Thehibikiew Not even bad in a good way

Sammy-Jo Cervantes There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

zardoz-13 Director Paul Wenkos' first film "The Burglar" (1957) was based on the David Goodis novel of the same name, and Goodis penned the screenplay, too. This grim, gritty, black & white suspense thriller starts out strongly but then degenerates into a lackluster crime-doesn't-pay yarn. A gang of thieves break into a wealthy spiritualist's mansion in Philadelphia late one evening and steals a priceless necklace. The thief who enters the second floor of the mansion to crack a wall safe and make away with the goods is Nate Harbin (Dan Duryea of "Black Bart"), the kind of sort of leader of a gang of two other hoodlums—Baylock (Peter Capell of "Son of Hitler") and Dohmer (Mickey Shaughnessy of "From Here to Eternity")—and a young woman Gladden (Jayne Mansfield of "Female Jungle") who he has known all his life. Ironically, Nate and Gladden were orphans both raised by a compassionate thief, Gerald (one-time-only actor Sam Elber) who has made Nate swear that he will always look after Gladden. Nate sends Gladden in to case the place, and Sister Sara (Phoebe Mackay of "Splendor in the Grass") gives her the grand tour. The night that the guys went to Sister Sara's mansion, they parked their jalopy along the highway. Two uniformed officers in a prowl car stop to check out the abandoned vehicle. Fearless Nate pauses in the middle of cracking the safe, leaves the premises, and walks back to the two cops standing by his ride. Nate complains audaciously about the shortage of mechanics up at that time in the evening. The two cops believe Nate's story about his car stalling out, so they let him sleep 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 forgets to close it. Later, not long after Nate and his accomplices have left, Sister Sara discovers that she has been burglarized because Nate left 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 highway is the corrupt cop who takes the necklace off his hands. At one point, Nate and his accomplices pull up stakes and head to Atlantic City. Charlie(Stewart Bradley) 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.Wendkos confines this thriller to a mere 90 minutes, but the momentum breaks down after the initial robbery and the period when the thieves lay low to avoid arrest. Wendkos's "The Burglar" inspired director Henri Verneuil's French remake with Omar Sharif and Jean-Paul Belmondo entitled "The Burglars." "The Burglar" suffers from a bummer of an ending, while it's remake is a lot more fun.

bkoganbing For a chance to look at Atlantic City in the Fifties before the casinos moved in The Burglar is the film for you. Dan Duryea stars in this small B film from Columbia as a professional burglar looking to make a big score with a necklace robbed from a fake spiritualist.Duryea's team consists of Peter Capell jewelry expert, Mickey Shaughnessy muscle and hormones, and Jayne Mansfield who gives his hormones their exercise. Jayne's kind of a legacy for Duryea, if you can believe he thinks of her as kind of a kid sister. Duryea was raised by Jayne's father who was also a burglar and taught him the trade.The robbery goes, but Duryea is spotted by cop Stewart Bradley who's on the take. So he has real police as well as this crooked one looking to get in on the score.You'll note the similarities between The Burglar and The Asphalt Jungle. Both Duryea here and Sterling Hayden in the John Huston classic seem to be drawn inexorably to disaster. The difference is that Huston had that MGM shine to his film and this is a routine B film that's a cut above average.Usually when a film is held up for a couple of years for release that spells problems. But The Burglar shot in 1955 and released in 1957 is moody and atmospheric and a nifty noir feature. Jayne Mansfield gets some competition in the sex pot department from Martha Vickers best remembered as Lauren Bacall's psychotic sister in The Big Sleep. She's working with Bradley who's working on Mansfield. All I can say is nice work if you can get it.Around this time there was an attempt to make a lead of Dan Duryea, but he never really transitioned into that category. But The Burglar represents a fine bit of work from him and the rest of the cast.

tlloydesq Let's break this film into 3 scenes: the intro and robbery – good. The ending – good. The wordy bit in the middle – awful.There is a reasonable (not brilliant) story in there and the cast make a good fist of that but the overly emotional scenes which bind the story together just don't work. That the score is overpowering doesn't help.But this film could have been so much better if it was tightened up. There are some decent jazz rhythms humming away in the background which could have been worked on and the dramatisation I refer to in the middle could also have been better arranged.On the plus side, the seedy setting suits the film and I appreciate the straightforward action – no need for choreographed martial arts when a few decent punches (carefully played in the background) do the job.I wouldn't go out of my way to watch this film again but...if you have 90 minutes to kill it is worth persevering with.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx 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.