The Burglar (1957)

Film: The Burglar (1957)
Stars: Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield, Martha Vickers, Peter Capell, Mickey Shaughnessy
Director: Paul Wendkos
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Jayne Mansfield-click here to learn more about Ms. Mansfield (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It is impossible to have a conversation about Jayne Mansfield without bringing up Marilyn Monroe.  Mansfield came about almost completely as a result of Monroe, and in almost every way was a facsimile of her.  It feels unkind to call her a "poor man's Mariliyn," but history has basically given us that title so it seems foolhardy to ignore.  That being said, one of the main reasons that history has forgotten Mansfield is that she didn't have Monroe's savvy (or luck) to be able to headline for great directors.  Monroe is more remembered today for her birthday songs and impossibly sexualized appearance, but she also left behind a filmography worth revisiting, making pictures for John Huston, Joe Mankiewicz, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, & Billy Wilder, among others.  Mansfield only really worked with two directors that are remembered at all today (Stanley Donen & Raoul Walsh) on very minor movies in their filmographies, and as a result has few films that seem at all interested in her doing anything other than breathlessly turning on the audience.  A rare exception to this was 1957's The Burglar, a largely forgotten late-era film noir where she plays the adopted sister of jewel thief Dan Duryea.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around Nat Harbin (Duryea) a low-level jewel thief who attempts a shot at the big time by stealing the emerald necklace of a phony spiritualist, who has just conned a dying millionaire into giving her his fortune.  Nat successfully steals the jewelry after Gladden (Mansfield), a girl that he has raised since childhood when he was adopted by his father, cases the joint.  After a successful robbery, the two along with their associates Baylock (Capell) and Dohmer (Shaughnessy) struggle to find a solution on how to unload the necklace, as it's too hot to sell for what it's worth.  Eventually Dohmer attempts to rape Gladden, so obsessed is he by his lust, and she is sent off to a beach resort where she is seduced by a crooked cop who is trying to get the necklace for himself.  Nat is also being seduced by a mysterious woman named Della (Vickers) who turns out to be the accomplice of the cop.  One-by-one all of the jewel thieves die, eventually even Nat at the cop's hands, only to have the cop outed in a shootout at a carnival, with a weeping Gladden hunched over his body.

The Burglar is a conundrum for me, and for anyone who has seen a lot of film noir.  It's not bad-you don't put Dan Duryea & Martha Vickers in the leads of a noir and end up with a bad movie-but it's all been done before.  The opening scene of a newsreel is mirroring Citizen Kane, while the carnival funhouse scenes have been done better in The Lady from Shanghai, or later Woman on the Run with Ann Sheridan.  Essentially, Paul Wendkos is trying to mirror Orson Welles, but he manages to only do it by being a copycat, rather than having something new to say.  Welles himself would prove the following year that despite nearly two decades of formula ahead of him, he would have a fresh take on the genre with Touch of Evil, but The Burglar is merely good while attempting to be great.

The performances are probably what save it.  Duryea as Nat is terrific, the longtime character actor getting full chance at the lead and he takes advantage of it.  There are some very artsy, angsty shots that feel more at-home in a 1960's film than 1957, and Duryea's everyman plays into that well.  Vickers, who a decade earlier had made her mark in the classic The Big Sleep, is given a thankless role but finds some fun dimensions to it, and at least the pickup scene where she basically tricks Nat into coming onto her is fun.  Mansfield, though?  She's...fine.  It seems mean to say because she's not ardently bad, but compared to accomplished performers like Duryea and Vickers, it looks like she's phoning this performance in, and doesn't have the dramatic heft to get into the head of Gladden in the way, say, Kim Novak would have done with the part.  There is a weird incestuous vibe between Gladden & Nat (she's desperately in love with him, despite the fact that he views himself as her father or brother), but Mansfield can't even nab the strangeness of such a character quirk, and is out-of-her-depths here.  She's good because the part is good, not because she's giving some great dramatic work.