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.

This bottom of the barrel B film (pretty low even for Universal before it became a blockbuster studio) is an overly dramatic, unbelievable racket film about a shoplifting ring that blackmails librarian Mona Freeman after discovering she has a past as a shoplifter. She is trained by the glamorous head of the ring Andrea King who ends up kidnapping her and taking her to Mexico where police officer Scott Brady goes undercover in order to break the ring. It's one of the most convoluted, detail missing scripts, giving young Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson early roles but nothing really of quality. The plot and situations which follow are so outlandish that it isn't even laughable, just humourless and boring. it's the type of film that it seems like they took on unproduced scripts out of their vault, change the premise and racket, and rushed it into production. It is so bad, this wouldn't even be published as a dime-store pulp novel.