d. Paul Wendkos (1957)
'We, the dead, welcome you'.
Nat
Harbin (Dan Duryea, weary as hell) is a career criminal, a break in expert. He
has never been caught, never been photographed, never been finger printed.
Neither has he ever been particularly successful, living in a series of crummy
rooms in slummy streets, eking out a living for himself and his adopted sister,
Gladden (Jayne Mansfield!). They are in love with each other, but something
always gets in the way: life, usually, and Nat’s higher sense of obligation and
morality to the girl he has looked after since she was a kid. Maybe if things
were different they could be happy, live a different life. Maybe. Nat is like a
sleepwalker, locked into himself, indifferent to almost everything apart from
the instinct to put one foot in front of the other. Even love is a burden.
Nat
decides that he needs a big score, so forms an ‘organisation’: him, Gladden, a whining
weakling called Baylock and a sleazy psychopath called Dohmer. Together they
steal a sapphire necklace from a shifty spiritualist called Sister Phoebe. It’s
worth a cool $150,000, and they think they can get $80,000 for it. What they
actually get is death, hunted down by a crooked cop who wants the necklace for
himself.
As
you might expect from a film noir based, like Nightfall, on a book by arch fatalist David Goodis, The Burglar is dark, inky black in places. The characters are lost
causes, stuck on predetermined routes to sordid ends. They all need someone to
talk to, someone to listen. They will end up unsung, unremembered, unburied,
left in crumpled heaps or in hastily dug holes by the side of the road. The
drama is played out in huge sudden close ups and in flashing action cuts, all
to the blaring of an occasionally intrusive brass and vibes score. Everything
about this grim little story is played big, as if it mattered, as if any of it
mattered.
At
the climax, in the bustling amusement arcades and tourist attractions of
Atlantic City (‘the playground of the world’) the characters play out their last
scenes in sudden isolation, as if they are the only people on the planet. In the
end, Nat finally gets what he wanted all along: he is put of his misery. Gladden
survives, the only one young enough and innocent enough to still have a shot at
something else, at someone else. What happens to the necklace? Who cares?
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