Thief (1981)
Directed by Michael Mann
Frank is an expert professional safecracker, specialized in high-profile diamond heists. He plans to use his ill-gotten income to retire from crime and build a nice life for himself complete with a home, wife and kids. To accelerate the process, he signs on with a top gangster for a big score.
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Like Rififi, Thief finds its crooks working in dead silence as they carry out their heists.
Although Thief does not necessarily offer anything new narratively or thematically—it is very much a reworking of the classic heist film and all those heady existential European crime movies like Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge (1970) with additional emphasis on the politics of class—Mann shapes the material in a way that makes it feel sharp and innovative.
(In contrast to silent robberies like the famous centerpiece of Rififi, Frank’s methods are a more sophisticated version of a smash-and-grab, with blowtorches and drills carving holes at maximum volume.)
Although Thief does not necessarily offer anything new narratively or thematically—it is very much a reworking of the classic heist film and all those heady existential European crime movies like Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge (1970) with additional emphasis on the politics of class—Mann shapes the material in a way that makes it feel sharp and innovative.
It was produced in the early 1980s, a time when the Hollywood studios were starting to move away from the kind of edgy, director/auteur-driven movies that typically centered around complicated protagonists who could be written off as “losers” (think Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, or just about any film directed by Robert Altman in the ’70s) in favor of a more comforting, audience-friendly Reagan-era sensibility that focused on high-octane protagonists who buck the system and win (think Beverly Hills Cop or Top Gun or even Rambo: First Blood Part II, which is a very different film thematically and tonally from First Blood).
It was produced in the early 1980s, a time when the Hollywood studios were starting to move away from the kind of edgy, director/auteur-driven movies that typically centered around complicated protagonists who could be written off as “losers” (think Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, or just about any film directed by Robert Altman in the ’70s) in favor of a more comforting, audience-friendly Reagan-era sensibility that focused on high-octane protagonists who buck the system and win (think Beverly Hills Cop or Top Gun or even Rambo: First Blood Part II, which is a very different film thematically and tonally from First Blood).
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Not since Walter Hill's ''The Driver,'' a gangster melodrama so high-toned that the characters were identified not by names but by their occupations, has there been an action film so unfortunately convinced that ordinary movies can be elevated to cinema if the characters talk fancy enough and if the camera consistently turns the most commonplace objects into beautiful abstractions of reality.
“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.