Gerard Dennis

Tonight's edition of Noir Alley, coming up at midnight and on only once because of tomorrow's 24-hour programming salute to Robert Redford, is a movie that's not really a noir, but the sort of noir-adjacent crime movie that's still fairly well up Eddie Muller's alley: The Great Jewel Robber, at midnight tonight, so still late evening Saturday in more westerly time zones.

A "ripped from the headlines" pre-title sequence tells us about a man known as the "Raffles of Hollywood" among other things, a jewel robber to the stars who apparently took quite a few people for a lot of money before he was sentenced to prison. As you might guess, the movie tells us the story of this man and how he started, although at least this time I wouldn't argue that it's a flashback in the traditional sense of the word.

Gerard Dennis (David Brian) lives in a rooming house in Toronto. There's been a series of robberies of furs and jewels that have baffled the police. That is, until a man comes in to one of the police stations. Not to confess, mind you, since this isn't the thief. But to tell the police they can catch him. It turns out that this man, a Mr. Blaine, owns the house where Gerard is renting a room, and has seen the stuff Gerard is hiding. Sure enough, they go over to the house and find the goods, and when Gerard gets back that night, arrest him.

Gerard told Mr. Blaine's daughter he was in love with her and hoping to marry her, much to her father's objections. But since they're not married, Gerard isn't allowed to write letters to her, something you'd think the prison would have told him before he tried writing any letters. When he finds out they're trashing those letters, he's pissed, and plots his escape from a prison work detail. He then goes to young Miss Blaine and gets money from her for fake passports and whatnot. Except that he's been lying to her, and goes to his real girlfriend Peggy, who knows of a safe-cracking job in Buffalo.

So Gerard and Peggy make it over the border, but when it comes time to do the job, Gerard learns that Peggy and the hotel bartender who set up this job are even bigger double-crossers than Gerard is. A dispute over it leads to Gerard getting hit and suffering several broken ribs for which he spends a couple of weeks in hospital. There, he falls in love with nurse Martha (Marjorie Reynolds), marrying her after he gets out of the hospital and taking her back to New Rochelle, where she got her first nursing job back in the day. It's also a place for him to find new territory where he isn't known and where he can steal more jewels, fencing and re-setting them.

But Martha isn't pleased with his being a thief and wants him to stop. He claims he will, but once again he's lying, so she too goes to the police to get them to capture him. This time, Gerard gets on a train cross-country and goes to Hollywood. On the train, he meets Mrs. Vinson (Jacqueline de Wit), who has lost a brooch. Gerard may have stolen it, but in any case he "finds" it and returns it to Mrs. Vinson, which is more of a way for him to get an in with the Beverly Hills and Hollywood crowds who are of course loaded and offer more opportunity for jewels and furs to steal.

The plot of The Great Jewel Robber is a fairly straightforward one, and frankly feels a bit boring in writing up the synopsis. That's grossly unfair to the movie. While it's not an all-time great, it's certainly serviceable and never less than interesting. David Brian does a good job as the charming heavy, and the docudrama style of storytelling works. Modern viewers may wonder how police never seemed to catch on to Gerard, although communication between various jurisdictions wasn't quite as good back in the late 1940s.

I hadn't heard of The Great Jewel Robber before the last time it was on TCM, but I'm glad they showed it and I got the chance to watch it.