I give credit here to writer David Goodis, who adapted his own novel for The Burglar. The film was made in Philadelphia and Atlantic City by producer Louis Kellman in the hopes of turning the area into a major film production location. Paul Wendkos, who had worked with Kellman on documentaries, was given his first chance to direct and made an intense film noir on a very low budget. The films stars Dan Duryea, as the weary leader of a gang of burglars, Martha Vickers, and Jayne Mansfield in her first film. Wendkos knew Goodis lived in Philadelphia and commissioned him to write the script, which reflects Goodis's sympathy for those down and out and those on the fringes of society.
Nat (Duryea) escaped from an orphanage and got taken in by a burglar who taught Nat his trade and when the burglar died Nat promised to take care of his mentor's daughter, Gladden, played by Mansfield. Gladden cased the joints that Nat's gang robbed and is eventually sent to Atlantic City to avoid the lurid looks of the other members of the gang; Gladden of course is in love with Nat ("I tore apart my pillow with my teeth thinking of you"). Gladden is seduced by a crooked cop who hooks up with Della (Vickers), who in turn seduces Nat in an attempt to find a valuable necklace that Nat's gang stole. This story of shifting loyalties and betrayals, combined with Wendkos's brash style (considerably influenced by Orson Welles, with its elements of The Lady from Shanghai as well as an opening newsreel like that in Citizen Kane), makes for an effective and fatalistic film noir at a time, more that ten years after the end of World War II, when the film noir was sputtering out. Credit also goes to cinematographer Don Malkames, a veteran of B films, including Edgar Ulmer's St. Benny the Dip (1951).
Wendkos made several more good genre films (The Case Against Brooklyn, 1958, and the Fred MacMurray Western Face of a Fugitive, 1959) before switching to Gidget movies and television.
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