The first challenge of making a good crime movie is making audiences care about a fundamentally immoral protagonist. You can invent a world of gentleman criminals robbing the rich (Ocean’s 11, The Thomas Crown Affair), indulge in garish criminal-on-criminal bloodshed (Pulp Fiction, Snatch), give your hero a hidden heart of gold (Drive, Donnie Brasco), or just make them a little less dumb and thuggish than their colleagues (The Departed, The Town). This often elides the sociopathic nature of organized crime; to be an effective movie, Donnie Brasco had to rewrite Al Pacino’s mobster from the cold-blooded brute he really was to a tragic figure only capable of existing on screen.
Thief makes no such compromises. Michael Mann’s first film, released 45 years ago today, introduces its star safecracker with a lengthy, almost wordless diamond heist, and the clinical efficiency of our protagonist and his colleagues makes you think this will be another story of suave professionals. But once we see James Caan’s Frank off the job, we realize that he’s no Danny Ocean.
Rude, impulsive, ignorant, sexist, racist, and stubborn to the point of self-endangerment, Frank makes sense as a thief because it’s hard to imagine him as anything else. It’s not that he doesn’t show moments of humanity, but those moments are swallowed up by the profession that so dominates his life it serves as the movie’s title. He wants to pull one last job and retire to domestic bliss with Jessie (Tuesday Weld), but it’s unclear what he’d actually get out of such an arrangement, beyond boredom.
Frank’s greatest insights come when he’s describing life behind bars to Jessie, and his only moment of true empathy comes when he gets a dying friend out of prison so he can see the outside world for a final time. Frank himself lost his 20s to prison, and can only view existence in relation to the experience. The result is a man who feels like an outsider in its most punishing and alienating sense. And once you strip away the Hollywood romance, the life of an outsider isn’t a particularly pleasant one.
The only people Frank seriously interacts with are as beyond-the-margins as he is. Jessie has her own, less-willing criminal background. Crime boss Leo (Robert Prosky) gives Frank a talk about the importance of family, but he doesn’t seem like much of a family man once he’s issuing brutal threats to keep Frank in line. Everyone — from the nakedly corrupt cops shaking Frank down to the unseen woman who sells Frank and Jessie the baby they can’t have for themselves — has no motivation beyond what they see in the mirror.
Frank and Jessie get philosophical.
All of this contrasts with gorgeous shots of rain-slicked streets, long, almost pornographic sequences where men put their equipment to work, and a memorable Tangerine Dream soundtrack that makes you imagine Harrison Ford hunting replicants just off-camera. Mann’s debut won him considerable acclaim, and it’s not hard to see why. He gives Frank’s work a sleek luster, then lets the reality of it close in.
Loosely based on the dubious memoirs of burglar Frank Hohimer, who himself emphasized the value of family before portraying himself as a crude thug superior only to the terrifying Mafia figures he encountered, Thief feels like a stripped-down first draft of Mann’s more famous Heat — Preheat, if you will — that, fittingly, hinges on Caan’s icy performance. Maybe Frank’s life could’ve been different if he hadn’t stolen a little money when he was 20, or maybe this was always who he was going to be. He hasn’t given the matter much thought, so there’s no reason for us to.
If you forget when Thief was made, the cars and neon lights will remind you.
The Heat comparisons are obvious — emotionally aloof criminals, a long conversation in a diner, and a preoccupation with the technical accuracy of tools and guns are just some of the Michael Mannerisms on display here — but Thief also feels adjacent to The Irishman, with its Frank’s aging into lonely irrelevance merely implied by this Frank strolling off into the night alone. He has to abandon the good life he supposedly coveted and return to the role that defines him, but it’s hard to imagine that Thief was ever going to end another way.
In that sense, and in all senses, Thief is an uncompromising character study of an uncompromising man. You’re not going to like Frank, and you’re probably going to be frustrated by his near-suicidal commitment to his own free agency. But in a cinematic world of improbable gentleman criminals and sympathetic con men, he remains a uniquely credible portrait of his profession.
Thief is available to rent on Prime Video.
