Rent Larceny (1948)

Forties Noir. - Larceny review by Steve

Routine crime thriller which gets marketed now as film noir but really is too sunny, and there are no shadowy interiors. Still, we get other genre motifs like the impression veterans of WWII were stiffed by those who stayed at home. Plus yards of hardboiled dialogue... And a blonde who's hot trouble (Shelley Winters).

John Payne is the front for Dan Duryea's unscrupulous gang of swaggering fraudsters. These conmen are proper lowlifes. Their latest scam is to convince a wealthy war widow (Joan Caulfield) to invest in a lavish project for a monument to her dead husband. But will actually be a big donation to organised crime.

The problem is we have to at least halfway sympathise with Payne's predicament when he falls for his mark. But he's an utterly amoral scumbag, even if not quite as repellant as his boss. And Payne hasn't the charm to make this work. It's actually much more entertaining to watch Duryea running through his familiar sleazeball schtick.

It's not obvious why every good looking dame finds Payne irresistible. But it's fun to watch these Universal starlets switch on the personality. Winters plays cinema's dumbest femme fatale to amusing effect. George Marshall usually directed B westerns and hasn't the style for film noir . This one is reserved for Dan Duryea cultists.

Talk to the Fist - Larceny review by CH

"I'm a funny guy - I even like broccolli." So says John Payne, a smooth-talking sharpster who is front man for a gang out to fleece Joan Caulfield of $100,000 under guise of setting up a West Coast memorial to her war hero husband with whom Payne claims to have served in Europe. Love, or something approaching it, intervenes and there is a fair ration of double cross. Very much the stuff of a noir - not least with Dan Duryea as leader of the gang and lover of Shelley Winters. She, however, is so smitten with Payne that she disobeys orders to hide in Havana and arrives on the scene, complete with a line in the sharp talking which is a highlight of the film, so much so that the viewer accepts the turns taken by the plot. The dialogue makes all this close to a corker. It should be better known.