Welsh-born Ray Milland combined an elegant, patrician manner with a high, distinctive, harshly metallic voice that allowed him to play angry or anguished neurotic roles, such as his Oscar-winning turn as an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945). He directed himself in several movies, including the overlooked gem The Safecracker (1958). Now available on demand, it’s an absorbing and still fresh combination of genres, every sequence handled with finesse.
Beginning in 1938 England, the first act is a crime drama and character study of Colley Dawson (Milland), a restless man who’s an expert in one narrow specialty: the ability to open a combination lock the old-fashioned way, with his ears and fingers. When earning an honest living doesn’t get him farther than living with his mother, he’s approached by an art dealer (Barry Jones) who happens to know which safes in England have certain valuable objects that have disappeared — because he’s the one who sold them before in similar off-the-books transactions. This should mean that the owners can’t call Scotland Yard, but apparently they do, because the law is soon following Dawson.
Jump forward a few years: there’s a war on, and values are topsy turvy. Now the War Office needs a man who can be dropped into a secret Belgian location and open a German safe with a list of agents in England — without letting the Germans know it’s been tumbled. This begins a section that can be called “training for the big job”, leading of course to “the big job”, a foreshadowing of later WWII capers like The Guns of Navarrone (1961) and Where Eagles Dare and “ragtag team” movies like The Dirty Dozen (1967).
As directed and played by Milland from a script by esteemed TV writer Paul Monash, Colley never has a transformative moment when he “sees the light” as stirring music rises behind him. He remains an anti-hero, someone averse to following orders or towing the line, an anti-authoritarian self-interested man instead of a flag-waving patriot. That this person is declared a hero, and effectively is one, is one of the movie’s subtle adult ironies.
Perhaps another is that he’s given a couple of heterosexual romantic interests, briefly, to counterpoint his portrayal of a bachelor (living with mum!) whose closest friendship is with an older bachelor who, like himself, has an aesthetic appreciation of beautiful objects. This is a fair matter for speculation, given that the source is a story by Lt. Col. Rhys Davies and Bruce Thomas.
The Lt. Col. is apparently the famous Welsh writer Rhys Davies, a homosexual who presumably identified with outsiders alienated from a society that doesn’t want them. About Bruce Thomas, we can only learn online that he was a longtime resident of Palm Springs, and we’ll leave that alone.
The Warner Archive print is decent, with a trailer the only extra.