Hi:
Like most of us, I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. Quarantine makes me want, more than anything, to rub up against the screen—or rather, to rub up against the ordinary textures of the world as we used to encounter it. That’s part of what the movies are for (in a great essay that prefaces the published script of Chinatown, Robert Towne says that writing the project was, for him, “an acknowledgment that I lived with things I loved but could no longer see”), and always has been, but now I want this more than ever. The idea of walking into a supermarket late at night without a mask seems almost as exotic as smoking in one, but these days I would give my non-texting arm for that experience. Of course, it’s easy to watch great movies, but one odd effect of these past few months—which can feel, at times, like an extended sick day—has been the enhanced appetite I’ve had for watching merely good ones. (Hell, sometimes even not-so-good ones.) These days, of course, everything has to be “gut-wrenching,” “a masterpiece,” and so on to grab our attention, but . . . why? I wonder just because most pieces that are said to be these things aren’t, but because sublimity can be exhausting, and your favorite artist probably isn’t actually Ozu or Tolstoy or Miles Davis but . . . someone else. I’ve watched Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord” three times in quarantine, Robert Altman’s “Three Women” twice, and Cassavetes’ “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” twice, but I’ve also watched Floyd Mutrux’s “Dusty and Sweets McGee,” James Frawley’s “The Christian Licorice Store,” and Jacques Demy’s “Model Shop.” The latter three don’t belong in the Hall of Fame for anyone who isn’t obsessed with Los Angeles circa 1970 (and perhaps they don’t even for us), but they certainly belong in the Hall of Interesting, the Hall of Good, the Hall of Hypnotic and Appealing.
So does Michael Mann’s Thief, which if you haven’t seen it lately, is better than you remember. In many ways it seems a dry run for 1995’s Heat, with one safecracker standing in for a group of them and James Caan’s hairy-shouldered palooka standing in for sleek, feline De Niro and his glorious Italian suits. (On the other hand, it’s got Tuesday Weld in place of Amy Brenneman. I mean no insult to Brenneman calling this an upgrade, as I’ll watch Weld in anything.) Heat is, for sure, the more romantic movie, the more operatic. It’s got brooding, beautiful images of Los Angeles at night, a scene set inside the late, lamented Kate Mantilini, and a ton of other things to recommend it, not least Al Pacino chewing some of the funniest scenery of his career.
Thief, though, is the first of two he would make in the fifteen years preceding Heat that rehearse that movie’s milieu and its themes. (The other is 1989’s LA Takedown, a pilot he made for NBC that replicates Heat almost exactly, down to character names, dialogue, and various other scene-specifics. It’s harder to recommend, although it does offer the reverse pleasure of seeing Heat’s iconic diner scene replayed by what we can politely term a pair of pleasant-looking understudies, and the equally dubious pleasure of Billy Idol’s “LA Woman” used over some killer westside streetscapes) If Heat’s Neil McCauley is an Armani man, Thief’s Frank—we never do learn his last name—is the kind of guy who carries his lunch in a brown paper bag. They’re both safecrackers, but Frank fronts as a legitimate businessman, or rather as a guy who owns a car dealership. “Business” is for criminals—real criminals, the kind of people who move money around without earning any of it with their own sweat and ingenuity. (That’s true in Heat too. The villain there is Roger van Zant, scumbag proprietor of “Malibu Equity & Investments.”) The schism in Mann’s movies is always between robbers, working people who are trying—at least in his view—to redress imbalances in the system (even Neil McCauley is quick to point out to everyone he robs that their money is insured), and actual crooks, people who are involved in one form or another of human trafficking.
Whether or not you buy it, the pleasure in Thief, as in all of Mann’s films, is its ravishing texture, its cobalt blues and rain-spattered asphalt, its images of Chicago as a place whose perennial night is only ever split by the safecracker’s acetylene torch. In this, of course, it’s just another noir, but since when did “just another noir” look like this:
You can for sure see the radical garishness of Mann’s work on Miami Vice, but here it’s turned inside out, inverted. Even the few scenes that play out in daylight are bleached to the point they may as well be set in a void. And while some people see Mann as an extreme, even an empty, stylist (Richard Brody wrote a sort of boneheaded piece to this effect), I think the opposite is true: he’s a moralist who’s also a fabulist, someone whose gimlet eye for detail (he’s obsessed with the details of his protagonists’ trade: how safes are cracked, alarms are cut, what sorts of professionals they enlist in their physical assaults on titanium) encodes an ethical position. These stories themselves are a lot closer to Robin Hood than they are to any more ordinary reality. Not that anyone gives their money away, but the Sheriff of Nottingham is always looming somewhere over the proceedings. And he gets strong performances, as in this scene where Frank and Weld’s moll trade histories.
As written, it’s pulpy, clumsy and a little overwrought—you can see places where the writer, in this case Mann also, must have congratulated himself for lines that looked authentic on the page but sound ridiculous when spoken—but both the scene and the actors push past that, and arrive at something profoundly moving. It’s a long scene—almost ten minutes—and yet Weld and Caan really make the most of it, don’t they? Caan has often claimed this is the favorite scene in which he’s ever acted, which considering certain alternatives is something.
There are worst things you could do with this moment, this cusp between a hot summer and an uncertain fall, than to sink into Thief of an evening. It’s available on Hulu, I think, as well as on that tech service I won’t name as its founder already has enough of our money, and other streaming platforms besides.
While you do, or even as you just pop into your next email, why not enjoy this playlist that rolls up some of the music Mann uses in these movies and others, along with some adjacencies. The absence of both the Heat score and the one that Tangerine Dream recorded for Thief is simply one more reason to have serious qualms about Spotify, to be addressed another time. Here I’ve made up for it by interpolating songs that were used in Miami Vice, which Mann executive produced so it ain’t cheating. Expect some heavy eighties gloss. (Yes, Phil Collins appears, but only once, and you can be thankful I spared you this song at least.) It’s mood music, a little operatic—even flat out cheesy—in spots, but so’s life, right?
Until soon—
Matthew
p.s. That Robert Towne essay I alluded to up top is, alas, not online. It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing about Los Angeles, about memory and creativity, and in it Towne—like Mann—draws a useful distinction (“useful” for our times especially) between the moral struggles of private citizens and the sweeping ethical crimes of men like his film’s Noah Cross. You can, and should, find the essay in this tremendous anthology, which is worth every penny and also not hard to find used, if that’s easier. You’ll get a lot of wear out of it, I promise.
These arrows have been dipped in Fanny's barbeque sauce.....God, but I love that movie! Watched it myself not too long ago.
I have watched The Devil Wears Prada three times since March, and will not apologize for it.