Thief (1981)

directed by Michael Mann

Joe Gross

My favorite moviegoing experience remains the time I saw Heat at the West Village’s IFC Center in between consecutive warehouse shifts at Flushing’s Citi Field, one day, one night: watching De Niro’s Neil McCauley board a twilit train in coveralls knowing I’d do the same as soon as the credits rolled, box cutter in my pocket––the stamped economy steel kind you slam against your thigh to reveal the razor––and ULINE gloves I never wore but would wish I had when the broken nails and split cuticles and blood blisters resultant of repetitive lifting piled up, the callous frictions that grant seasoned hands the grip of gloves as a reward for working at one task too long.

But I’ve come to think Thief, Michael Mann’s debut feature, is his masterpiece. Contained therein is the simplest, most ostentatious beach fit ever put to film (cuffed white jeans, shoeless, shirtless, shades; read more about the movie’s fashionable but not fastidious wardrobe here), what remains one of cinema’s most nuanced, understated scenes of sexual assault’s aftermath, and the best of Tangerine Dream’s many film scores (listen to the aforementioned “Beach Scene”). And whereas Heat is operatic, The Godfather of heist flicks, bookended by La Pietà and trafficking in archetypes like a commedia dell’arte––textured, no doubt, by indelible performances but still reducible to the relentless detective, the smooth operator, cat and mouse––Thief’s stylized veneer gives way to a realist core: filament lights fight with rain for the camera’s focus; the camera cranes so close to neon signs you can hear them crackle; the haze of smoke threatens to cloud the lens, and all the movie’s most impressive iconography results from painstaking and practically effected safecracking scenes such that the whole thing seems to sermonize the working stiff with the same grandeur as any Catholic ceremony.

Because that’s what James Caan’s Frank, the titular thief, is. He’s a tradesman, a welder applying his knowledge in the opposite direction, not building vaults but burning through them, drilling them, punching out locks––whatever a particular make and model requires, and he knows the specs on them all. He’s “got a mouth, […] can take a trimming,” shown begrudging respect by the cops shaking him down for a piece of his action even as he voices his contempt for them and anyone else skating by on someone else’s dime, “Did it ever occur to you to work for a living?” He calls his gun his “labor union” and he’s a consummate professional, a proletarian tough self-assured in the worth of his work and little else, an adoptee of the monkish, spartan, attachment-free ethos mouthed like a mantra by Neil McCauley in Heat not only out of necessity but because he was tragically predisposed to it by the formative abuses of orphanhood, poverty, and imprisonment—torn out by the roots, still a kid holding onto a drawing of his dream life as he struggles to grow into it, fearing that what he loves and longs for can and will be lost. He carries his world with him and is its sole ward. Literally. Frank cradles a collage of wife, kids, home, and friends freed from prison in his wallet, and it’s the most endearing and most tragic thing about him: imagine this solemn sourpuss cutting the pictures out of a magazine and fumbling around with glue in his cell because he finds his desire begs expression.

This being a realist film, the local syndicate catches wind of Frank just as soon as he begins to build this life, and seizes on his skill, suffocates his self-determination. Capitalism has got no place in it for the quiet craftsman; it exploits him. Some guy with a modicum of organizational skill and a couple more connections breathes down your neck like he earned the sweat it’s caked in. And all he’s doing really is work you already would have done––Frank was already casing joints and vetting fences, which is what his new boss claims he offers, the setup of the actual safecracking; whether I’ve been a deliman, a prep cook, or a warehouse runner, I’ve known my routine inside and out and someone micromanaging me has never improved upon it either. I manage myself. You give me something to do, I do it and you better not bother me while I’m working because I’m going to do it right. I glory in breaking my back, same as any other man. It’s how I’ve moved through every job I’ve ever had to some extent or another, the guy who works so hard no one hassles him. You better allow me the mindfulness practice of manual labor I’ve made for myself because it’s the only quiet moment I’ve carved out. “I am Joe, the boss of my own body.” Except I’m not. When I’m done, I’m going to go home and eat, sleep, get ready for work the next day because the money never adds up to enough. I’m going to wish I had more time, time to write, to do any single thing I enjoy, to keep up with what and who I make time for in spite of work, the people and places I hang around for free; I’m going to spend much of my time off the clock wishing my collage were actual and not aspirational and not so dependent on drudgery. Beatrice Loayza sums it up nicely in her review of David Fincher’s The Killer: “To work is to compromise, to ‘not give a fuck’ even when we do.” This tension animates me and animates Mann’s protagonists, too. In Heat’s diner scene, Neil McCauley says he has a recurring dream that he’s drowning and needs to wake up and breathe before he dies––it’s about “having enough time.” Frank says in Thief’s diner scene, “I have run out of time [...] I can’t work fast enough to catch up.” Me? Well, you just read this paragraph.

Maybe, just maybe, you sense I’ve bristled at being bossed around a few times in my life, felt I was ill-compensated, felt my time could have been better spent, too. I think it’s safe to say it was more than a feeling. Michael Mann came up in Chicago. James Caan grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, same as my parents, same as me. Inculcated in the prickly pragmatism of cities, dealt dictums (I imagine) like “whatever you do tonight, you better be up for work in the morning.” I think it’s the primary reason Caan’s performance and the movie ring true, a prism through which I can pass my own relationship to labor and exploitation. We all take pride in our pluck. So Frank lashes out with his “labor union,” knocks off the boss that tries to break him under the yoke; it’s cathartic. But in reality I’ll demure and keep my employment, my pride and my pluck leveraged against me, and offscreen, the cash Frank fought for still crowds his wallet, butting up against his collage in the billfold, creasing the corners, bending the future out of shape, reminding him how little his life is worth in the present day, the present circumstance. But the collage is still there; the ideal survives; the dreamer struggles to achieve it. There’s another scene at the end of Thief’s script that didn’t make the final cut:

“It’s summer. It’s sun-baked. The sidewalks are pink and hot. Smoked glass and steel buildings. Ocean. [...] He touches her…”

Joe Gross is a Flushing-based bookseller, poet, translator, and author of the prize-winning chapbook Lest We All Get Clipped (Ghostbird Press, 2023). His work has appeared in KtB Magazine, HORNS, petrichor, Four Way Review, la piccioletta barca, and Queensbound, among others. He holds an MFA from Queens College, CUNY, where he was co-editor of Armstrong Literary. Find him on Twitter @komradekapybara and @joegrosspoet on Instagram.