The Burglar (Samson Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Enchantment TCM showed a movie that was much more to my taste: The Burglar, a film noir shot in 1955 but not released until 1957. It was filmed on location in Philadelphia and produced by Louis W. Kellman, who owned a film processing lab there and hoped that making a movie would encourage other filmmakers to shoot in Philadelphia and thereby get more business for his lab. The Burglar was directed by Paul Wendkos and based on a pulp novel by David Goodis, who’d briefly hit the heights of success when his second novel, Dark Passage (1945), was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and bought by Warner Bros., who filmed it in 1947 with Delmer Daves as writer/director (after the studio had rejected Goodis’s own adaptation of his novel) and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as stars. He got work in Hollywood as a writer but by 1950 he was disgusted with the movie business and retreated to his original home town, Philadelphia, where he cranked out pulps for the Fawcett Crest Gold Medal line and used the money to pay for the care of his schizophrenic brother Herbert. When Kellman and Wendkos learned that the author of the book they were about to film was living in the city they were going to film it in, they sought out Goodis and hired him to write the script -- the only time Goodis got to write one of the movies based on his novels. I have vague memories of reading The Burglar in a modern-day reprint years ago but had very little recollection of it -- perhaps because Goodis wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style (if Dashiell Hammett has sometimes been called the Ernest Hemingway of noir, you could argue that Goodis was its William Faulkner) and frequently stopped his plots in their tracks to get inside the mental processes of his characters in long digressions that his pulp editors didn’t mind (at least they filled up the page count!) but movie producers and directors did.

The Burglar opens with a fake newsreel about tensions in the Cold War and lady athletes bouncing around on pogo sticks before cutting to a story about Sister Sara (Phoebe Mackay), whose millionaire backer has sold just about everything he owned to her for nominal sums, including a house he willed her and she’s inherited as well as a priceless jeweled necklace of emeralds and platinum. In the audience watching this newsreel is Nathaniel “Nat” Harbin (Dan Duryea, 10 years after his classic noirs for Fritz Lang -- Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street -- and looking like he hasn’t weathered the years well), who works out a plan for himself and his three confederates -- Gladden (Jayne Mansfield before she got her 20th Century-Fox contract as a potential replacement for Marilyn Monroe and made her best-known films, The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), Baylock (Peter Caroll) and Dohmer (Mickey Shaughnessy) -- to steal the necklace. Nat sends Gladden to case the place by posing as a would-be devotee of Sister Sara’s cult, and she returns with a rough plan of the house and the knowledge that from 11 to 11:15 p.m. Sister Sara always watches a local late-night TV news program hosted by John Facenda (who actually was a Philadelphia TV news anchor at the time and later became the narrator for NFL Films), and since she will be downstairs watching TV the burglars will be able to break into her upstairs bedroom and steal the necklace as long as they finish before 11:15, when the show ends and Sara will go to bed. On the night of the burglary two police officers spot Nat outside the house waiting beside the getaway car, and when the burglars leave there’s a shoot-out in which one of the cops is killed while the other (Wendell Phillips) gets a good enough look at Nat the police are able to call in a sketch artist and do a reasonably accurate drawing of him.

From there the film concentrates on the thieves, who are hiding out in a seedy room and getting antsy because the other two want to cash out immediately but Nat is holding out to realize at least some of what the piece is worth instead of selling it to a fence for a fraction of its value. There’s an interesting sense of irony as Wendkos cuts back and forth between the thieves in a room plotting how to turn their loot into cash and the cops also sitting in a room plotting how to find them. Along the way we get a flashback which depicts Nat as a child escaping from an orphanage and ending up as the ward of a professional burglar who literally taught him everything he knew about the craft -- with the result that Nat also became a burglar when the old man died. This is also how he met Gladden, his foster-father’s natural daughter, and dad on his deathbed made Nat swear a promise to take care of Gladden and protect her. Later on we learn that Gladden has stuck with the gang because she was hopelessly in love with Nat -- but Nat kept back from any romantic interest in her because he would have felt like that was dating his sister. Gladden runs away from the gang and goes to Atlantic City, where we see her on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit (the one point in the film where Wendkos exploits Mansfield’s fabled physical assets) and where she meets and starts dating a man -- only he turns out to be the surviving police officer who confronted Nat during the burglary and who, instead of busting him, decided to turn crooked and grab the piece for himself. As part of this plan he assigns his own girlfriend, Della (Martha Vickers, Lauren Bacall’s nymphomaniac sister in The Big Sleep and the crippled victim in The Big Bluff -- and one of those incredibly talented actors who deserved a much bigger career than she got), to come on to Nat in a bar in a surprisingly blatant pickup scene for 1955 -- only he overhears her talking to the corrupt cop and realizes he’s being taken. The film ends with a brutal shoot-out on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier (where Bruce Springsteen would play a lot of his early gigs in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s).

The Burglar is a quite impressive movie, though the acting is wildly variable -- Dan Duryea turns in a fully professional performance but Peter Capell is ridiculously overwrought and Mansfield, though in a sense you’re rooting for her to show that she was more than just a blonde sexpot and she could really act (much the way Monroe had shown real acting chops in such noir roles as The Asphalt Jungle, Don’t Bother to Knock and Niagara), just doesn’t come through. She has one great scene -- in which Gladden tells Nat that she’s always had the hots for him and has lived with him in a continual state of sexual frustration because, hamstrung by his vow to her dad, he’s never seen her “that way” or, if he did, never acted on it -- and there are a couple of moments when she drops her vocal register and sounds quite like her daughter, Mariska Hargitay, in her trademark role as Captain Olivia Benson on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, but for the most part she just seems overwhelmed by the role and I suspect this film would have been considerably stronger if Mansfield and Vickers had switched parts. Where The Burglar scores is in the sheer bravura of its direction and cinematography -- including one fight scene between two of the gang members in which cinematographer Don Malkames (the go-to guy just then for anyone shooting a crime thriller on the East Coast) shoots hand-held and suddenly The Burglar looks like a movie from the Steadicam era instead of one from the 1950’s -- and in Goodis’s script, which offers us keen insights into the characters and turns them into figures of considerably more depth than we usually get in classic noir.

It’s also a movie that benefits from the greater flexibility and portability of movie equipment that began in the 1950’s (especially the adoption of magnetic tape to record the sound -- though film prints still featured optical rather than magnetic soundtracks -- and the development of smaller, lighter cameras and more sensitive film stocks), and Wendkos takes full advantage of these. Eddie Muller in his “Noir Alley” comments on the film noted Wendkos’s stylistic debt to Orson Welles -- particularly in the Citizen Kane-like fake newsreel at the beginning and the use of an amusement park for the climax as in The Lady from Shanghai -- but the film also seems to anticipate later developments in the 1960’s as cameras got even lighter and more portable and it became practical to shoot a film like this in color. The Burglar is a flawed but mostly quite good noir melodrama and well worth seeing!