The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne (2013)
Cast: Doris Payne
Director: Kirk Marcolina, Matthew Pond
Country: USA
Genre: Documentary
Official Site: Here
Editor’s Note: The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne opens in Toronto on Friday, June 20th at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.
It’s easy to get pulled in. Someone pays you a little attention. Someone treats you like you’re special. Someone cares about what you are saying, listens to your concerns, charms you and seems charmed by you. And then they’re gone. Pop culture is full of depictions of charming con artists, debonair thieves who win over their marks (and audiences in the process) with wit, magnetism, and agility. They’re the villains of their stories from an objective perspective, but really, they’re the heroes.
She is every bit the living example of the charismatic criminal, the thief you root for, hoping they’ll slip away into the sunset with their ill-gotten gains at their side.
Doris “Diamond Doris” Payne, as we are told early in The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne, views herself as both the hero and the villain of her story. Over a career that spans five decades, Payne (who, last fall at 83, was arrested for stealing a $22,500 ring in Palm Desert) has stolen more than $2 million in jewelry from places as far flung as London, Zurich, and Monte Carlo (where she traveled after seeing To Catch a Thief and posed as Otto Preminger’s wife). Payne is an inveterate jewel thief and a pathological liar, but she is
also so fiercely independent and indefatigable, it becomes almost impossible not to root for her. She is every bit the living example of the charismatic criminal, the thief you root for, hoping they’ll slip away into the sunset with their ill-gotten gains at their side.
The film pulls from various sources, including a longtime friend, her children, a sheriff who has worked to convict her, her lawyer, and the woman who has written a screenplay about her. Perhaps most strangely, in the inclusion of a professor of literature whose role is to try to paint a picture of an archetypal trickster figure, a folk hero who cut a rebellious swath through racially turbulent decades, making her own way in an era, and from an upbringing that basically demanded she do anything but. Yet the film, to its credit, focuses most closely on Doris herself, as she chuckles about her greatest criminal exploits, adamantly refusing to apologize for what she sees as victimless crimes.
For that brief moment, Payne is a scared, angry old woman beating back consequences she knows she can’t avoid forever. And then, she’s calm again, laughing and tossing off another anecdote from her life of crime.
Directors Matthew Pond and Kirk Marcolina smartly keep the dark side of all this at the back of our minds. In perhaps the film’s key scene, the directors confront Payne, who used them as an alibi to sign out of her halfway house on the day of the theft she stands trial for throughout the film. Payne dances around questions about where she actually was and why she claimed to be with them, telling them not to lie and that she’ll stand by the truth, but insinuating they should do whatever makes them feel comfortable. The more cornered she feels, the angrier she gets, and the mask of gentility, that calm, cool collection that allowed an African American woman to waltz into jewelry stores throughout the Civil Rights era without arousing suspicion, slips slightly. For that brief moment, Payne is a scared, angry old woman beating back consequences she knows she can’t avoid forever. And then, she’s calm again, laughing and tossing off another anecdote from her life of crime.
Though she paints herself as a Robin Hood figure who emerged as a thief during a moment of segregation (she was asked to leave a store when a white customer came in, and decided to keep the watch she had been trying on to punish the storekeeper), it becomes clear that this is a woman who would do or say anything to pull off her next con. All of her friends and family call Doris a good woman, and speak about her moral strength. She specifically states that she does not believe being a thief affects her moral character. It does, of course, but that is all too easy to forget when The Life and Times of Doris Payne has you in its grasp. The film is hamstrung at points in its efforts to use standard documentary tricks, like reenactments and repeated cuts to stock footage of diamonds, and with its sleek running time, it often comes across less as a complete story and more as a series of anecdotes. But as a gateway into one of the most notorious jewel thieves of the last century, it is often fascinating. To watch Doris Payne speak is to fall just a little bit in love with her. To see her tell her story is to be pulled in until you find yourself on her side. She’s completely charming even as you know she shouldn’t be, even as she flat-out refuses to apologize for her many crimes. She is every bit the charismatic con woman. And then she’s gone.
The film is hamstrung at points in its efforts to use standard documentary tricks, like reenactments and repeated cuts to stock footage of diamonds, and with its sleek running time, it often comes across less as a complete story and more as a series of anecdotes. But as a gateway into one of the most notorious jewel thieves of the last century, it is often fascinating.
