From the Rental Vault: Seven Thieves

Later this month, another version of the novel which became director Henry Hathaway's most famous work will hit the screen, courtesy of Joel and Ethan Coen.

But nine years before Hathaway directed the performance for which John Wayne would win his only Oscar, he handled another very talented cast in the noir heist film Seven Thieves. The results weren't as memorable, probably owing more to a confused screenplay by Sidney Boehm, a heist plan that lacks much pop and some odd choices in picking those talented actors.

Edward G. Robinson plays Theo Wilkins, a disgraced former professor and ex-con living in Monte Carlo. He's sent for a young friend, a thief named Paul Mason (Rod Steiger) who is himself fresh off a prison term. Wilkins has put together part of a team to rob a casino, but needs a point man to lead them, and he wants Mason for that role. Femme fatale Melanie (Joan Collins) is having an affair with the casino director's executive assistant, but her regular boyfriend Poncho (Eli Wallach) is also in on the scheme. A safecracker and a driver/mechanic complete the septet.

Robinson and Steiger open the film with some excellent snappy noirish exchanges before Collins' club dancer and Wallach's saxophone player enter the mix. But soon after the group meets and they begin heist preparations, the movie starts to lose focus and energy. The actual robbery caper is pedestrian, livened up a little by the weaknesses some of the team members display but still pretty flat. Nearly every role is filled by quality actors, but even the best guides have a hard time finding their way without maps.

Collins was only 27 when she made Seven Thieves, two decades away from her defining role as über-rhymes-with-witch Alexis Colby on Dynasty. She and Steiger are also given a lot of scenes to carry, and even though Steiger was only eight years her senior, his broken-down face and droopy demeanor make him seem too old to believe the blossoming relationship. Wallach was already 45, giving the supposed relationship between himself and Collins even more of a credibility gap.

Thieves might have been conceived as more of a crime picture than the more cerebral story it turned out to be. The poster shows Robinson in his cigar-chomping Little Caesar best even though he's playing a professor and does its best to make Steiger look like a slouch-hatted Robert Mitchum. Worse heist films have been made, of course, but the disappointment with Thieves is how many wonderful ingredients were used to make a rather bland main course.