One Way Street (Hugo Fregonese, 1950)

James Mason, Dan Duryea, and William Conrad in One Way Street

Cast: James Mason, Märta Torén, Dan Duryea, Basil Ruysdael, William Conrad, Rodolfo Acosta, King Donovan. Robert Espinoza, Tito Renaldo, Margarito Luna, Emma Roldán, George J. Lewis. Screenplay: Lawrence Kimble. Cinematography: Maury Gertsman. Bernard Herzburn, Alfred Ybarra. Film editing: Martin Carruth. Music: Frank Skinner. 

The Burglar (Paul Wendkos, 1957)

Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea in The Burglar

Cast: Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield, Martha Vickers, Peter Capell, Mickey Shaughnessy, Wendell K. Phillips, Phoebe Mackay, Stewart Bradley, John Facenda, Sam Elber. Screenplay: David Goodis, based on his novel. Cinematography: Dan Malkames. Art direction: Jim Leonard. Film editing: Herta Horn, Paul Wendkos. Music: Sol Kaplan.

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.

Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Cast: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally, Millard Mitchell, Charles Drake, John McIntire, Will Geer, Jay C. Flippen, Rock Hudson, John Alexander, Steve Brodie, James Millican, Abner Biberman, Tony Curtis, James Best. Screenplay: Robert L. Richards, Borden Chase, based on a story by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun, Nathan Juran. Film editing: Edward Curtiss.

Winchester '73 fetishes the titular firearm as if it were Excalibur or the Shield of Achilles. Which is all to the point if you're mythmaking, as this film, the first of a series of five movies on which James Stewart collaborated with director Anthony Mann, distinctly is. It's not only a contribution to the myth of the American West, but its central conflict is based on the story of Cain and Abel, with a touch of Oedipus thrown in. Sibling rivalry -- I almost wrote "sibling riflery" -- never got hotter. This is the only one of the Stewart-Mann Westerns that wasn't made in color, but it hardly matters: William H. Daniels photographs the high desert country of Arizona as lovingly as he ever filmed Greta Garbo. The film also holds a place in Hollywood movie history because of the deal Stewart's agent made guaranteeing the actor a percentage of the profits -- a step toward the disintegration of the studio system that would accelerate through the 1950s. But it might also be noted that the studios still held some power: Two up-and-coming Universal contract players, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis, both have small roles in the film, the former in war paint and a fake nose as the Indian chief Young Bull, the latter in a bit part as a cavalryman who admires the rifle on which the plot centers. Winchester '73 is one of the great Westerns not because it questions the myths (and the clichés, such as Shelley Winters's "dance hall girl" with a heart as gold as her hair) on which the genre is founded, but because it so wholeheartedly accepts and integrates them into a well-paced and entertaining movie.

Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)

Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street is based on the same novel by Georges de la Fouchardière that Jean Renoir had adapted for his 1931 film that retained the novel's title, La Chienne. Both films came at oddly significant points in their directors' careers: Renoir's was only his second talkie, but one in which he demonstrated his mastery of the relatively new medium by a creative use of ambient sound. Lang's was made just as World War II was ending -- a moment when it became possible for him to return to Europe, which he had fled to avoid Nazi persecution. Lang chose, however, to stay on in Hollywood for 12 more years, though he grew increasingly annoyed at the creative restrictions imposed on him by the big studios and Production Code censorship. In this context, Scarlet Street stands out as edgy and somewhat defiant. The Code prescribed a kind of lex talionis: any criminal act demands a punishment equivalent in kind and degree. But in Scarlet Street, Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) gets away with not only fraud and theft but also murder -- a double murder, if you consider that the man wrongly accused of the murder goes to the electric chair for it. Cross is punished by homelessness and by auditory delusions of the voices of those who drove him to crime, but that's much less severe than the Code usually prescribed. There were those, of course, including censors in New York State, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, who noticed the Code's laxness and proceeded to ban the film on their own. Today, Scarlet Street is regarded as a classic, one of the premier examples of film noir at its darkest. It doesn't quite measure up to Renoir's version, perhaps because Renoir was freer in expressing his vision of the material than Lang was. Renoir's film had touches of humor and a gentler, more ironic ending, but the ending of Scarlet Street is entirely in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film, with its traces of unfettered Lang: for example, the shocking viciousness of Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), who if you know how to decode the Code is clearly the pimp to the prostitute Kitty March (Joan Bennett). And Cross's behavior at the end of the film, derelict and delusional, echoes some of the frantic paranoia of Peter Lorre's child murderer in Lang's M (1931). The screenplay is by Dudley Nichols.