Classic Movie Review : Thief (1981)
I'm not a fan of heist movies. They're often the exact same thing, featuring the same exact characters that double cross one another for the same exact reasons. I mean, who cares about the fucking score and the fucking girl the protagonist wants to start a new life with as everyone knows she’s in cahoots with the antagonist, right? But if you tell a story with enough love and care, you can captivate any audience. Michael Mann's Thief is the quintessential heist movie, but it doesn't matter. It's fucking great and it doesn't get old.
Thief tells the story of Frank (James Caan), a professional safecracker who is trying to figure out a life for himself after serving a long penitentiary sentence. After taking down a diamond score, he passes it to his handler Joe Gags (Hal Frank) who gets promptly murdered, taking Frank's payout into his grave. Not being a guy to fuck with, Frank goes after his bag and gets an offer he can’t refuse from Joe's killer Leo (the great Robert Prosky) and both men have a different idea of how things should work.
Style As A Point Of View
This is a great movie even if it isn’t a great story. Leave this screenplay in less capable hands than Michael Mann's and it would've been forgotten by history months after its release. Thief has to be one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen that features no digital effects whatsoever. The colours, the lighting, the framing and even the sporadic use of its soundtrack contributed to its unreality. What you see in Thief is not reality, it’s the gritty, romantic perception of its main character.
Every detail in this movie is thought out to be as moody and dramatic as it can possibly be. The pouring rain during the first heist at the beginning; neons acting as a criminal activity signpost, but also as a guiding light in the otherwise pitch black night (I love the scene where Frank and Jessie talk in a diner, all blued out by the neons outside); the cold and impersonal man vs machine scenes where Frank takes down seemingly impenetrable safes by sheer force. It never feels like you’re watching what really happened.
That’s the genius of Thief, because it’s more fun this way. It feels like a crazy bar story told to you by a shady stranger more than it does reading an objective account of a crime. Memory edits and colours facts better than anybody could and Thief is Frank's self-aggrandizing point of view. It consistently remains a compelling point of view because he was so removed from society for so long that he’s perceiving it as this monolithic force acting against him. It's empowering without having an empowering message.
The Subtle Art of Brutality
Another selling point of Thief is how quickly and unexpectedly brutal it can get. There's a great scene at the beginning where Frank visits Attaglia (Tom Signorelli) for the first time and the latter plays the dumb, corporate lackey until Frank pulls out his piece. The sight of the gun changes the entire dynamics of the scene because both characters understand the stakes of gun violence. They don’t talk about it, they don’t act melodramatically, but tension ratchets up a thousand times. Michael Mann never spells it out for you.
Thief is all mood and atmosphere until it takes sharp turns into violence that is extreme, but never feels like it is for the sake of it. Even the Peckinpahesque final scene is governed by the principle of survival and not necessarily spectacle (it's a great spectacle too, don’t get me wrong). It makes the stakes high and clear, but it also makes Frank more likeable even if he's participating in the same low life game as everyone else. He's just trying to figure his way through, so that he can keep telling stories to himself.
*
I hadn't seen Thief in over twenty years and had completely forgotten how fucking awesome it is. It's such a labor of love and a rich, precise work of visual storytelling that it raises the bar for anything else you're going to watch moving forward. In the age of content, Thief stands out as art. It's a film that took the necessary time it needed to take in order to exist and that evokes powerful emotions as much as it entertains. Maybe my memory was fuzzy, maybe I couldn't appreciate it then, but it's one of my favorite movies now.
9.3/10
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