Thief (1981) is a familiar story well told: A thief wants to go straight after he pulls one more job, and then things go awry. Going back a quarter century to Michael Mann’s first wide-release film reveals a good film-maker at work. Mann was inspired to go into film-making when he saw Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. That film, he said, told an entire generation that it was possible to say something of artistic worth and simultaneously be commercially successful. In Thief, screenwriter and director Mann says: Meet this guy; it’ll shake up your stereotypical image of a thief because this guy has some great traits and great dreams as well as some tragic flaws.
The cinematography is top-notch. The opening heist sequence shows various close-ups of breaking into the safe, melding the artistry and the mechanics of the operation. Nearly every scene thereafter is shot with a color palette in mind: the icy blue fluorescent glare of the used car lot, the warm, smoky atmosphere of the bar and eatery, the rich orange glow of cutting through a safe with a torch—excellent work.
The sound track by Tangerine Dream is cranked up. Some people will hate both the volume and the music. I thought it really worked. Although the 70s electronic band was too loud at times, it provided music appropriate to the film, it added some appropriate distortion, grit, and pulsating beat, and it emphasized the silence of dramatic scenes when it stopped. Incidentally, there is one short scene with a blues band playing, and the end credits give a special thanks to blues greats Mighty Joe Young and Willie Dixon.
For me, the complexity of the thief came to the fore when I had to turn the DVD off with less than half an hour to go. What would Frank (James Caan) do to get out of the corner the Mafia had trapped him in? Going into hiding with his wife and kid was congruent with his character. But so was some tricky scheme where he got the cops who were trying to get a cut of his action to somehow turn on Leo (Robert Prosky) and the mob. Although Frank does neither of these things, what he actually does still makes perfect sense for his character.