Author’s Note: Michael Mann’s first feature film, Thief, is on-sale for dirt-cheap on Prime Video at the moment. So, I thought I’d re-post a short essay I wrote about it on my old blog some years ago. Enjoy!
When my son and I went to New York City over the summer, we stayed in Queens, just a few blocks from the Museum of the Moving Image. We spent most of our time in Manhattan, doing the tourist thing, and I never got around to the seeing the Museum. I regret this, and not only because it’s supposed to be a really cool place.
As fate would have it, I later found out that the film being screened at the Museum that week was Michael Mann’s first feature, Thief. It’s a fabulously entertaining crime thriller starring James Caan (a Bronx native) in one of the best performances of his long career. Caan plays Frank (we never learn his last name), a Chicago businessman by day and a high-end burglar by night. Like many heroes in Mann’s films, Frank is guy with a score to settle; he spent much of his youth in jail on trumped-up charges, and now stealing is his way of making for lost time.
In fact, time—or the lack of it—is a central theme of this movie. Frank is always racing against the clock. Whether he is out on one his of his all-night scores drilling through a bank vault, or in his pursuit of a decent love life with his new girlfriend, Jessie (Tuesday Weld), he is always running. “I can’t walk fast enough to catch up, and I can’t run fast enough to catch up,” he tells Jessie. So what’s the solution?
Beat the system.
Frank also epitomizes another of Mann’s favorite themes—he’s an absolute individualist. He lives by his own wits and talent, and takes orders from no one, not even the local (corrupt) cops or the mafia. Of course, there is a downside to this kind of freedom. Frank can’t let anyone get too close him, personally; he has to be free to maneuver. The result is that he has almost no human connections. His only intimate friend is an aging convict named Okla (played with winning grace by Willie Nelson), who taught Frank his super-thief skills while they were in the joint.
Which brings me to one of my favorite moments in the movie. Early in the first act, Frank gets a letter from Okla at his main place of business. He steps outside to read it, sitting on a bench whose vast emptiness takes up over half of the frame. The colors are all desaturated, metallic blues, as if Frank’s loneliness is manifesting itself in the world around him. Frank reads the letter, puts it away, and then takes out a piece of poster paper that he keeps in his wallet. It bears a collage that he has made in prison, full of swirling images of life and happiness, all depicting the future he wants to attain.
It’s a great moment in cinema, not only because it’s so brilliantly evocative, in and of itself, but also because it reinforces a motif that repeats throughout the film.
Most importantly, Thief is an enormously powerful thriller, with many propulsive action sequences. After each one, however, Mann slows down the pace. Frank goes dormant, for a few beats. Several times in the film, after committing some new and impressive act of crime or violence, we see Frank in repose, resting, thinking.
Take the most famous scene in the movie, for instance—another scene of stillness. It comes when Frank drives Jessie to a diner so he can explain his life to her. It’s a long scene, over ten minutes, with nothing but dialogue. And yet it’s one of the most engrossing vignettes in all cinema. (Caan has stated that this scene is his personal favorite of his career.) Nothing really happens in it, except for two lonely, wounded people revealing their pasts to each other. It’s also the moment when they decide to make future together. We, the audience, know it can’t work out—Frank will, inevitably, run out time—but we are drawn in nonetheless, rooting for them.
Thief is a perfect movie from a great director. Check it out when you can.
Ash Clifton, Writer 