Larceny (1948)

If anyone had told me that a Dan Duryea film noir could almost (almost) double as a Christmas movie, I would never have believed it, but it’s true of Larceny. The events in the film’s narrative take place around the Christmas and New Year holidays. Of course, Silky Randall, played by Duryea, and Rick Maxon, played by John Payne, use the holidays to their advantage. They arrive in Mission City, California, to swindle the widow of a World War II soldier, and the holiday celebrations, including the Rose Bowl, just help their nefarious con game all the more by making it easier for them, Maxon in particular, to play on her emotions.

The film starts in Miami Beach, where Maxon and Randall are trying to get the most out of a con game they are working on someone named Vanderline. Vanderline is turning sour on their land deal. He thinks that the yacht club they want to build is taking too long. He and his friends have nothing to show for their investments except an option on a piece of shoreline property and some blueprints. He accuses Maxon and Randall of being con men. Randall lets Vanderline know that he and his friends are part of the deal now. If Vanderline thinks it’s a swindle, then he is either guilty of swindling others or he will have to admit to his friends that he has been duped, and neither option appeals to Vanderline. Before Vanderline has a chance to say more or change his mind, Randall and Maxon walk away with the money.

They have already been planning their next con with the help of others in their gang: Max and Duke, who have been doing their research. The next mark is war widow Deb Clark who lives in Mission City and whose husband Jim died in World War II. This time, they’ll fundraise to build a phony war memorial. In the meantime, Silky Randall’s girlfriend, Tory Hayward, is causing trouble because she is having an affair with Rick Maxon, and she much prefers Maxon. She wants Maxon to break with Randall and leave with her. Maxon isn’t so sure that is a good idea because Randall is prone to violence when it suits him. He may be attracted to Hayward, but he doesn’t want to run off with her.

Rick Maxon and Duke leave for Mission City to scope out their prospects and lay the groundwork. Maxon arrives during the holiday season, which is made clear because there’s a Christmas tree in the front lobby of the Youth Athletic Association (YAA), where he is planning to stay. Charlie Jordan runs the YAA and greets Maxon when he signs in at the front desk. Jordan convinces Maxon to give a short inspirational speech to the young men at the YAA. Maxon grudgingly complies because it’s a distraction and because he will have to flesh out his story about being a war buddy of Jim Clark, Deb’s deceased husband.

Tory Hayward doesn’t go to Havana like Silky Randall wanted her to. He wants her out of the way and away from Maxon, but she has other ideas. She arrives in Mission City and sends a note to Rick Maxon via a drugstore delivery. They argue when Maxon meets her: Hayward intercepts Maxon’s flirtation with Mabel, the waitress at the diner across the street from the YAA. Hayward gets jealous very easily and makes her feelings known to Mabel right away. But Maxon cannot let Hayward go just yet, especially when she threatens to call Silky Randall and tell him that Maxon sent for her. Tory Hayward becomes the biggest complicating factor in Maxon’s and Randall’s plans for the phony war memorial fund.

(This article about Larceny contains spoilers.)

Rick Maxon has a lot of success working his way into Deb Clark’s life. He presents himself as a friend of her late husband Jim, and she is only too happy to hear what he has to say about her husband. He has plenty of money from the land deal in Miami, and he uses it to stay in Mission City as long as he needs to start the war memorial fund. He is so successful that the con game may be a short one: Deb is eager to honor her husband and wants to donate as much money as she can to make it her pet project.

Enter Tory Hayward—again. She wants Rick Maxon, and she doesn’t plan to let anything get in her way. You would think that most of the tension in the narrative would come from Maxon working his con and his charm on Deb Clark, but Hayward is ready to insert herself in any plans that don’t help her own agenda. She is dangerous, and not just because of the lengths to which she will go. Silky Randall is still fond of her, and he is just as jealous and dangerous as Hayward.

Almost everything I read about Larceny described it as the story of a con man who finally meets his match because he falls in love with the woman he is planning to swindle, and that would be Rick Maxon falling in love with Deb Clark. I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the plot. Rick Maxon is indeed a ladies’ man. He likes women and he pursues them. If he has a chance with a woman, he takes it. This quality about Rick Maxon makes him a good choice for con games, especially those involving women, because Maxon can always turn on the charm, which is what every good con man can use to his advantage.

But I’m not so sure that Rick Maxon actually falls in love with any of the women who pursue him or whom he pursues in Larceny. When he tells Deb Clark at the end that it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, I think he truly believes that, and he doesn’t find it all that hard to walk away. Rick Maxon is a rather complicated character. He doesn’t mind swindling the vulnerable, but he doesn’t want to hurt their feelings too deeply while he’s doing it. I’m not convinced that this level of concern for the vulnerable in general equates to falling in love with one woman specifically. But this certainly didn’t diminish the story. In fact, it made it more interesting because I kept trying to guess when the plot would turn to romance, and it never really does.

The DVD that I watched came with commentary by film historian Eddy Von Mueller (not to be confused with Eddie Muller, founder of the Film Noir Foundation). Von Mueller gives a lot of information that grounds the film in its time period: postwar U.S. society struggling to come to terms with the effects of a world war. For instance, he explains that the Youth Athletic Association (YAA) is a stand-in for the YMCA, which was founded in 1844 in London, England, and played a part in the U.S. temperance movement. The fighting was over in 1948, when Larceny was released, but World War II still hung over the country, as it did over the film industry and Larceny itself. The YMCA helped young boys who were left alone during the war because their fathers were fighting and their mothers were working in the wartime defense industries. The young boys who frequent the YAA in Larceny would have been very much like the boys who frequented the YMCA. These wartime and postwar experiences were some of the reasons for the rise in juvenile crime after the war. Juvenile delinquency was a real-life issue and is a subtheme in Larceny.

Juvenile delinquency becomes a major theme of some films noir in the 1950s. One example is Crime in the Streets. Click here for my article about it.

Larceny was released by Kino Lorber on DVD in 2021, and the company seems to be releasing film noir DVDs and Blu-ray discs one right after the other over the past year or so. I’m having a bit of trouble keeping up, but I couldn’t be happier about that.

September 3, 1948, release date  •  Directed by George Sherman  •  Screenplay by William Bowers, Louis Morheim, Herbert H. Margolis  •  Based on the novel The Velvet Fleece by Lois Eby and John Fleming  •  Music by Leith Stevens  •  Edited by Frank Gross  •  Cinematography by Irving Glassberg

John Payne as Rick Maxon  •  Joan Caulfield as Deborah (aka Deb) Owens Clark  •  Dan Duryea as Silky Randall  •  Shelley Winters as Tory Hayward  •  Harry Antrim as Mr. McNulty  •  Dorothy Hart as Madeline Talbert  •  Richard Rober as Max  •  Dan O’Herlihy as Duke  •  Nicholas Joy as Walter Vanderline  •  Percy Helton as Charlie Jordan, head of the Youth Athletic Association  •  Walter Greaza as Mr. Owens  •  Patricia Alphin as Mabel, the waitress at the diner  •  Russ Conway as a detective  •  Paul Brinegar as William Morton, the mechanic  • Don Wilson as the master of ceremonies

Distributed by Universal-International  •  Produced by Universal-International