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| Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea in The Burglar |
The Burglar is a low-budget crime movie that doesn't always get its rhythms right, but nevertheless holds one's attention better than lots of slicker and more sophisticated movies. It was the first feature for director Paul Wendkos, who went on to a long career mostly in television, and though he doesn't show a lot of skill in directing actors, he knows where to put the camera, using close-ups effectively, and making the most of the Philadelphia and Atlantic City locations where The Burglar was shot. The story centers on Nat Harbin, the titular burglar, and the aftermath of the heist he and his cronies pull off, drilling into the safe where a wealthy "spiritualist" has stashed a priceless emerald necklace. The burglary is interrupted when a police car, which has spotted Harbin's car parked outside the mansion, pulls up, but Harbin persuades the cops that he had engine trouble and plans to spend the night in the car until he can find a mechanic in the morning. Harbin's fellow thieves include a pair of jittery low-lifes, Baylock (Peter Capell) and Dohmer (Mickey Shaughnessy), as well as a young woman, Gladden (Jayne Mansfield), who cases the mansion before the burglars break into it. Gladden, whose peculiar name is questioned but never explained in the film, grew up with Harbin after he ran away from home as a boy and was picked up while hitchhiking by a kind of Fagin figure named Gerald (Sam Elber), who taught him the tricks of the burgling trade. When Gerald dies, Harbin honors his request to look after Gladden. The two of them have maintained a kind of brother-sister relationship. After completing the burglary, Harbin insists on a cooling-off period before they make an attempt to fence the stolen necklace, but Baylock and Dohmer impatiently resist him. Dealing with his loose-cannon colleagues is only one of Harbin's problems after the police use a sketch artist to develop an image of him, based on the descriptions by the cops who had spotted him with his car. Moreover, one of the cops turns out to be a bad guy, working in cahoots with a young woman named Della (Martha Vickers), who picks Harbin up in a bar to try to get a fix on where he has stashed the loot. And so it goes, getting bloodier by the minute, until the climax in a house of horrors attraction at the Atlantic City Steel Pier. Duryea gives a solid performance, and it's good to see Vickers, best known as the thumb-sucking Carmen Sternwood in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). Capell and Shaughnessy are a bit too hyper as Harbin's cronies, and Mansfield, never valued for her acting skill, was probably chosen for the scene in which she lies on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit.
