Of course, starting fresh isn’t so easy, as the very attachments that Frank wants (a nice house, a wife, a kid) are exactly the kinds of things that give other criminals and the cops power over him.
(These are all crime movie tropes, but Mann has always wholeheartedly embraced tropes and focused on formal, not narrative, innovation). He’s also a man with a code, and he’s got one last job to do that’ll score him enough capital to start fresh. Thief follows Frank (James Caan), a safecracker who wants to leave the criminal lifestyle behind and start a family. Thief’s plot is something we’ve come to expect from Mann, but even at the time it wasn’t entirely unique-the French crime filmmaker Jean Pierre-Melville had popularized the existential criminal over a decade before Mann’s film came out. Thief is thoughtful and stylish and a little corny, but oh so cool-classic Mann. It’s a bridge film for the crime thriller and the announcement of a major talent. It weds the gritty auteurism of the 1970s with the flashier stylisms of the 1980s. This is because the film sets up so confidently and precisely the themes and styles that have obsessed Michael Mann for the following three decades. It is a story of a thief with principals shaped in foster homes and prison cells who will set his dreams ablaze for the sake of them–and for revenge.It’s hard to talk about Thief, Michael Mann’s 1981 feature film debut, without discussing Mann’s entire career that has followed. It is the story of a man who has spent his entire life on the outside looking in, a man who takes great pride in his work but can barely speak of it. Yet, for all that (and one of the greatest heist sequences in movie history in which the industrial arts inform the cinematic) Thief is essentially a tragic character study, wrapped in the trappings of a neo-noir. Signatures like wet streets with neon colors reflecting off them, elegant camera work capturing the frailty of life through the lens of grindhouse spectacle and intricate attention to the art of the heist and sporadic violence, all of it set to a pulsing, synthesized soundtrack. It is fun to watch Mann’s directorial signatures taking shape before anyone knew who he was. Seybold served as a consultant to the film while he was being hunted by the FBI. Michael Mann takes these familiar troupes of noir and runs with them in Thief, starting with his own screenplay that borrows from the memoir of jewel thief, John Allen Seybold’s Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar. Jessie tells him she can’t have children. It is the one thing that slows the dogged pursuit of his own self doubt. Frank assures her that he is one big heist away from being able to retire in style.Īnd style is very important to Frank. Jessie too, has a criminal past that she has been keeping at a respectable distance.
Her name is Jessie (Tuesday Weld) and Frank pursues her immediately, with blatant determination so honest, so desperate that she agrees to be his soulmate on a whim. There is an attraction, a familiarity, though they do not know each other. To that end he becomes acquainted with a pretty cashier/hostess in the cafe where he takes his meals. And he stays clear of the mob.įrank lives very comfortably. He deals only in cash and diamonds that he procures with a skeleton crew of trusted professionals in elaborate, carefully orchestrated heists.
The only footsteps he hears behind him are from Father Time.įrank, takes down big scores. In Michael Mann’s 1981 debut feature film, Thief (1981), Caan’s “Frank” is a career criminal on top of his game. And that made him a blue-collar superstar in the late 60’s to the early 80’s and fueled his resurgence in the 90’s.
A tender heart and a threadbare vulnerability differentiated him and his characters, making it almost impossible to root against them and–existentially–him. James Caan is one of many Hollywood tough guys–on screen and off. …And if my mother was alive, she’d be his age now, which is 80. I don’t know much about his life other than he was born and reared in the Bronx and that he has a reputation of being a tough guy. I grew up with James Caan, in a manner of speaking that is to say, I grew up with him the way we all did…while watching his films.