The Big Steal (RKO, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 31) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” showing of a movie that isn’t particularly noir but is an engaging thriller/action film: The Big Steal, made in 1949 for RKO Radio Pictures and directed by Don Siegel from a script by Daniel Mainwaring (under his “Geoffrey Homes” pseudonym) and Gerald Drayson Adams from a story called “The Road to Carmichael’s” by Richard Wormser. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller told a rather different version of the origins of this film from the one I’d read before in Stuart M. Kaminsky’s early-1970’s book-length interview with Don Siegel. Siegel, who’d just been fired from Warner Bros. over his film Night Unto Night (a drama about amnesia starring Viveca Lindfors and, of all people, Ronald Reagan), was at loose ends and Howard Hughes, who then owned RKO, offered him this film as “an excuse to get Robert Mitchum out of jail.” In 1948 Mitchum had been busted for possession of marijuana, and according to Siegel, Hughes dredged up this mediocre script and sent a representative to the judge hearing Mitchum’s case with instructions to tell the judge that Hughes had 120 cast and crew members down in Mexico drawing salaries, ready to make this movie, and if the judge didn’t release Mitchum he’d have to lay off all those people. Muller’s version was that Mitchum actually drew a six-month sentence and much of the movie had to be shot around him.

Since most of the film consists of an elaborate three-way car chase between Army Lieutenant Duke Halliday (Robert Mitchum), who’s been framed for the theft of a $300,000 payroll fund from his Army base; the real criminal, Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles); and Captain Vincent Blake (William Bendix), Halliday’s immediate superior, who’s out to arrest him for the theft, Siegel resorted to the old trick used by John Wayne’s directors when he was making “one-horse Westerns” for Monogram. Since Monogram’s production unit could only afford to rent one horse, they’d show the actor playing the villain ride across the location, then walk the horse back, and John Wayne would get on the horse and ride over the same route. The two would then be cut together so it looked like Wayne was chasing the villain on a different horse. Likewise, for the chase scenes set in Mexico, Siegel had Knowles and Bendix drive their cars along the route of the chase and then Mitchum and his co-star, Joan Graham (Jane Greer, reunited with Mitchum from the cast of Out of the Past, which Muller continues to call the quintessential film noir – a title I’d give to Murder, My Sweet!) would drive the same route months later. It’s a tribute to Siegel’s skill as a director that he keeps the film moving so fast one doesn’t notice the differences in foliage along the route, since Knowles and Bendix had been filmed in midwinter and Mitchum and Greer (whose character was previously Knowles’s girlfriend until he “borrowed” $2,000 from her and refused to pay it back, whereupon she transferred her affections to Mitchum) in midsummer. Siegel also reportedly deleted quite a few script pages in an effort to make sure he finished the film on time – which he did – though, once again, Siegel and editor Samuel E. Beetley did such good jobs that we don’t notice any lacunae in the plot.

One of the other legends surrounding this film was that Jane Greer’s promising career went down the tubes when she turned down Howard Hughes’s sexual advances. Not so, according to Muller; she actually did have an affair with Hughes, only she broke it off to marry someone else and that’s when he decided to destroy her career out of revenge. Only he had a problem with The Big Steal because Lizabeth Scott, originally set to play the female lead, withdrew from the film at the insistence of her sugar-daddy producer, Hal Wallis, because Wallis was afraid of the long-term damage appearing with a notorious pothead would do to her career. So Hughes needed another actress in a hurry, and Greer offered to step in because, though they were never more than friends, she and Mitchum had got along well making Out of the Past. Incidentally, Out of the Past and The Big Steal have more than just two leading actors in common; both are set either partly or totally in Mexico and Daniel Mainwaring was involved with both; Out of the Past was written by Mainwaring and based on a novel called Build My Gallows High that Mainwaring had written and published in the “Geoffrey Homes” identity. Though I’m not sure how much of The Big Steal was actually shot in Mexico – there are some pretty obvious process-screen shots during some of the car chases and the final sequences look like the exteriors were shot at the good ol’ Iverson Ranch outside Hollywood, scene of a thousand Republic Westerns – enough of it was that the film gains a great deal of credibility from the fact that these dowdy buildings are actually Mexican and not the familiar RKO standing street sets “Mexicanized” by replacing their usual English signs with Spanish ones.

There’s also a clever subplot involving Inspector General Ortega (Ramon Novarro, making a welcome return to American films 15 years after Louis B. Mayer fired him from MGM for being Gay) of the Mexican police, who’s carrying on an unequal struggle with English, in which he’s being coached by his sidekick, Lt. Ruiz (Don Alvarado); and a major plot point in that Jane Greer’s character speaks near-perfect Spanish and Mitchum’s has to rely on her to interpret for him. Three years later, Mainwaring and director Ida Lupino would recycle this gimmick for her film The Hitch-Hiker (1953), in which two American tourists visiting Mexico (Edmond O-Brien and Frank Lovejoy) are car-jacked by a psychopathic fugitive (William Talman, later the hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason TV series). One of the plot points of that film is that the fugitive doesn’t know any Spanish while the American tourists he’s hijacked do, and throughout the movie he’s worried that his victims will give the game away by saying something in Spanish the Mexican characters will understand and he won’t. The Big Steal also features two, count ’em, two decoy suitcases in which Knowles’s character has supposedly hidden the $300,000, and a great climax in which the money actually turns out to be stashed in the spare tire of Knowles’s car. He shows up at the desert redoubt of his fence, Julius Seton (John Qualen), who offers him half of the face value of the loot (given that most movie fences offer just 10 percent or so of the actual value of the swag, Knowles is getting off pretty easily!), only there’s a big shoot-out involving Mitchum, Greer, and Bendix, who turns out [spoiler alert!] to be the mastermind of the whole caper, working with Knowles’s character to split the $300,000 and frame Mitchum for the crime.

I’ve seen The Big Steal several times before but I liked it better on this go-round than I have in the past; though not as “quality” a movie as Out of the Past, it’s a lot more fun, and frankly Jane Greer is a charming enough actress I’d rather see her in a sympathetic role than as the femme fatale she played in the earlier film. After we watched the movie Charles and I screened a quite interesting YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY1gcEJupRs&t=47s) about 15 films noir from the 1940’s which were supposedly lost and only recently restored after painstaking searches through various film archives: High Tide (1947), Too Late for Tears (1949), The Guilty (1947), The Pretender (1947), Road House (1948), Detour (1946), The Chase (1946), Nobody Lives Forever (1946), Three Strangers (1946), Voice in the Wind (1944), Repeat Performance (1947), The Argyle Secrets (1948), Hollow Triumph a.k.a. The Scar (1948), Strange Impersonation (1946), and Open Secret (1948). The narrator (all too obviously an AI-generated computer voice, though some human must have written it) described Repeat Performance as what would have happened if Cornell Woolrich had written It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s the story of an actress who’s given the chance to re-live the last year of her life and thereby avoid murdering her husband, which she’s seen doing in the opening scene, and the narrator of this video suggested it was the first science-fiction film noir even though a) the premise is much closer to fantasy than science fiction, and b) the earliest film noir I can think of with a science-fiction element is Decoy, made at Monogram in 1946, in which a dead criminal is brought back to life by other crooks in search of his buried loot. Until I ran across Decoy I’d assumed the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers – which, like The Big Steal, was directed by Don Siegel and written by Daniel Mainwaring – was the first science-fiction film noir!