Though a whirl of dancing gyrations, blare of the rock’n'roll drums, haze of a smoke-filled San Francisco nightclub known as Big Al’s, cameras swing to Chinatown and…

 

Guns blaze on screen …

… and Eddie Pedak (ALAIN DELON) is framed for a killing and robbery he didn’t commit. 

So reads the synopsis of Ralph Nelson’s Once a Thief (1965), issued by MGM’s Publicity Department at the time of its theatrical release.  The film is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by John Trinian, aka Zekial Marko, aka Marvin Leroy Schmoker, a small-time career criminal who rehabilitated himself outside of prison by writing pulp novels and who was given the job to adapt his book for the big screen.  First published in 1964, Scratch a Thief is set in San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach district, amid the jazz clubs and tenement flops of that new breed of iconoclasts that author Jack Kerouac would dub “the Subterraneans.”  The arrest of ex-con Eddie Pedak on a bum rap for murder sets in motion a tragic chain reaction of deals , deceptions, rip-offs and retaliations that leaves a trail of corpses that could stretch clear across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Once a Thief gave Alain Delon his first working vacation in America (after having popped up in one of the vignettes of MGM’s The Yellow Rolls Royce, filmed in Great Britain and Europe).  For this coproduction of MGM and Jacques Bar’s CIPRA (Compagnie Internationale de Productions Cinématographiques), “Europe’s top young actor” (as the studio heralded Delon) was paired with “Hollywood’s most exciting young actress” – Ann-Margret, fresh from Viva Las Vegas (1964) with Elvis Presley.  Director Ralph Nelson saw in the Sweden-born bombshell the gravity of “a young Judith Anderson” and indeed she’s a good fit for Delon.  Both performers are impossibly beautiful young people, yet their good looks are undercut with a note of cruelty that make them believable as lovers who like to chase their romance with a little drop of poison.

Key among the supporting players is Jack Palance, back in the United States after an extended stay overseas starring in one multi-national production after another and having just spoofed his Hollywood heavy image as a crass movie producer in  Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1964).  The ever-sinister but oddly endearing actor has a ball as Eddie’s older brother Walter, an Italo-Slovak immigrant made-bad who wants to lure Eddie back into a life of crime for one last job. 

In one of his most powerful yet most underrated late life performances, Van Heflin appears as the dogged Frisco detective who once took a bullet from Eddie’s .38 and now wears the slug as a watch fob as a cautionary reminder never to be caught off-guard again. 

Cast as Palance’s guns-for-hire are John Davis Chandler, star of Burt Balaban’s true crime chronicle Mad Dog Coll (1961) and a reliable creep in such classics as The Young Savages (1961), Major Dundee (1965), Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and…

… Tony Musante (in his film debut). Musante went on to featured roles in The Incident (1967), The Detective (1968) and Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969) before landing his own hit TV series, Toma, which ran for one season in 1973 before the actor jumped ship and the property morphed into Baretta starring Robert Blake.  (Musante and John Davis Chandler were reunited for an episode of Toma titled, appropriately enough, “The Frame-Up.”)  The Bridgeport, Connecticut native matured into a powerful character actor, with featured roles in The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), The Yards (2000) and We Own the Night (2007), as well as on several episodes of the hit HBO series Oz.

Filmed entirely on location in San Francisco by veteran cinematographer Robert Burks (who had shot Vertigo for Alfred Hitchcock there a few years earlier), Once a Thief made pioneering use of a then-new high speed film stock that permitted filming with a greater degree of available light using only portable quartz lamps weighing 1 lb. each.  This innovation allowed Ralph Nelson’s crew to move more quickly and to film less obstrusively on the busy city streets and graced the production with the edgy, as-it-happens tempo of a documentary.

Better known for tasteful dramas (The Lilies of the Field) and light comedies (Father Goose), Ralph Nelson took a realistic, warts and all approach to Once a Thief, ripping the lid of the shadowy night life of marginal characters while Zekial Marko’s jivey screenplay is surprisingly frank about homosexuality and drug use and critical of a society that bears more complicity in the creation of criminals than it would like to admit.

Not surprisingly, film critics of the time gave Once a Thief the high hat, grousing about perceived genre cliches and unable or unwilling to appreciate how Nelson and Marko cannily manipulated the conventions of the caper film and film noir to underscore their themes of trust, loyalty, faith and redemption, as well as their shared belief that “society creates criminals.” 

“There aren’t very many real people left.  The only real people I know are dead, pushed into nuthouses, lobotomies, junk, suicide… or really cooling it and saying nothin’ to nobody.”  from Once a Thief

 Catch Once a Thief on TCM on August 18, 2008, at 4:30 pm (EST).