Such a frustrating disappointment

Sorry, this movie sucks

From my favorite movies..

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

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.

This film has a lot going for it. The opening few minutes are imaginative. Dan Duryea's acting is excellent, good enough to carry him through patches of hokey dialogue. Jayne Mansfield is nice to look at, with a pretty face, and curvaceous in a 50s sort of way before feminine beauty became thin as a rake (But what was the make-up department thinking giving her those outlandish eyebrows?). Never mind that she couldn't act. You have to enjoy the noirish atmosphere, and there are lots of outdoor scenes that catch the eye. The original music, by Sol Kaplan, is superb, or at least it would be on its own; as background it's a little too intrusive and occasionally over the top emotionally. The climax, with a deadly chase in an amusement park is a nice Hitchcock touch. Yet the movie doesn't quite work. It's hard to say exactly why. One big problem is the writing. Both the plot and the dialogue seem to have the same major flaws: at times hokey, at other times seeming to stall, leaving awkward silences or clumsy transitions. I think The Burglar might have been excellent if the studio had given more resources to developing the script, instead of leaving it in the hands of the man who wrote the novel the movie is based on.

A showy medium has a set of fancy jewels. Dan Duryea, THE BURGLAR, intends to steal them with the help of gang member Jayne Mansfield. Will the stresses and strains of the criminal lifestyle wreck their lives, or will the gang finally make the big score that will let them all retire? This is one of those movies, following in the wake of the Asphalt Jungle, that shows how the tiny character flaws of the criminals involved in a caper all work to mess up their enterprise. If you like the genre, you'll like this. If you are not a noir/crime movie enthusiast, you might determine that all this seems pretty derivative from better movies. The director has definitely seen his Orson Welles movies (Citizen Kane and Lady from Shanghai are sampled here), but he only has a B-movie plot to drive the action. Later in the movie, this becomes a problem when the mechanics of inevitable doom require Duryea to show an implausible lack of judgment.Nevertheless, Dan Duryea, who plays his role without an ounce of his usual scuzzy smarm, responds quite well to being cast somewhat against type. Jayne Mansfield, who had not yet developed her inflatable sex doll persona (this movie was shot well before Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), does well with a fairly nuanced part that makes use of her looks, but does not require her to be either stupid or sleazy. The movie, when not being overly showy with its visuals, gets in some great location shooting in both Philadlphia and Atlantic City.This is worth seeing, if you like crime movies. But you will get the feeling there was a lot of potential that went unfulfilled here.

I saw this film a long time ago and was tremendously impressed, almost hynotized, by its technique. It was directed by Paul Wendkos, who's since gone on to a successful career in television, but who was for a while considered an up and coming director of movies. The stars, Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield, never quite achieved the kind of success many had envisioned for them. Duryea's career was sidetracked by Richard Widmark, and Mansfield never replaced Marilyn Monroe. Part of the charm of this film is watching small timers play small timers in a small movie that didn't cost a lot of money and which few people saw or want to see because no one connected with it is famous (though Jayne has her fans I guess). To make matters worse, the film is arty, full of offbeat camera angles and strange lighting that sometimes makes people look startled, as if they're continually having their picture taken. It's a tawdry tale about little people with big problems, and it works. For all I know it could be a work of art. The story is mostly about a jewel robbery, but it's also about the strange, almost incestuous relationship between Dan and Jayne, which both does and doesn't have a whole lot to do with jewels. There is a very bad guy involved who comes across like a young Senator Joe McCarthy. There are scenes in an amusement park; and more scenes in an empty stadium. I'm not sure why. The films is dazzling and ambitious and pretentious, so much so that it's beyond mere film noir as such; it's more like art noir.