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As soon as we see the rain-slicked streets of Chicago and hear the throbbing synths of Tangerine Dream, we’re in Mann-Land. Does anyone do neon reflections better? Chicago makes the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” look like Podunk on a Thursday night. I’d be happy just to watch big old American cars trundle through the rain and not even bother with a plot.
But, a plot there is, and it’s pretty basic. Nothing that hasn’t been done before: a high-end heist-meister has to do one more big job and then he’s out. But no matter how a criminal tries to get out of the game, they always pull him back in, don’t they? And so they do James Caan. As a role, this isn’t comparable to Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather”. As stylish a visual stylist Michael Mann is, “Thief” isn’t epic like that. It’s pretty good, though. He sells the ex-convict with a talent and a hair-trigger temper.
Caan looks great; with the black leather jacket, the tight jeans, the Eldorado, he’s living the dream. In fact he’s got his dream down on paper in a portable framing device he can unfold and stare at. Didn’t some new age guru have that idea too, you make up a dream board and stare at it until it becomes actualized? Seems to have worked for James Caan, anyway. He’s got a car lot, a bar, nice if overly flashy clothes, seriously over-flashy cars.
If I were a criminal, especially the sort who does high-profile crimes, I wonder if I wouldn’t want to be less conspicuous. Dress schlumpy, drive a dusty Taurus, avoid the limelight? Just saying. But Caan has it all except for a Tuesday Weld, who then conveniently turns up.
Weld is pretty stiff here. Maybe she’s expressing her traumatized past, Columbia (the country, not the college), drug dealer BF, hard times, fertility troubles. But her lack of affect, and the speed with which she goes from regarding Caan as a pushy creep to his being her one true love, that’s a bit hard to take seriously. Also, if I were a criminal, I don’t know that I’d discuss my profession loudly in a diner. Or wave a pistol around in a diner or assault patrons on the sidewalk of a diner. But that’s just me.
Anyway, Tuesday Weld displays the talent that would take her a very little ways in the movie business. I remember her as being pretty good in “Mr. Goodbar” and she was excellent with the uber-neurotic Anthony Perkins in “Pretty Poison”. Here, she’s OK but kind of oddly stiff. Definitely not overacting.
Jim Belushi (apparently this is his first acting job) plays Caan’s tech-savvy partner in crime. It’s a smallish part and he’s completely up to it. No complaints. James Belushi does not get much credit as a journeyman actor. Nor does he deserve much credit. Here, as he would be in future films, Belushi is unobjectionable. All one can ask.
If you look fast, you can see Dennis Farina in his first role as a wiseguy, a genre he’d inhabit profitably for years to come. Some guys are just fortunate enough to look like mobsters. Willie Nelson doesn’t necessarily look like a mobster, but he does a fine dying scene.
But for most of the picture, I’m just admiring Michael Mann’s first time out as a big time director. Besides the rain-slicked streets dazzling us with neon, his two set-piece heists are riveting. Drilling into a vault never looked so photogenic. Caan radiates a calm intense competence when he’s cracking a safe, which makes him subsequently giving into seething rage kind of hard to buy. His thief is so good at what he does because he’s so careful and focused and prepared. That is, the opposite of what goes down at the end.
The second heist is a tour-de-force. The blazing thermal lance melting into the vault is beautiful, sparks flying and metal glowing. It’s these images that make “Thief” a memorable cult classic. Robbery never looked so good. Especially the p.o.v. shots from inside the safe. Lovely.
Now if I were picking nits…. I’ve done a little welding over the years. Unless that vault room has industrial ventilation, smoke in this confined space would be so thick that Caan and crew wouldn’t be able to see each other, let alone the diamonds. You’re burning the steel lance pipe with pure oxygen. Besides which, Caan is vaporizing steel, concrete, copper, titanium and whatever else the elderly expert said. And the carpet. You’d definitely want breathing gear. I’d worry about the diamonds inside, too, unless they’re in insulated boxes. We’re talking 4,000 degrees plus here. Diamond burns at under a thousand, and the boxes in the safe are gonna ignite at much lower temperatures.
If I were still picking nits, I’d notice that this building has no smoke detectors, despite the elaborate alarms. Or sprinklers. But wow, does this sequence look great!
By now, everybody who’s going to watch “Thief” is already familiar with the ending, so I’m not spoiling when I say that it’s the clichéd way to get to the end of the plot. Suddenly, everybody shoots everybody else. It’s been done many times before and since. Caan steps it up a notch by also blowing up his house, his bar and his car dealership. Doesn’t make much sense; if he’s proving that he doesn’t care nothing about nothing no more, who’s he proving that to? I mean, he intends to shoot all the bad guys and probably get killed in the process. So, maybe his wife and kid could’ve profited more by having a non-blown-up house and bar and car dealership? I don’t think the insurance is going to pay off after a bombing.
Nice explosions, though. It blowed up real good! Again, if I were a nit-picker, I’d wonder what sort of guy has his bar apparently pre-wired to self-destruct, since he’s in and out in a minute. And how about all the people who had jobs there? And the buildings next door? Kind of a dickish move, I’d say.
I will also say that the jail-speak thing, in which hardened cons and ex-cons deliver meaningful speeches during which they speak using no contractions, I do not think that actual tough guys speak that way unless those tough guys should be taking their cues from “Guys and Dolls”. I am just saying. The Borg are big on the talking with no contractions. Gang guys? I must say that I doubt this is factual. But, there isn’t all that much Runyon talking, and most of the dialog is terse, professional thieves making plans, gangsters making threats. Other than Caan’s monologs with Tuesday Weld, there’s not much talking and a lot of long wordless takes. A movie to look at more than listen to.
That said, the listening to benefits greatly from the soundtrack. Tangerine Dream and Michael Mann were totally in synch. It’d be hard to imagine “Thief” working with a conventional score. Tones waft and wane and propulsive synthesizers move the safe cracking from a mere heist into the realms of art. Visually and aurally outstanding. Lifts the picture from a routine dirty cops and existentialist robbers to another level. The gist is, it’s a pretty decent sound design. Check out “Manhunter” for a more evolved version of the audio/visual fusion. Shriekback, doesn’t get much better than that for mood music.
Count me as a Michael Mann fan. “Thief” is way better as a movie than “Heat”, a picture both Pacino and De Niro do their best to wreck. “Thief” is up there with “Collateral” for stylishness. For sheer gorgeousness, few movies, this one included, can stand with “The Last of the Mohicans”, but for the first time out of the gate, “Thief” shows plenty of promise for good things to come. In my opinion (and it’s the right opinion) “Manhunter” is unjustly overlooked in comparison to the much more conventional “Red Dragon”. I’d watch “Manhunter” twice rather than plod along with Edward Norton and Anthony Hopkins in “Silence”.
“Manhunter” also has Brian Cox as an excellent, ferocious Hannibal Lecter; “Silence” and “Red Dragon” and the regrettable “Hannibal” have doughy, seventy-ish Anthony Hopkins. Remember that scene in “Hannibal” where Lecter has to pick up Julianne Moore and carry her across the pigs? Must have used a lot of wire work for that bit of business. Hopkins would have to talk his victims to death, because he sure isn’t going to overpower them. But I digress. I like movies that look better than mere real life ever could, and that’s Michael Mann’s forte.
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December 15, 2015 "Please retry" | Criterion Collection | 1 | $16.90 | $22.15 |
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Top reviews from other countries
Patricia M. Dryburgh
This is not your typical heist film.
Reviewed in Canada on December 31, 2022
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Thief - Der Einzelgänger oder das frühe Kino des Michael Mann
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