Mann: Thief (1981)

Thief was Michael Mann’s first cinematic release, but it’s shot through with his distinctive style in a remarkably fully-formed manner. In part, that’s due to his 1970s work on television procedural, which ensures that his narrative here is as clipped and efficient as possible, leaving ample space for stylistic experimentation and flourish. Like many of Mann’s procedurals, it could be described as neo-noir, except that it mercilessly excavates the soft-focus pastness of his contemporaries, instead turning to a kind of semi-futurism to prevent the stark loneliness of classic noir resembling anything like nostalgic consolation. In part, that’s enabled by its central character, Frank (James Caan), an expert safe-cracker and jewel thief who’s coerced, against his better judgment, into working for a larger criminal conglomerate. Frank has spent the better part of ten years in prison, and it’s taught him to have no belief in the future – having lost so much time, he’s learned that the only way to regain time, or to inhabit time, is to stop caring about it, to raise nihilistic disinterestedness to a transcendent pitch. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Frank explains this approach to a burgeoning love interest, Jessie (Tuesday Weld) – and his gradual movement towards caring about her, and caring about life, is the emotional kernel of the narrative. What makes Mann’s vision so powerful, then, is that Frank’s return to life parallels his integration into the criminal conglomerate – in fact, it’s the head of the conglomerate, Leo (Robert Prosky) who provides him with a suburban house, as well as helping him and Jessie adopt a child. As a result, caring about life comes to stifle his vision in much the same way as being beholden to the conglomerate, meaning that his transcendent nihilism lurks around the edges of the film even or especially when it seems most life-affirming. And, in stylistic terms, that means Mann’s nihilistic cityscape textures everything – in fact, Frank first explains his outlook to Jessie in one of Chicago’s iconic tollway diners, the city spread out in the background, as in so many scenes. Distilled to a series of exquisite, futuristic nightscapes in which the conjunction of metal and neon is almost sentient, it’s a city’s that’s already semi-autonomous from its citizens, just as the procedural details of Frank’s heists tend to become jettisoned, semi-autonomous from both the heists themselves and the narrative thrust of the film. At times, it's as if Mann's celluloid has become proto-digital, somehow discorrelated itself from the human eye in its recognition of a deeper, connection between itself and the various electronic devices and procedures with which it rapturously communes. In that sense, it’s a pre-apocalyptic film – every night is shot like it’s the last night on Earth, but it’s utterly devoid of the sublime expectation of apocalypse, just because it’s clear that this city will continue flickering away indefinitely, in the same way the film feels on the verge of transcending celluloid, or any other connection to the organic world. As Mann’s career progresses, his drive towards artificial, electronic light has dovetailed quite naturally with his recourse to the camera as a forensic device – and that tendency finds its foundational moment here, as exquisite cinematography becomes a tool for meticulously, crisply and clinically isolating what will survive all of us.