The Jericho Mile (1980)
Directed by Michael Mann
A runner, serving a life sentence at Folsom Prison, works at becoming the world's fastest miler and wins a chance to compete for a spot on the Olympic team.
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What critics compared The Jericho Mile to
If the one constant of Mann's cinema is that a man with a certain code is placed into a situation where that code is in crisis - and it seems perfectly easy to me to apply that theme to each and every one of his features, from the TV movie The Jericho Mile through the otherwise uncharacteristic period films The Keep and The Last of the Mohicans , all the way up to Ali 's story of a man who gives up success for his beliefs - we find in Collateral a variation on that theme that gives it added interest, coming so far into his career: in this movie, we have a man with a code who is a bad man, and a man with no particular code being forced, at long last, to develop such a code.
At this moment, he had as much clout as ever in his career: more than during Miami Vice , more than after The Jericho Mile turned him into the hot young director to watch.
“Thief” (1981) was Mann's theatrical debut after an apprenticeship in television that included an episode of “Police Woman” and the rock-solid TV prison movie “The Jericho Mile” (1979), and he intended to flex every stylistic muscle he had toned up.
''Thief'' is the first theatrical film to be written and directed by Michael Mann, who received an Emmy for his television movie ''The Jericho Mile.''
Thief is a very stylized movie, effectively directed by Michael Mann (who wrote and directed the TV movie "The Jericho Mile").
Having spent his career up until this point working in television, writing for shows like Starsky and Hutch and Police Story and making his directorial debut with the made-for-TV movie The Jericho Mile (1979), Mann clearly relished working on the big screen for the first time, and he layers Thief with a now immediately recognizable aesthetic of glistening streets, reflective surfaces, and intense neon lights, all of which is scored to Tangerine Dream’s thudding electronic beats.
While The Jericho Mile proved that Mann was well able to make a motion picture, Thief found him stepping up to the plate to make nothing less than a piece of right proper art, as boldly declared in the film's opening moments.
A silently professional night-time jewel robbery, reduced to near-abstract essentials and paced by a Tangerine Dream score, sets the electric tone for Mann's fine follow-up to The Jericho Mile: a philosophical thriller filled with modernist cool.