![]() ![]() During this time, he was befriended by Okla (Willie Nelson), the older friend and mentor who taught him everything he knows about being a jewel thief. This opening sequence is done with as much panache as the famous heist in Jules Dassin’s Rififi, but its minutely controlled look and the suspense of the moment serve another purpose as well: to act as a fascination-grabbing prelude to what Thief is really about, which is the wider meaning and consequences of Frank’s character, and his dream of a life outside the prison that formed him.Īs we discover in one anguished encounter with a bureaucrat, Frank was “state-raised.” When he was eighteen years old, he received a two-year sentence for stealing forty dollars that became-through his violent efforts to protect himself-a seventeen-year prison tenure. Sparks fly like fireworks smoke pours off the drills.īut despite Mann’s reputation as a director of such breathtaking set pieces, he is always even more absorbed in the fine nuances of character. With an authenticity that astonishes at times, Thief breaks down visually, in bold close-ups, how the technical business of attacking a safe full of uncut diamonds works-not by blowing it up or listening for the combination tumblers but by using industrial tools to expose or remove the locking systems. In the bravura first heist sequence, we see what very efficient thieves Frank and his men are (the film was made with real-life thief John Santucci as an adviser he also plays the part of a cop). He owns a used car dealership and a small bar as cover for his activities. He’s a high-line thief with a tight crew comprising himself, alarms expert Barry, and comms man Joseph (William LaValley). In the Chicago of Thief, the black streets are rat runs and the black sky behind the lights is impenetrable dreams here have strict limits.įrank’s world is self-limited to what he has set up. But the X of lights shows a different kind of stylistic chutzpah, and in its grandiose descent from the sky, the second shot suggests a more totalized dystopia than the streets of New York represent in those earlier films, one that anticipates, for instance, the way Ridley Scott would shoot Blade Runner a year later, in a globalized city of perpetual rain. With the big, boxy cars that line the street, and the feeling of the city as a labyrinthine machine, these shots give Thief immediate kinship with the likes of William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973). ![]() The second shot looks up at a big, moonlike light, with torrential rain coming out of the night sky, then pans down slowly between angular configurations of fire escapes to the narrows of Rat Alley. In the first shot, the jewel thief Frank (James Caan) gets into an Eldorado driven by his partner Barry (James Belushi), which then cuts across the camera’s field of view and drives away into the distance, down Chicago’s rain-swept Lincoln Avenue-thereby epitomizing the script’s bare description in a later sequence: “Taillights on wet, black streets.” The V of streetlights and its reflection form a perfect X of vanishing-point perspective. How he did live.Without a word spoken, the first two shots in Thief, Michael Mann’s groundbreaking 1981 feature debut, announce a simultaneously grim and dreamlike vision that seems, in retrospect, perfectly poised between the great urban crime films of the 1970s and the formal aesthetics of the 1980s-the “style decade” that Mann’s subsequent cinema and television work did so much to help shape. And, to quote the ending of Brian's Song, we'll remember him as he lived. The world lost one of its most treasured screen legends with the passing of James Caan, but we should take solace in knowing he gave cinema so many great, memorable performances while he was here. Caan’s performance is particularly stunning, especially the scene where he goes to great lengths to save a soldier. There are few military dramas that feature a cast as noteworthy as A Bridge Too Far, which boasts the likes of Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neal, Anthony Hopkins, and James Caan as Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun. ![]() But, the mass of soldiers soon discover the plan isn’t going to be as easy or painless as they once thought. Richard Attenborough’s 1977 military epic, A Bridge Too Far, follows American and British forces as they plan to take back a road leading from the Netherlands to Germany in the height of World War II. (Image credit: United Artists) A Bridge Too Far (1977) ![]()
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