About the daily drudgery of life. In Once a Thief, the bland everyday world is fraught with peril.
--Wampa 12, The Film Noir Bible, 2003
Directed by W. Lee Wilder (brother of Billy) and photographed on some of the same Los Angeles locations as Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and D.O.A.(1949), Once a Thief is a grimy, low-budget film about desperate people. Margie Foster, played by the gritty June Havoc, can't find another factory job in San Francisco so she takes up shoplifting and then flees to Los Angeles and finds a job as a waitress. She is conned by sleazy Mitch Moore (Cesar Romero), who runs a bookie joint with a dry cleaners as a front and after stealing all Margie's money and promising to marry her he gives the cops an anonymous tip about her shoplifting, which he finds out about when he tries to pawn a stolen watch she foolishly had held on to. Margie breaks out of prison and confronts Mitch, killing him accidentally as they struggle with a gun.
Margie's best friend is played effectively by Marie McDonald, as Flo --, McDonald in real life had seven husbands and died in her forties of a drug overdose -- who remains loyal to Havoc when Romero steals Flo's money under the pretense of getting a good lawyer for Margie. The movie is filled with character actors --Iris Adrian, Lon Chaney Jr., et al. --who play the lower-class denizens of Los Angeles with little past and less future. Margie herself is typical of those moving to California, from a farm "in the middle of nowhere," after the war, with the hope of jobs and opportunity.
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