Thief

 A student of London's International Film School, Michael Mann began his career in the late 1970s writing for TV shows like Starsky and Hutch. Thief was his first feature film. A precursor to his crime classic, Heat, it deals with the same main idea  – a professional criminal wants to pull off one last score so that he can settle down to a normal life with the woman he loves.  It is not as polished as the 1995 film however  it is still an intense ride and features a blistering performance from James Caan.

Caan plays Frank, a Chicago safe-cracker specializing in diamonds who covers up his criminal activities with his used car dealership and a bar. The film opens with a 10 minute sequence of Frank drilling a safe with the assistance of Barry (James Belushi) who takes care of security systems. They score but the transaction to sell the diamonds goes wrong and so Frank meets crime boss, Leo (Robert Prosky). Leo wants a smart boy like Frank to work for him but Leo wants to stay his own man. That is until Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a somewhat faded rose who works in a coffee shop Frank patronizes agrees to his proposal of marriage and promise of life in the ‘burbs.  So to make some big money fast,  Frank agrees to Leo’s offer. Of course, in the best crime movie tradition it’s all going to go wrong.

The screenplay for this film was adapted by Mann from a novel "The Home Invaders" by Frank Hohimer, a professional thief who was serving time when this film was in production. Indeed one of its impressive features is the effort made to be authentic with the tools used, notably in the opening sequence, being actual safe-breaking equipment supplied by thieves who were hired as "technical consultants" on the film notably John Santucci, who  portrays Sgt. Urizzi on screen. For all that, and acknowledging that this was 1981, the big heist seems to come off remarkably easily with no explanation of how Frank and his buddies managed to get a huge oxy-acetylene tank into the building let alone cut a safe door in half without anyone hearing, even more so because in the previous scene he was being tailed by some bent cops.

What makes the film a cut-above, however, is Mann’s intelligent working of the genre tropes, building his story around a kind of thief’s existentialist mantra that to survive in this cruel world one has to care for nothing, a theme which reappears in Heat.  In both films the story revolves around what happens when the protagonist sets aside his own philosophy. Sometimes Mann’s intellectual tendencies betray him as in the line which Jessie addresses to Frank when he is terminating their brief marriage : “You mean, we just disassemble it and put it back in the box, like an erector set?'' but for the most part he imbues his characters with real humanity

Caan gives one of his career-best performances, at times recalling the intensity of Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Tuesday Weld is well-cast in a relatively small role as Frank’s slightly shop-worn love but the stand-out is Robert Prosky as the kind of ruthless villain who would appear in the films of Guy Ritchie (trivia buffs will note the first screen appearance of Dennis Farina). Willie Nelson turns up as an old con and Frank’s mentor

The film is steeped with noirish effects, rain-swept streets at night, neon-lit bars and so on whilst a score by Tangerine Dream gives the film that distinctive '80s synthesizer sound, building to a self-immolation by Frank that seems completely excessive bombastic proportions and a final inevitable shootout that is, somewhat oddly, far less spectacular than seems warranted. As a debut Thief is skilfully executed and full of promise, something that Mann has amply delivered in his subsequent career.

 

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