The Great Jewel Robber (Warner Bros., 1950)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 1) my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: The Great Jewel Robber (1950). Note that the title is The Great Jewel Robber, not The Great Jewel Robbery, because instead of being centered around a single crime it’s based on the true-life exploits and multiple crimes of jewel thief Gerard Graham Dennis (David Brian), who got his start in crime in his native Ontario, Canada. As a youth he was arrested for house-breaking and other petty crimes, until in Montreal he grabbed the opportunity to break into the home of a gold-mine heiress and casually pocket $75,000 worth of jewels. Dennis got arrested but escaped from a prison work detail and ultimately fled across the border, settling in New Rochelle, New York (famed to fans of the Dick Van Dyke TV show as the place from which Van Dyke’s character commuted to his job as a TV comedy writer in New York City) and hitting up wealthy victims. He only stole jewels and furs, and when the father of one of his many girlfriends caught on to the fact that he was a thief, he reported Dennis to the cops while Dennis was actually living in his home as a boarder. The woman helped Dennis escape and gave him $300, but no sooner had he done so than he took up with a new girlfriend whom he exploited for more getaway money. Ultimately he wounded a reluctant man who refused to part with his wife’s engagement ring because it was a family heirloom, and Dennis shot him in the shoulder, though he survived. Dennis then fled to California on a cross-country train and while on board met yet another woman, heiress to a fortune in California oil, and seduced her. Then he established himself in Hollywood and started stealing from major movie stars (the ones mentioned in the film are Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, and Dennis Morgan – all Warner Bros. contractees) as well as anyone else with money. When the cops finally caught up with him he was extradited to New York and stood trial for the crimes he’d committed in New Rochelle.

Written by Borden Chase (whose real name Eddie Muller gave as Frank Fowler, though according to his Wikipedia page he was born Devin Borden) and directed by Peter Godfrey, The Great Jewel Robber was produced by Bryan Foy. As a child he’d been one of “The Seven Little Foys,” offspring of vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy, who incorporated his kids into his act. When he grew up he decided to make his career behind the camera and became a “B”-movie producer for various studios, including Warner Bros. and 20th-Century Fox. While at Fox in 1944 he green-lighted a film called Roger Touhy, Gangster, defying the Production Code Administration’s ban on biopics of real-life gangsters on the ground that they’d tend to glorify crime. Foy continued to produce films about actual criminals, and in 1949 he negotiated with the real Gerard Dennis for the rights to his life story. Chase concocted a script in which the first-person narration was told by Dennis himself. The Great Jewel Robber was only tangentially film noir – Eddie Muller has been progressively looser as to his definition of what constitutes a film noir – but it was a quite entertaining film that sent my estimation of Peter Godfrey’s directorial talents several ticks up. Godfrey’s best-known film is the original 1945 version of Christmas in Connecticut starring Barbara Stanwyck as a magazine columnist who’s pretending to be a Martha Stewart-esque domestic diva when she can’t cook at all. I got a bad taste in my mouth about him when I saw The Two Mrs. Carrolls, made two years later, a perfectly dreadful film about an artist with a psychological compulsion to murder his models that thoroughly wasted the talents of Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart. I remember watching this film and then downloading the archive.org post of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 Bluebeard to experience one occasion when the “A”-listers muffed a promising story premise and the “B”-listers did it magnificently. I also had a bad taste when I read about another 1947 Godfrey film, That Hagen Girl, which co-starred Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple. Though I’ve never seen it, I’ve read about it in the book The 50 Worst Films of All Time by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss, which quoted Reagan’s autobiography as saying he particularly disliked the ending. The film’s basic plot was about a rumor that Temple was Reagan’s illegitimate daughter, and once it was proven that she wasn’t, she and Reagan got together as a couple on-screen. Reagan protested that no one would believe this ending because he was so much older than Temple, but Godfrey insisted on keeping it because his wife was also much younger than he.

With The Great Jewel Robber Godfrey was able to make a quite interesting movie despite the handicap of a rather dull and thug-like leading man. David Brian was O.K.-looking and appropriately hunky for the role – though he was blond and the real Gerard Dennis was dark-haired – but at least part of his appeal was his debonair sexual charm (the real Dennis was nicknamed “the American Raffles” after the famous gentleman-thief character created by E. W. Hornung, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law), and it’s hard to believe David Brian as the man no woman can resist when his seduction technique, as we see it on screen, consists of merely glowering at his targets until they yield to him. Obviously the perfect person for this role c. 1950 would have been Cary Grant – who actually did play a similar character in Alfred Hitchcock’s marvelous To Catch a Thief four years later – but by 1950 Grant would have been way beyond Bryan Foy’s budget. Ironically, the biggest thing about Dennis we dislike in Chase’s script is not his thievery but his callousness towards women – including Martha Rollins (Marjorie Reynolds from Holiday Inn and Ministry of Fear), whom Dennis meets when she’s working as a nurse in the hospital where he’s being treated for the wounds his would-be victim inflicted on him (his real name was Tulloch but he’s called “Tom Creel” in the movie and played by Charles Cane). Dennis gets her to leave her job for him, flee with him, and even marry him. When he abandons her later she’s understandably pissed and by the end of the movie she turns him in to the police, giving them a shot of the two of them together on their honeymoon in (where else?) Niagara Falls so the authorities finally have a photo of him they can use to trace him. The Great Jewel Robber was a quite good movie that could have been even better with a stronger, sexier actor in the lead, and though it’s not really film noir it was quite watchable.