1950s film noir here. The only copies available are poor VHS copies that sell for $25.00 or $30.00 on Ebay. It's ashame because it is a good film with all around impressive performances. Definitely needs an official DVD release. Filmed in 1955 but released in 1957 to cash in on Jayne's fame. Filmed in Philadelphia about 1 hour from where Jayne lived until she was 6, and is buried at, Pen Argyl. The plot line: Petty thief Duryea and his gang of 'thugs' go on a big heist at a local wealthy woman's mansion. In comes little 'sister' to Duryea Jayne, to help size the place up and get a feel for where the jewels are. Chaos ensues and Duryea ends up sending Jayne to Atlantic City (after the heist has been pulled off) only to find out she is having an affair with (MAJOR SPOILER) the policeman investigating the robbery! Good plot line and a great nostalgic look at Baby Jayne before she went Hollywood.

Henry Hathaway's movie The Black Rose concerns a Saxon squire who travels to China and back again during the Middle Ages encountering marvels, romance and adventures along the way. It's a pretty and fun Technicolor movie containing a soupçon of rapture. On an intellectual level it can be fairly piffling until close to the end when the Norman King of England refuses to persecute the rebel Walter any longer, recognising that his animosity towards Normans is far from treason, but just a political manifestation of something very personal, conflict with his father. It was an eye opener to me at the time, how much Freudian issues play a subliminal part in our politics. This sort of mature perspective is to be found in The Burglar. It represents an opening up, an efflorescence of noir, typical of the late era (Mickey One, Blast of Silence). In noir authority is often an oppressive force, but in The Burglar, there's the suggestion that it's not the authorities and the system that pre-figure our doom, but our upbringing. It's up to you though, there's leeway for you to see it either way. Who's the enemy is it dad or Big Brother? In one scene, seemingly totally unconnected from the rest of the film, Nat (The Burglar - Dan Duryea) mooches around the precincts of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and is seen sitting directly below the statue of John Barry, the first head of the United States Navy, in Independence Square, three miles away, just moments before. In sight is Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed. The locations are deserted and he's watched over by some sort of passant sculptural beastie and towered over by fluted columns. Are these relics of the past or an overarching system and structure in which he's alternately powerless and hounded or irrelevant? Does the beastie see him, or is it just a charming piece of stone and is the indelible stain of Dad the issue he can't rub off? I saw a film Paul Wendkos made decades later, Hell Boats, and there was a general ambivalence there as well, which I find very stimulating and mature. There are no easy answers to The Burglar. Although I've mentioned Freud, The Burglar isn't one of those annoying movies that are dogmatically Freudian snoozers; the conversations surrounding the past all come off as extremely natural in effect. A little tardily, onto the plot! A bunch of small time burglars figure they can up the ante and go for some sparklers. It doesn't take a genius to work out that fate's cosh is waiting for each of them in the shadows one way or the other. Dan Duryea's lead is the standout, but you gotta feel sorry for Peter Capell's hyperactive pop-eyed lookout Baylock. Scared of his own shadow he dreams of owning a plantation in Central America, he hysterically calls it buying "ground", as if what he stands on the rest of the time is something that might open up and swallow him at any time. It's just so clever how this movie grinds out a noir atmosphere with slight tricks of vocabulary. Even loving this movie with all my heart, I must admit that a relevant criticism for many genre fans wondering if they should watch The Burglar or not is that it lacks thrill in the middle section of the film, principally because Nat has a death wish and isn't putting up much of a fight. Things pick up for the finale on the famous Atlantic City Steel Pier, which comes off as a merging the skews of Lady From Shanghai and Mickey One. Wendkos' film should have lead to a glittering career, but more meretricious aesthetics triumphed.

A showy medium has a set of fancy jewels. Dan Duryea, THE BURGLAR, intends to steal them with the help of gang member Jayne Mansfield. Will the stresses and strains of the criminal lifestyle wreck their lives, or will the gang finally make the big score that will let them all retire? This is one of those movies, following in the wake of the Asphalt Jungle, that shows how the tiny character flaws of the criminals involved in a caper all work to mess up their enterprise. If you like the genre, you'll like this. If you are not a noir/crime movie enthusiast, you might determine that all this seems pretty derivative from better movies. The director has definitely seen his Orson Welles movies (Citizen Kane and Lady from Shanghai are sampled here), but he only has a B-movie plot to drive the action. Later in the movie, this becomes a problem when the mechanics of inevitable doom require Duryea to show an implausible lack of judgment. Nevertheless, Dan Duryea, who plays his role without an ounce of his usual scuzzy smarm, responds quite well to being cast somewhat against type. Jayne Mansfield, who had not yet developed her inflatable sex doll persona (this movie was shot well before Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), does well with a fairly nuanced part that makes use of her looks, but does not require her to be either stupid or sleazy. The movie, when not being overly showy with its visuals, gets in some great location shooting in both Philadlphia and Atlantic City. This is worth seeing, if you like crime movies. But you will get the feeling there was a lot of potential that went unfulfilled here.

This is one of those extravagantly stylized late-period noirs, one which palpitates with flamboyant cinematic technique. It belongs in the same club as those other exaggerated, self-consciously arty noirs of the late 50s/early 60s, like Touch of Evil, Kiss Me Deadly, Blast of Silence and Sam Fuller's contemporaneous contributions to the genre. Wendkos directs like a recent A+ film school graduate showing off every Hitchcock and Welles trick he's learned -- there are many stunning edits (he is also credited as the film's editor), several strikingly composed shots, and a suitably seedy background (the fact that the crooks' hideout is right next to a railway line full of speeding streamliners is a boon). At the same time, he toes the studio line of narrative clarity and cohesive action scenes enough to make this suitable viewing for the non-buff (one can see why he spent most of his years in television, but at the same time could dazzle with over-the-top effects in The Mephisto Waltz.) Fans of Atlantic City's Steel Pier are in for a treat in the film's climax (which owes a bit too much to The Lady from Shanghai) -- we even get to see the diving horse. But notably, we also see the soggy marshes that border the city and reflect the protagonists' own situational quagmire. It may not have the integrity of the more subtly devastating noirs of the Siodmak 40s, but it has its own postmodern tradition to uphold. It's worth picking this one up even on the third-generation dupes that are now in circulation; a wide-screen dvd restoration is definitely in order.

It coulda been a contender, but the sloppy direction ruined it. Duryea is good as the tormented soul keeping watch over Jayne Mansfield,in one of her signature "endowed" roles, as the kind hearted love-sick (for Duryea) e. She's dreadful. There are three in this crooks "organization" who steal a flashy emerald necklace from a dippy woman living in a mansion. Now, how do they dispose of it since it's so hot it will burn their hands if they touch it. Finally, after much drama and over-acting, they head for New Jersey to find Mansfield who is involved with some dude she met while on her back on the beach with her qualities showing "up". Dead cop, dead member of the organization, la dee dah, etc, etc. Finally Jayne and Dan end up on the boardwalk (I guess Atlantic City?) being pursued by her dude who happens to be a cop they know who is after the necklace, blah, blah, blah. Previously, the 2nd member of the organization gets beaten to death by the dude. The boardwalk scenes are corny and horribly directed. Jayne goes free, Duryea gets it in the back and front by about 27 bullets from the bad cop dude's six shooter, the real cops show up, the cop-dude is exposed and the movie ends. This was thrilling and exciting but so terribly directed it misses being very good, so, as it is, its OK. Would only recommend it because of the ever interesting Duryea. Incidentally: Martha Vicers who play the hot Carmen Sternwood in "The Big Sleep" eleven year earlier is equally hot in a pivotal role here also.

Three burglars steal a valuable necklace before encountering the proverbial web of deceit. The movie's a highly uneven work, reminding me as much of Kubrick's The Killing (1956) as the arty flashes of Welles and others. Clearly director Wendkos is reaching for an artistic style, but unlike Kubrick, Wendkos imitates more than he originates. Plus he's working with a ham-handed screenplay that lacks the clarity and flow of Kubrick's classic racetrack caper. Unfortunately, the narrative here tends to stumble along rather than evolve. For example, note the holes in just how the crooked cop puts his operation together, and how he knows as much as he knows. Nonetheless, the opening ten minutes covering the jewel theft is very effective, showing real promise. But the fluidity soon lapses. On a lighter note, I can't help but notice (like another reviewer) Mansfield's unusually bushy eyebrows that undercut her good looks. I'm wondering if they were natural and later pared back by a studio make-over or whether they resulted here from a myopic make-up man. In fact, without all the studio glamorizing of later years, I hardly recognized her. Anyway, for all its shortcomings, the movie remains a generally interesting curiosity that also affirms an unusual moral. Namely, that there can be more honor among thieves than among cops. Something Kubrick also knew.