Thief

Probably largely the result of the fact that I grew up regularly hearing firsthand crime stories that were more intriguing and disturbing than those featured in movies, I have never really given that big of a shit about noir-ish crime-thrillers, especially those regularly vomited out of Hollywood, so there is no doubt in my mind when I see one and come to the conclusion it is a masterpiece. To me, a good crime-thriller has nil ‘filler’ and puts just as much emphasis on every shot and scene as Bergman or Lynch would put into one of their films, albeit in a fashion that can be just as easily be digested by proles and philistines as pretentious art fags and cineastes. Although probably not completely immaculate, William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) is what I consider to be the ideal crime-thriller as a cinematic work that more or less completely reinvents the (sub)genre and which I would regard as a piece of carefully constructed cinematic art that defines both the philosophy and aesthetic ‘integrity’ (or lack thereof) of its particular zeitgeist. If there is any film from the same decade that is on the same level as Friedkin’s film, it is indubitably Michael Mann’s debut feature Thief (1981) aka Violent Streets aka The Cracker: Midnight Outlaw, which I recently re-watched and came to the conclusion that it was a near perfect piece of cinema, at least as far as its genre is concerned. Not surprisingly, like Friedkin, Mann was the son of working-class Jews from Chicago and, also like his kosher kinsman, he is a rare example of a truly masculine-minded Jewish filmmaker.  Additionally, Thief stars James Caan who, aside from also being from a Hebraic prole background (his father was a butcher), is arguably the most innately tough and manly Jewish actor of his generation and possibly in all of cinema history. Indeed, if there is any Jew that debunks Weininger’s theory that Jewishness and femininity are one and the same and would make for a great Zionist propaganda symbol as the Judaic Übermensch, it is Caan. Like Friedkin with his first big hit The French Connection (1971), Thief is a gritty yet carefully stylized cinematic work where the auteur opted to incorporate an inordinate and arguably borderline dangerous degree of realism, including hiring real cops and croaks as actors, as well as hiring real professional thieves as technical advisors. A quite cynical and nihilistic cinematic work, Mann’s film is also Friedkin-esque in its depiction of cops and cons as different sides of the same coin and absolute refusal to make any superficial moral judgements. Indeed, Mann hired real-life guido jewel thief John Santucci (who ironically portrays a sleazy police sergeant) to create real robbery tools and train lead Caan how to use them. In fact, the main heist featured in the film, which involves the use of a thermal lance (aka ‘oxy-lance’) to cut through a vault door, was modeled after a real robbery that Santucci carried out. Additionally, the film was loosely based on the novel The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar by pseudonymous author Frank Hohimer (real name John Seybold), who was also a real-life jewel thief that was apparently serving a prison sentence at the time of the film’s production. 

 Of course, technical authenticity is only one of the many ingredients that make Mann’s film so positively potent from beginning to end. Indeed, aside from also featuring an absolutely imperative soundtrack by German electronic group Tangerine Dream and mostly aesthetically pleasuring nocturnal urban cinematography, Thief features one of the most unforgettable antiheroes of crime cinema history. Although he is not exactly a gay serial rapist and killer, the titular lead of the film is, at least philosophically speaking, like the Carl Panzram of movie thieves, as a sort of sociopathic criminal Übermensch who does not give a shit about anything and does not care about or listen to anyone. Like Panzram (who was gang raped by a group of hobos in a train car at the age of 14 after running away from home), the lead developed his uncompromising antisocial philosophy as a result of going through the life-changing ordeal of encountering humanity’s most craven and depraved individuals, or to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s overused quote to describe the tragic psychological state of the character, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” The closest thing I have ever seen to a Hollywood equivalent to the spirit of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s magnum opus Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) in terms of its gritty and totally unromantic yet at the same time strangely ‘humanistic’ view of crime and criminals, Thief is ultimately a sad yet stoic, ‘no bullshit’ reminder as to the sort of foredoomed and forlorn individuals that become ‘successful’ career criminals. Of course, like real-life master criminals, the antihero of Mann’s film might fulfill some of his rather ambitious dreams, but they are ultimately shattered and taken away from him in the end. Notably, what makes Mann’s film different from most of its genre persuasion is that the lead consciously decides to literally destroy his own version of the American dream as a means to preserve his Weltanschauung and keep his personal sovereignty. As a man that lost over a decade of his life in prison, the antihero is determined to quite literally contrive a full life in a very short period of time that includes a bourgeois family and home, but he ultimately gets himself entangled in a very precarious criminal web in the process and must choose between everything he has recently built for himself or maintaining his personal freedom. Additionally, the eponymous lead of the film might be a ‘thief,’ but he is a man’s man in the truest sense as an innately individualistic fellow who lives on his own terms and plays by his own rules, hence his truly epic and carefully calculated self-ordained downfall. 

 In a sort of ‘neon neo-noir’ opening scene full of beauteous shimmering city lights and almost celestial rainfall that does not feature one single line of dialogue, antihero Frank (James Caan) more or less effortlessly carries out a perfect diamond heist during a misty night in Chicago with his partner Barry (James Belushi in his first film role). After drilling throw a safe with a custom-made power-drill that an elderly friend created for him, Frank goes through the drawers of said safe and only bothers to steal envelops full of uncut diamonds, which is the only item he deals in because it is, relatively speaking, ‘clean’ and ‘low-risk’ compared to other stolen goods.  As a front for his criminal enterprise, Frank owns a used car dealership and a bar.  Frank’s ‘fence’ is a grotesquely fat and effeminate fellow of the overtly Judaic sort named Joe Gags (Hal Frank) who, unbeknownst to the antihero, has been stealing money from a local bigwig mob boss. When Gags is killed after being pushed out of a 12th-story window as punishment for skimming off the top of mob collection money, Frank discovers that the owner of a plating company, Mr. Attaglia (Tom Signorelli), was responsible for the killing. On top of killing his fence, Attaglia pocketed Frank’s $185,000 of the score money, which Gags had on him at the time of his death. Needless to say, Frank soon pays a visit to Attaglia under the false pretense of having a problem with a plating shipment and demands his money back. When Attaglia pretends to not know what he is talking about, Frank angrily remarks, “I come here to discuss a piece of business with you. And what are you gonna do? You gonna tell me fairy tales?,” thus angering the plating company owner to the point where he demands that he get out of his office. At this point, Frank whips out at handgun, points it at Attaglia's face, and fiercely states, “I am the last guy in the world. . .that you want to fuck with. You found my money on Gags. Let us pretend you don’t know whose money it is.” Ultimately, Frank sets up a meeting for Attaglia that night to get his $185,000 back, but instead of the plating company executive, the antihero encounters a fat old four-eyed polack named Leo (Robert Prosky), who is as charming as the devil despite his fairly repugnant appearance. Unbeknownst to Frank, Leo wants to make a Faustian pact that will ultimately lead to his downfall, or at least temporary downfall. 

 As Leo explains to Frank, he is a high-level fence and mafia boss who is charge out over half of the crime in Chicago and he has been admiring the antihero’s work from afar for some time.  Naturally, Frank is somewhat taken aback by Leo's disclosure, as if the lead was under the impression that he was a criminal phantom of sorts that no one was aware of.  Leo also makes it quite clear to Frank that if he had not stepped in, Attaglia would have retaliated against him.  While Frank attempts to immediately leave after he is handed the $185,000 and tells Leo he has no interest in working for him, stating, “I am self-employed. I am doin’ fine. I don’t deal with egos. I am Joe the boss of my own body, so what the fuck do I have to work for you for?,” the rather rotund mob boss will not take no for an answer and begins making the antihero an offer he cannot refuse, even bragging to him like a virtual carny huckster, “I’ll make you a millionaire in four months.” According to Leo, he can give Frank all the resources he needs to carryout the perfect big score, including the best locations and whatever equipment and phony documents that he would require to get the job done.  While Frank agrees to give Leo a call about a possible temporary ‘no strings attached’ partnership for two or three heists, the lead does not seem too interested in the offer, at least until fate steps in and makes it seem like the antihero has the perfect opportunity to catch up on the time that he lost in prison.  After all, Frank could be set for life if he does a couple heists with Leo, thus giving him the opportunity to soon completely retire from crime and devote his life to being a bourgeois family man, or so he thinks. Indeed, after his talk with Leo, Frank goes to a local club to meet up with his love interest Jessie (Tuesday Weld)—a woman that he intends to marry, even though he barely knows her and has yet to have sex with her—but when he gets there she immediately begins berating him for being two hours later, stating in a brazenly bitchy fashion, “What the hell are you doing here? […] I do not need to be humiliated.” Determined to prove he had a valid reason for being late and that he has a serious interest in beginning a “big romance” with her, Frank more or less physically drags Jessie out of the club against her will and then shoves her inside his car.  Although Frank owns a used car dealership and a bar as ‘legitimate’ front for his criminal operation, during the car ride he decides to reveal to Jessie his true background, stating to her like a painfully honest low-class braggart, “I wear $150 slacks! I wear silk shirts! I wear $800 suits! I wear a gold watch! I wear a perfect D flawless, three-carat ring! I change cars like other guys change their fuckin’ shoes! I’m a thief. I’ve been in prison.” While Jessie continues to yell and bitch at Frank, she begins to settle down when they arrive at a diner and have a more intimate talk.  It is at the diner that Frank reveals to Jessie his most unflattering vulnerabilities and his virtual blueprint for his life, which he wants to make her an imperative part of.

 As she describes to Frank during a long and intimate conversation in the diner, Jessie used to have a cocaine dealer boyfriend who got himself killed under dubious circumstances in South America, thus leaving her to fend for herself on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia (while she does not say it outright, the viewer assumes she did a little third world style pussy-peddling to survive). As a result of her less than glamorous experiences, Jessie is wholly content with her current banal job as a lowly restaurant cashier and makes it quite clear to Frank that she does not want to get her sucked back into the uncertainty of the criminal lifestyle again.  Not surprisingly, Frank mocks her attitude while, at the same time, assuring her that he eventually plans to quit thieving and is only doing it now to make up for lost time. At this point, Frank describes to her his general nihilistic worldview and how he became the impenetrable hyper-individualistic criminal that he is today. After being imprisoned at the age of 20 for stealing a mere $40, Frank ultimately found himself spending eleven years in jail as a result of receiving a “manslaughter beef” after brutally beating some bad guys that, as he describes, “tried to turn me out.” Indeed, after brutally beating up a group of prison guards and criminals with a pipe that attempted to gang rape him, Frank was subsequently severely beaten and hospitalized himself, though he managed to beat the leader of the group, a certain 300-pound slob named ‘Captain Morphis,’ so badly that he died two years later as a result of his injuries. Of course, the entire experience left Frank with an extremely tough mindset and considerably nihilistic worldview where he learned to not care about anything, most notably himself. As Frank tells Jessie, “…I don’t mean nothin’ to myself. I don’t care about me. I don’t care about… nothin’, you know? And then I know from that day that I survive…because I achieved that mental attitude.” At this point, Frank whips out a somewhat childish collage that he made in prison that he describes as “my life,” which features images of children, a beautiful woman, and his criminal mentor/paternal figure ‘Okla’ aka David (Willie Nelson).  Okla is the only man that Frank seems to truly respect and he was the one that convinced the antihero to be upfront about his criminal background (as the viewer discovers during a conversation between Frank and Okla, the lead's previous wife divorced him after discovering he was lying to her).  Frank points at the woman in his ‘life collage’ and tells Jessie that it is her. Of course, Frank wants Jessie to be his wife and he promises that he will go ‘straight’ and quit thieving after obtaining enough money to ‘catch up’ for the eleven years of life that he lost in prison, stating to her, “Look, I have run out of time. I have lost it all. And so I can’t work fast enough to catch up…and I can’t run fast enough to catch up…and the only thing that catches me up…is doin’ my magic act. But it ends, you know? It will end.” While Jessie seems to find Frank’s plan to be somewhat questionable, especially since she is infertile and cannot give him the children he wants, he reassures her by telling her that they can adopt a child.  Needless to say, the prospect of a large home, wealth, a husband, and a child seems quite enticing to the infertile spinster, so Jessie demonstrates that she has accepted Frank's somewhat strange, almost business-like proposal by holding his hand in what is probably the only truly tender moment in the entire film.

 As a result of becoming excited that Jessie has agreed on his somewhat unconventional offer to be his wife and part of his big life plan, Frank decides to call Leo to let him know that he is interested in their partnership, even though it is something he would probably not do under normal circumstances as a lone-wolf that has a hard time running with a pack. Meanwhile, Frank pays a repulsively shady Jewish lawyer $10,000 to bribe a corrupt judge to get his mentor Okla out of prison. Okla has angina and heart disease and made it quite clear to Frank that he did not want to die in prison. While Frank manages to get his friend out of prison, Okla crooks soon after.  Notably, after a negro doctor informs him of Okla's death, Frank petrifies the physician by maintaining a creepy dead stare and saying literally nothing, thus underscoring the antihero's incapacity to deal with emotions.  In tribute to Okla, Frank decides to name his adopted son after him. Indeed, as a result of the fact that he is turned down by an adoption agency due to his criminal record, Frank manages to procure a baby boy on the black market via Leo, who only went to the effort of getting the child as a means to lure the antihero into his operation. While Leo stylizes himself as a sort of benign paternal figure that does whatever he can to make his underlings happy, he is actually a ruthless megalomaniac that wants to make Frank his virtual slave. Of course, Frank immediately demonstrates that he will be a hard man to control because, unlike Leo and the other mob leaders, he refuses to pay off the local corrupt cops and, as a result, is brutally beaten by about half a dozen cops and has both his house and car bugged.  Luckily for Frank, he is far more intelligent than the corrupt cops that are trying to bust him.

 With the help of his jolly and somewhat buffoonish partner Barry and a couple crew members, Frank is completely successful at executing a large-scale San Diego diamond heist that Leo has organized for him. While Leo compliments Frank on the score and calls him “Dr. Wizard,” he fails to give the antihero the amount of cash he had agree upon. Although Frank was promised $830,000 of the $4 million that were made from wholesale of the unmounted stones that he stole during the heist, Leo has the gall to hand him a folder that contains no more than $90,000 and then attempts to play off his shady business tactics in what is surely a Harvey Weinstein-esque moment. When Frank asks him where the rest of the money is, Leo states that it is just the “cash part” and that he supposedly invested the rest of the money, stating like a true bullshitting swindler, “That’s because I put you into the Jacksonville, Fort Worth. . .and Davenport shopping centers with the rest. I take care of my people. You can ask these guys. Papers are at your house. It’s set up as a limited partnership. The general partner is a subchapter S corporation. You’ve got equity with me in that.” Needless to say, when Leo brings up a “major score in Palm Beach” that he boldly assumes the antihero will execute for him in six weeks, Frank becomes extremely agitated and tells him, “This is payday. It is over.” When Leo remarks, “I give you houses. I give you a car. You’re family. I thought you’d come around. What the hell is this? What – Where is gratitude? You can’t see day for night,” Frank reveals he is carrying a gun and then threatens the crime boss, stating in a quite ballsy fashion, “My money in 24 hours, or you will wear your ass for a hat.” Of course, a rich and powerful crime boss like Leo refuses to tolerate a threat from such an ostensible small fry like Frank.  Unfortunately for Leo and his associates, they ultimately underestimate Frank's uncompromising ruthlessness and seemingly psychopathic will power.

 When Frank goes by his car dealership and cannot find Barry, he soon finds himself ambushed by Leo’s goons. As a result of attempting to warn Frank that it is a trap, Barry is gunned down by Leo’s boys while he has hands tied behind his back. When Frank wakes up, he finds himself lying next to his buddy Barry’s corpse while Leo is standing over him in an intimidating fashion. While lying on the floor with a completely blank stare on his face like a virtual vegetable, Frank quietly stares at Leo as he states to him in a great speech where he reveals his true devilish self, “Look what happened to your friend ‘cause you gotta go against the way things go down. You treat what I tried to do for you like shit. You don’t want to work for me. What’s wrong with you? And then you carry a piece in my house. You one of those burned-out, demolished wackos in the joint? You’re scary, because you don’t give a fuck. But don’t come on to me now with your jailhouse bullshit. . .because you are not that guy. Don’t you get it, you prick? You got a home, car, businesses, family. . .and I own the paper on your whole fuckin’ life. I’ll put your cunt wife on the street to be fucked in the ass by niggers and Puerto Ricans. Your kid’s mine because I bought it. You got him on loan. He is leased. You are renting him. I’ll whack out your whole family. People’ll be eating ‘em for lunch tomorrow in their Wimpy burgers and not know it. You get paid what I say. You do what I say. I run you. There is no discussion. I want, you work. Until you are burned out. . .you are busted, or you’re dead. You get it? You got responsibilities. Tighten up and do it […] Back to work, Frank.”  As anyone that has been carefully watching the film up until this point rightly assumes, there is no way that an impenetrable lone wolf like Frank would not only tolerate his best friend's coldblooded murder, but also such an intricate threat against both himself and his family.  At this point, Frank must think quick and act lest he be a perennial bitch-boy to a soft four-eyed prick who looks like a public transit bus driver.

 As a man that values self-ownership above all us, Frank naturally refuses to be Leo’s permanent groveling diamond heist bitch and comes to the conclusion that he is willing to sacrifice literally everything he values, including his wife and son, to remain a free and sovereign individual. Indeed, during the middle of the night while she is sleeping, Frank abruptly wakes up Jessie and coldly and firmly informs her that it is “over” and he is throwing her out, which she naturally has a hard time understanding. While Frank hands her $410,000.00 and tells her that he will have an associate take care of her and the baby, Jessie loves him, cannot understand why he is acting in such a callous fashion, and refuses to leave, complaining, “Wait. We just – We just disassemble it and put it back in a box. . .like an Erector set you just send back to a store? I love you. I’m not going anywhere […] I’m your woman. You’re my man. Frank, Frank. I made a commitment.” With a completely cold and glacial stare, Frank replies to Jessie by stating, “To hell with me, with you. . .with everything. I’m throwing you out. Get out” and then hatefully yells to her to get out of his house. In a sort of both literal and symbolic annihilation of his entire life, Frank then proceeds to not only blow up his home, but also his car dealership and bar, thus proving he is not the sort of fellow that does things halfway.  Indeed, by blowing up everything in his life, Frank not only wipes away his entire identity, but also makes sure that he can have no second thoughts in terms of going back to his previous life.  Of course, Frank then proceeds to pay Leo a surprise visit where he knocks Attaglia out cold in the kitchen and then hunts the mob boss in his own home in a scenario where the powerful crime boss comes off looking like the physically weak and soft coward that he is. After shooting Leo dead upon finding him hiding behind a piece of furniture like a scared animal in one of the rooms in his house, Frank murders the mob boss’ henchman Carl and Attaglia after exiting the house, though he is shot a couple of times in the process (luckily, Frank had enough common sense to wear a bulletproof vest and thus comes out of the shootout fairly unscathed). In the end, Frank walks into the night by himself, as if taking the first steps of his new life journey, which will indubitably be alone.  Indeed, at this point, Frank has probably accepted that he is doomed to be alone forever and will never be able to be the bourgeois family man that he originally dreamed of.

 After my recent re-watching of Thief, I know realize that it and Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) were Nicolas Winding Refn’s two main models for Drive (2011). In fact, after watching Mann’s film, I have to admit that I have a lot less respect for Refn, as he now reminds me of a sort of European Tarantino, albeit with better taste cinema and a more covert and less self-congratulatory approach to paying ‘homage’ to his crucial influences.  Out of all these three films, Thief is the only one where I found myself entranced by the sight of misty rain drops, flying sparks, and slow-motion explosions, as if Mann was inspired by Stan Brakhage’s sort of organic lyricism. Of course, the film owes a good portion of its hypnotic power to its Tangerine Dream score (notably, Mann originally considered using degenerate jazz for the film, but luckily he made the right decision in the end). While I enjoy Mann’s subsequent Nazi horror-fantasy The Keep (1983), which also features a Tangerine Dream score, for largely novelty reason, it is the complete opposite of Thief in that it feels so glaringly contrived and phony, as if the Jewish auteur wanted to make the most one-dimensional anti-Nazi film ever assembled in what is ultimately a moronically morally dichotomous neo-fairytale where virtually all Germans are depicted as pure evil despite the fact a group of krauts provided the music for the film (to Mann’s credit, Paramount Pictures totally butchered the film and more or less cut it in half, though Mann intended to shoot a ‘Aryan holocaust’ scene at the end where every single German soldier is brutally murdered by a virtual golem). Indeed, despite being meticulously stylized, Thief has a certain unwavering authenticity to it in terms of its depiction of a psychosis-ridden career criminal that has learned to become internally dead as a means to cope with the traumas he has endured. Of course, like many talented individuals, the antihero of the film at least partly owes his Übermensch qualities to his mental defects. Notably, actor James Caan has described Thief as his second favorite of his own films, with the long diner monologue being the scene he is most proud of in all of his entire acting career. As demonstrated by his roles in Mann’s film, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), and The Gambler (1974), as well as tendency to do crazy things in real-life like pulling guns on negro rappers and befriending and publicly supporting real-life mafia bosses, Caan certainly seems to at least partially personally embody the erratic quasi-psychopathic characters that he is best known for playing, but of course only the toughest people from working-class backgrounds make it to the top, so that should be no surprise.  After all, no one would know who Caan, Mann, or Friedkin was today if they were meek pussies who did not grab life by the balls and make something of themselves by any means possible.  Of course, this is also what makes these three men different from most of the Hebrews in Hollywood, who oftentimes owe their celebrity to nepotism and ethnic networking and not genuine talent.

 While I respect the fact his third feature Manhunter (1986) is easily the most underrated Hannibal Lecter film and that he was actually able to get an intriguing performance out of Tom Cruise as a psychopathic killer in Collateral (2004), I do not think I could ever call myself even a softcore Michael Mann fan. After all, no real serious auteur could have directed films as lame and phony as The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Ali (2001).  Indeed, the only Mann flick that I like in its entirety is Thief, which I consider to be the filmmaker’s closest thing to a true auteur piece, thus making it all the more of a shame that it is probably his least appreciated and most overlooked work.  Like Friedkin, I think the real Mann is someone that could have just as easily become a Jewish gangster had his life taken a slightly different course and I believe his debut demonstrates this in its genuine obsession with the criminal mind and lifestyle. Even with his big budget Johnny Depp vehicle Public Enemies (2009), Mann would demonstrate a preternatural obsession with criminal authenticity in terms of historical accuracy in depicting the infamous life and times of German-American gangster John Dillinger and his gang.  Of course, what separates Thief from most of Mann's other films and crime-thrillers in general is that it is the real dirty deal and features none of the sort of frivolous tough guy posturing that appeals to the sort of borderline retarded illiterate thugs, dime-bag-peddling ghetto negroes, and spiritually castrated wiggers that masturbate to Scarface (1983) and Carlito's Way (1993) and would probably suck Robert De Niro's cock in a desperate attempt to try in vain to live vicariously through the man that starred in Goodfellas (1990) and some many other ginney-dago-wop-fests.  While his stoicism and will power is admirable, there is nothing genuinely romantic about the absurdly asocial antihero of Mann's debut, hence why aspiring rappers, crack dealers, and other crime-fetishizing degenerates would probably have a hard time embracing the film (of course, the Tangerine Dream score would also deter any of these preposterously pathetic peons, but I digress).  In short, Thief is a portrait of progressive criminal madness in a quasi-poetic form that deserves to be compared to the more intriguingly morally dubious cinematic works of Fritz Lang.  In terms of its uniquely unflattering depiction of Chicago as a sort of post-industrial hellhole where criminals run both the streets and courts,  Mann's film probably features the most unforgettable aesthetic assault against the spiritual core of an American city since David Lynch's quasi-Expressionistic depiction of Philadelphia in Eraserhead (1977), albeit in an exceedingly less esoteric fashion.  Arguably most interestingly, it is not often that one gets to see a film where a man is pushed completely to the edge and decides to literally blow up his entire life in a blaze of nihilistic glory. It also not often one gets to see a film that is almost orgasmically metallurgical in its essence, as if some of the ideas of Oswald Spengler's Man and Technology: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (1931) were used by Mann as a sort of aesthetic theory for Thief, which finds almost perverse pulchritude in post-industrial decay and the synthesis of man and machine.  After all, if there is a sort of quasi-realist equivalent to the titular cyborg assassin of The Terminator (1984), it is the eponymous antihero of Mann's film.

-Ty E