If one of Leo’s guys get pinched, the judge will grant clemency for the right amount. Everyone is getting a piece of the action: as soon as the cops find out Frank is working with Leo, they want their cut. That’s true of Thief, too, as it is of every Mann production, but Chicago is much more active force of evil in the film, spinning a web of corruption that Frank can’t escape. When people talk about cities being a “character” in a movie, they’re usually referring to how the ambience of the setting complements the action. What’s out of his control is the Chicago machine, which grinds up the pure-hearted just as surely as Frank’s drill bit tears through a steel plate. He has made many mistakes in his life, including one humiliating blowup at an adoption agency, but it’s a crucial fact of the film that his work is guaranteed. Though Mann treats this One Last Job with his usual scrupulousness, paying careful attention to the tools and tricks necessary to pull it off, there’s not much suspense over whether Frank can get it done. In a brilliant piece of character acting, Robert Prosky gives Leo an avuncular quality that’s at once reassuring and unsettling, and Frank can’t help but get pulled in by this sinister benefactor. He’s capable of happiness.Īgainst his instincts, Frank agrees to do a job for Leo, a big-time fence and Chicago mob boss. It’s not just that his dreams are modest – a wife, a child, a house, a dignified fate for his incarcerated mentor (Willie Nelson) – but that they’re achievable. The scene now reads like a preview of the Pacino/De Niro get-together in Heat, but what’s striking about it, beyond the nocturnal splendor of the window looking down on the freeway below, is how absolutely persuasive Frank is in the moment. Though Thief is bookended by two heist sequences, the true centerpiece of the film is an intimate diner scene where he shares the postcard with Jessie (Tuesday Weld), his cashier girlfriend, who learns she’s a part of it. The parameters of Frank’s dreams are precisely the dimensions of the postcard collage he keeps in his wallet. But that’s not the way the world works, and the moment he gives up his independence and takes a shot at a big score, scoundrels cling to him like barnacles.
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To him, the terms of any gig are straightforward: he and his guys will plunder a safe full of diamonds and his patron will hand him an envelope full of agreed-upon cash. And so when Frank decides to take on One Last Job before retirement, there’s never any sense that he’s angling for a bigger paycheck or secretly addicted to the criminal life. Mann exalts Frank’s brutish simplicity as a form of integrity and candor: he’s a man who means what he says and says what he feels, even if it gets him into trouble. He’s clocking in just like any other blue-collar stiff. The actual work is notable for its utter lack of grace and its reliance on Caan’s persuasive might. Through Mann’s lens, Frank is only distinguishable from a blue-collar worker through his expertise on how much force is necessary to bust into vaults and what sort of mechanical engineering it’s going to take to do it. His tools are heavy magnetic drills or a thermal lance, each tailored to carve holes through steel doors and plates. With Caan in the role, you usually know what you’re getting.Īs Frank, Caan isn’t the sort of jewel thief who’s going to dangle from the ceiling or pick safe locks with a stethoscope and a delicacy of touch. He may have been a glorified henchman, but he was not underhanded like his brother Fredo, and there was a certain dignity to his predictability. Sonny’s death was like Newton’s Third Law of Motion, an equal and opposite reaction to the violence that he instinctually brought into the world. His Sonny Corleone was never going to be Don Vito’s successor in The Godfather, despite his naked ambitions, because he can think of no obstacle that his masculinity cannot topple. Waingros on the bench.Ĭaan specializes in playing human battering rams – more muscle than brains, but a blunt instrument of reliable force. But the film’s true guiding force, its philosophical lodestar, is James Caan’s performance as Frank, a Chicago thief who wants nothing more than to do a job well and get paid for it, but runs into a city full of Waingros along the way.
Everything about Mann’s debut feature Thief, which turns 40 this week, is uncommonly assured for a first-time director, with many signature touches in place from the very first shots: the stylish neon-blue titles, the rain-slackened neo-noir nightscape, the pulsating synth score by Tangerine Dream.