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I Was a Shoplifter (1950)
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Overview
User Rating:
Release Date:
13 May 1950 (USA) moreTagline:
Exposing Today's Most Alarming Crime Ring!Plot:
Police detective sergeant Jeff Andrews is working on a case involving a gang of shoplifters, and he... more | add synopsisUser Comments:
B-minus cast in Z-minus movie moreCast
(Complete credited cast)| Scott Brady | ... | Jeff Andrews | |
| Mona Freeman | ... | Faye Burton | |
| Andrea King | ... | Ina Perdue | |
| Tony Curtis | ... | Pepe (as Anthony Curtis) | |
| Charles Drake | ... | Herb Klaxon | |
| Gregg Martell | ... | The Champ | |
| Robert Gist | ... | Barkie Neff | |
| Larry Keating | ... | Harry Dunson | |
| Michael Raffetto | ... | Sheriff E.W. Bascom | |
| Charles McGraw | ... | Detective | |
| Rock Hudson | ... | Store Detective |
Additional Details
Parents Guide:
Add content advisory for parentsRuntime:
USA:74 minCountry:
USALanguage:
EnglishColor:
Black and WhiteAspect Ratio:
1.37 : 1 moreSound Mix:
Mono (Western Electric Recording)Certification:
USA:Approved (PCA #14306) | USA:Passed (National Board of Review) | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15Fun Stuff
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Principal roles in I Was A Shoplifter fell to Scott Brady (Lawrence Tierney's brother), the evergreen Mona Freeman, Andrea King and the young `Anthony' Curtis. Smaller, almost invisible parts go to Charles McGraw, Peggie Castle and Rock Hudson. That's not a dream cast, but all had done and would do better work in far better vehicles than this dead-serious and deadly dull documentary-style look at `boosters' organized shoplifters.
Mousy librarian and prominent judge's daughter Freeman saunters through a big department store absently filling her pockets with trinkets, like a magpie flying off with anything that glitters. She's spotted, hauled into the manager's office and forced to sign a confession. Also caught in this retail dragnet is Brady, a professional booster as opposed to Freeman, who's written off as a `klepto' a basically harmless nuisance.
But later Freeman has visitors. The first is hard case King, who has a photocopy of Freeman's confession and blackmails her into joining the her nest of boosters; the second is Brady, who works undercover on a police task force trying to crack the ring. He falls for her, as does, more brutally, Curtis, one of King's torpedoes. The `action,' such as it is, moves south to San Diego then crosses the border to Tijuana for an (almost) final reckoning.
Laughably, the shoplifting syndicate operates on a level of ruthlessness and secrecy on a par with the Nazis in The House on 92nd Street, the heroin smugglers in To The Ends of the Earth, or the Communists in The Woman On Pier 13. But I Was A Shoplifter has been picked clean of wit, style and suspense; it stands as a grim example of a particular post-war posture of humorless self-importance, passing itself off as entertainment.