Such is the case of Eddie Pedak, the Italian immigrant protagonist played by Alain Delon in Once a Thief. Although few in number, Marko's stories are distinguished by an acute sensitivity to social injustice, with his characters etched as victims of a world gone cold in the push toward gged individualists whose true worth could never be punched into an IBM card.
#IT TAKES A THIEF 1960 SERIES#
(Marko's 1960 caper novel The Big Grab had already been filmed in France as Mélodie en sous-sol, starring Jean Gabin and Alain Delon - released in America as Any Number Can Win.) He enjoyed a short industry career, scripting teleplays for such weekly TV series as Toma, The Rockford Files and The Night Stalker (the supremely creepy "Zombie" episode) but seems to have retired or given up by the mid-70s. He gained a Writer's Guild of America card in 1964 when MGM bought the rights to Scratch a Thief and retained him to adapt it for the big screen.
As a novelist, Marko published a string of pulp novels under the alias "John Trinian," many set in and around San Francisco's bohemian North Beach district. Biographical information on Marko remained scant throughout his lifetime only after his death from emphysema in May of this year did it become known that he was born Marvin Leroy Schmoker in 1933 and that he had begun writing fiction upon his release from a prison stretch for a nonviolent crime. Once a Thief was based on the autobiographical novel Scratch a Thief by habitual criminal turned Hollywood screenwriter Zekial Marko. Once a Thief may not be one of the late actor's better-remembered films but it is vintage Palance, a singular portrait of preening villainy humanized through a unique combination of braggadocio and vulnerability. The part is small and clearly in support of headliners Alain Delon and Ann-Margret but Palance is, as ever, incandescent and unforgettable, whether chiding kid brother Delon over his choice of liquor, mothering a henchman who has just had his front teeth knocked out in a fight or speaking rapid-fire Italian with a Chinese undertaker. Palance had just played a crass Hollywood producer hoping to turn the myth of Ulysses into a popcorn muncher in Jean-Luc Godard's Capri-set Contempt (1963) and he was able to import a little of that character's serpentine suavity to the role of Italian immigrant-made-bad Walter Pedak in Once a Thief. She is saved, but Eddie is shot and killed while protecting Vido.Īt the time that he was called back to the United States by MGM to appear in Ralph Nelson's San Francisco-set crime film Once a Thief (1965), Jack Palance had enjoyed several years of a working vacation abroad playing outsized and outlandish characters torn from history, the Bible and pulp fiction: in Berlin for Robert Aldrich's Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), in Yugoslavia for André De Toth's The Mongols (1961) and in Italy for Rudolph Maté's The Barbarians (1960), Vittorio De Sica's The Last Judgment (1960) and Richard Fleischer's Barabbas (1961). Meanwhile, Vido has discovered that Eddie was framed for the previous robbery charges and even though Eddie admits to wounding Vido, the policeman agress to help him rescue Kathy.
The robbery is successful but Walter is killed in an attempted doublecross, and Sargatanas kidnaps Kathy to force Eddie to turn over the truck with the stolen goods. Frustrated and angry, Eddie is finally persuaded by his brother Walter and his accomplices, Sargatanas and Shoenstein, to assist in a $1 million robbery. Eddie loses his job as a result of the suspicion, and Kristine is forced to go to work in a cheap nightclub. Believing that Eddie was responsible for shooting him some years ago, Vido arrests Pedak for suspected robbery and murder but is forced to release him when the charges prove false. Ex-convict Eddie Pedak and his wife, Kristine, attempt to build a new life for themselves and their daughter Kathy in San Francisco, but police officer Mike Vido is determined to send Eddie back to prison.
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