Michael Mann\u2019s cinema is about the surfaces of the world his characters inhabit: an iconic shot of another of his thieves in Heat <\/em>(1995), come home to an empty house in the icy blue space between night and the following day with a gun laid on a glass table, might effortlessly stand in for the whole of the director\u2019s filmography. Thief <\/em>was Mann\u2019s debut feature, and his vision was already firmly in place. The opening sequence, as Frank breaks into a safe to retrieve a collection of diamonds, is all cold blues and incandescent greens, set to the driving electronica of Tangerine Dream, an overwhelming musical score that expresses Frank\u2019s duality: efficient professionalism and passionate commitment to a life fully realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Frank, James Caan oscillates between the hard-earned reputation of a man who had to fight his way through an eleven-year prison term, all cynicism, distrust, and masculine posturing, and the sensitive dreamer who commits totally to honesty. Both sides of Frank are on display in the film\u2019s most important scene, an extended conversation at a highway overpass diner during which he tries to convince the skeptical checkout girl Jessie (Tuesday Weld) to become the wife he has only imagined in his collage. He tells her a harrowing story about fighting his way through a pack of angry convicts with a pipe in one moment, and in the next, he assures her that they can adopt a child when she tearfully confesses that she cannot have one of her own. Throughout the scene and the rest of the film, Frank rarely uses a contraction in dialogue; in a recent interview<\/a> with Marc Maron on the WTF Podcast, Caan said the choice was motivated by Frank\u2019s desire never to have to repeat himself. The effect is a staccato punch in each of Frank\u2019s lines that shows the character\u2019s struggle to keep his vulnerabilities at bay\u2014in one moment in the diner, after Frank shows Jessie his collage, Caan seems to be fighting a cracking in his voice, suppressing the emotion that roils beneath his cool exterior. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Narratively, Thief<\/em> yields a procession of precisely controlled scenes defined by Frank\u2019s goals. After reluctantly agreeing to work for mob boss Leo (Robert Prosky) to take down a massive score in California, Frank begins to achieve his dreams. He and Jessie buy a house and get married. The couple\u2019s efforts to adopt a child are stymied by a state bureaucracy that has no confidence in Frank\u2019s ability to raise one, a frustrating moment that leads him to Leo, who secures a black market boy for him. Leo is no godfather, however; the double-cross eventually comes, with Leo withholding some of Frank\u2019s earnings for an investment the thief wants no part of. The melee that concludes the film, a slow-motion gunfight at Leo\u2019s house that leaves several gangsters dead, scored to a particularly rousing, propulsive track from Tangerine Dream, is a manifestation of Frank\u2019s self-destructive tendency towards total immolation. His sense of pride violated, his wife and child threatened, his dream of independence negated, all by the domineering, corporatized gangland honcho, leads him to burn it all down. He sends Jessie and their son away, bombs their house and his front businesses, and most importantly, crumples his collage and tosses it in the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A dream can be two contradictory things at once: an idealized future and an impossible one. So too can a film. In Thief<\/em>, Mann constructs a film of remarkably overt style that has spawned a number of imitators drawn to the director\u2019s exacting control of the image, predilection for bold colors, and interventionist musical scores. However, he also opens his heart by letting Frank imagine a future\u2014a risky endeavor. Plans, once made, become real in some sense. Gone unfulfilled, though, that version of reality can go necrotic. No amount of surface can mask the pain left behind. Frank\u2019s self-satisfied nod after his plan to crack a safe yields a fortune in diamonds is the reassurance of a job well done, one step closer to the tomorrow he sees in his mind. His scorched-earth dismantling of the life he worked so hard to build is borne out of disappointment in the world that denied it to him, but mostly, in himself. Though he survives the final gunfight with only a few minor wounds, the film refuses to portray his defiant walk into the night as any kind of triumph.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n He will have to start again. Each day, he will have to imagine a future, and then contend with his failure to realize it. Thief<\/em>, now itself middle aged, finds one of its most poignant moments in the quiet appreciation of a sunrise\u2014but it cannot shake the sunsets on its mind. “Thief” is currently streaming on HBO Max<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/thief2-1024x554.jpg\")
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