Frank has a woman in his life, Jessie (Tuesday Weld), who isn't quite his wife because he wants to have a good life ready for her before they get married it would seem in fact that getting his slice of Americana has become the overriding obsession of his life, so that when an old mobster named Leo (Robert Prosky, in his feature debut) offers him a big payday for designing and executing an unusually large robbery, Frank gulps down his natural disinclination to have anything to do with the mob, and takes the job. I'm not sure how a film can simultaneously feel that physical and realistic, and that confoundedly poetic, and that is why I know that Thief is a masterpiece.Īs we'll learn eventually, the leader of this band of thieves is Frank (James Caan), who when we first meet him has wild, puffy '80s hair and a big pair of goggles, looking rather like the lead singer for The Buggles.
Thief 1981 poster how to#
This sequence - like all the heist sequences in Thief - is marked by documentary-style precision about the actions being performed (thanks to a genuine gem thief who acted as consultant on the film and played a policeman), although it's hard to say that the film feels like a documentary at all: with all the sparks and molten metal and close-ups of mechanical objects and the like, the scene attains a poetic abstraction that somehow nestles quite comfortably next to its textbook-specific depiction of how to rob a bank.
Thief 1981 poster full#
It's always a bit thrilling to see an American film with the bravery to toss ten full minutes of wordless action, more so when those ten minutes come right at the start and when the filmmaker in question is a newbie making his very first big-budget work, it moves from "thrilling" to "revelatory", especially given that Mann isn't just filming a group of men pulling off a heist. It starts with a lengthy, dialogue-free sequence in which we watch as a team of thieves breaks into a bank vault to abscond with a handful of diamonds. While The Jericho Mile proved that Mann was well able to make a motion picture, Thief found him stepping up to the plate to make nothing less than a piece of right proper art, as boldly declared in the film's opening moments. It is a film with very few obvious flaws, "very few" becoming "practically none" if we consider the original theatrical cut instead of the dubiously-advised director's cut that is the only way to see it on DVD and the immense strengths of the film would be more than enough to outweigh far greater problems than it displays. Thief isn't just good, it's freaking brilliant the best of all Mann's films or else I'll eat my hat (as of this writing, I've seen seven of his twelve features, and thus am taking a little bit out of turn) - and not just the best film of its director's career, but one of the best American films of the whole of the 1980s.
Which, if it isn't true that it's really good, that's only because "really good" undersells it something fierce. Michael Mann's first theatrical feature (in the United States, anyhow), Thief, has something of a reputation for being the Mann film that Mann fanciers haven't quite gotten around to seeing even though they know that they ought to, because it's supposed to be really good.