Frank has spotted Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a woman he likes who has a touch of class about her, even though he knows she’s had hard times and she’s now working as a diner cashier. It is this foot-on-the-accelerator attitude that leads to the film’s most poignant and beautifully acted early scene. Just as Frank wants to get all of that in a hurry, he also wants to get out of the high- risk trade that will make it possible as soon as he can. All of Frank’s ideas about his perfect life outside prison are concentrated into a folded-up photomontage he made there, with magazine images of a home, women, and children, and a snapshot of Okla. There is an intriguing mystery at the heart of the film about how Frank went from the pure theory of his Folsom training to the top of his game as a thief in just four years, but my guess is that he was bankrolled, at least for the first heist, by Okla, who would become his partner if he ever got out of prison. During this time, he was befriended by Okla (Willie Nelson), the older friend and mentor who taught him everything he knows about being a jewel thief. This opening sequence is done with as much panache as the famous heist in Jules Dassin’s Rififi, but its minutely controlled look and the suspense of the moment serve another purpose as well: to act as a fascination-grabbing prelude to what Thief is really about, which is the wider meaning and consequences of Frank’s character, and his dream of a life outside the prison that formed him.Īs we discover in one anguished encounter with a bureaucrat, Frank was “state-raised.” When he was eighteen years old, he received a two-year sentence for stealing forty dollars that became-through his violent efforts to protect himself-a seventeen-year prison tenure. Sparks fly like fireworks smoke pours off the drills.īut despite Mann’s reputation as a director of such breathtaking set pieces, he is always even more absorbed in the fine nuances of character.
THIEF 1981 ONLINE STREAMING FULL
With an authenticity that astonishes at times, Thief breaks down visually, in bold close-ups, how the technical business of attacking a safe full of uncut diamonds works-not by blowing it up or listening for the combination tumblers but by using industrial tools to expose or remove the locking systems. In the bravura first heist sequence, we see what very efficient thieves Frank and his men are (the film was made with real-life thief John Santucci as an adviser he also plays the part of a cop). He owns a used car dealership and a small bar as cover for his activities. He’s a high-line thief with a tight crew comprising himself, alarms expert Barry, and comms man Joseph (William LaValley). In the Chicago of Thief, the black streets are rat runs and the black sky behind the lights is impenetrable dreams here have strict limits.įrank’s world is self-limited to what he has set up. But the X of lights shows a different kind of stylistic chutzpah, and in its grandiose descent from the sky, the second shot suggests a more totalized dystopia than the streets of New York represent in those earlier films, one that anticipates, for instance, the way Ridley Scott would shoot Blade Runner a year later, in a globalized city of perpetual rain. With the big, boxy cars that line the street, and the feeling of the city as a labyrinthine machine, these shots give Thief immediate kinship with the likes of William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973). The second shot looks up at a big, moonlike light, with torrential rain coming out of the night sky, then pans down slowly between angular configurations of fire escapes to the narrows of Rat Alley. In the first shot, the jewel thief Frank (James Caan) gets into an Eldorado driven by his partner Barry (James Belushi), which then cuts across the camera’s field of view and drives away into the distance, down Chicago’s rain-swept Lincoln Avenue-thereby epitomizing the script’s bare description in a later sequence: “Taillights on wet, black streets.” The V of streetlights and its reflection form a perfect X of vanishing-point perspective. Without a word spoken, the first two shots in Thief, Michael Mann’s groundbreaking 1981 feature debut, announce a simultaneously grim and dreamlike vision that seems, in retrospect, perfectly poised between the great urban crime films of the 1970s and the formal aesthetics of the 1980s-the “style decade” that Mann’s subsequent cinema and television work did so much to help shape.
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