Once a Thief

Toward the end of Summer Under the Stars in August, TCM ran a day of the movies of Alain Delon. This gave me the opportunity to watch one I hadn't seen before, Once a Thief.

The movie starts off with a jazzy scene in a smoky club somewhere in San Francisco, intercut with a hold-up going on in a small store in Chinatown that results in the proprietress getting shot dead, all with the opening credits, implying that there's something edgy and new (well, at least for the mid-1960s) about the movie. We are then introduced to the main characters.

Delon stars as Eddie Pedak, a parolee who served time for robbery and shooting a cop. He's trying to put his life together by working at a shipper on the waterfront, hoping to buy a boat he can do fishing out in the Pacific with. He's also got a wife in Kristine (Ann-Margret) and daughter. And somehow, he was abot to scrape the money together despite having spent time in prison to buy a vintage Ford Model A that looks spiffy.

Van Heflin plays Mike Vido, a detective for the San Francisco police who is the man that was shot by Eddie in that previous holdup. So Vido has a thing against Eddie to begin with. And when it transpires that there was a Model A outside that store in Chinatown, and the bullet from her was fired from the same gun used to shoot Vido, he draws the natural conclusion that Eddie was involved in the shooting, even though the dead woman's husband can't identify him in a lineup. It's enough to get Vido to go to the waterfront and cost Eddie his job.

Eddie protests his innocence, and as we said, the Chinese guy in the store couldn't identify him. Eddie has trouble getting a job, but is also proud enough that he doesn't want Kristine to do the sort of work for which she'd be best suited. Recognizing all of this is Eddie's estranged brother Walter (Jack Palance).

Walter has a plan. Eddie's old employer on the waterfront is going to be handling a shipment of titanium, something that's going to be worth a large sum of money because the relatively rare metal is valuable. Walter has learned this somehow, and has assembled a team of people for the heist. The only thing is, he could use his brother's inside knowledge of the layout of the place, and Eddie doesn't really want to do it.

That's going to change somewhat, however, when keeps being unable to get a job, and it seems like this "one last heist" (sure) is the only way to get the money to pay off the boat. The fact that Walter and his minions are harassing Eddie's daughter doesn't make matters any easier for Eddie.

And then Vido finds an odd car in the garage of recovered stolen cars. It's a Model A that looks surprisingly like Eddie's, but it isn't Eddies. Vido is finally able to put two and two together and figure out that Eddie is framed, and we the viewer can guess that it's Walter who did it specifically to put more pressure on Eddie to go along with the heist. Unfortuntely, the Production Code was still in effect at the time the movie was made, so you can figure out how things are going to end.

Once a Thief isn't necessarily a bad movie, and certainly not a bad movie for its genre. But it suffers from the opening, which give the impression it's going to do a lot more than it ultimately delivers on. Sure, there are a lot of little touches to like, and having Van Heflin and Jack Palance in the movie is always a plus. But in the end it feels like a been there, done that movie that's not going to stand the test of time.

Once a Thief is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.