The Criterion Collection has re-released Michael Mann's Thief, their spine #691, in a fresh 4K digital restoration. It's a fairly light package: just three featurettes from the prior edition are included, and none of them are spectacular.
This is more than made up for, however, by the quality of the transfer. Originally filmed in 35mm and remastered from the camera negative (an added scene for this "director's cut" is sourced from an internegative), the movie looks, frankly, incredible.
The 4K UHD is a near-perfect simulation of watching a fresh projection print from the year of production, while sacrificing nothing in terms of image detail or nuance. Blacks are inky and true, while the HDR grade still gives us a pleasing punchiness in the mid-range and highlights.
The neon and gemstone coloured nighttimes that professional thief Frank (James Caan, at the top of his game) moves through immediately establish what we will come to describe as Mann's style, emerging here (in the director's first theatrical feature) fully-formed. Thief works as a prototype for most of Mann's career-long formal, thematic and narrative ambitions as well.
Though credited as being based on a book by Frank Hohimer (another professional thief), Mann admits in the supplemental features that he entirely discarded Hohimer's narrative and credited the author for legal reasons only. Instead, Mann creates a sui generis tale of a fast-moving crook and wannabe wife guy, who gets so close to his dream that he can hold it in his hands, before reality inevitably takes everything away.
We find Frank, at the start of the picture, drilling into a diamond vault to extract a couple hundred grand's worth of ice. (Caan learned how to operate the 200-pound drill, and successfully cracked a working safe, for the shoot.) The world that Frank lives within is thoroughly amoral: he drifts between his bar and his car dealership (both money-laundering fronts) and various high-line scores. When he attracts the attention of the police, it isn't because they want to arrest him; they want Frank to cut them in on a piece of the action. Everyone in Mann's Chicago is a crook; the movie's cast is a murderer's row of Chicago tough guys.
Frank carries a vision board folded up in his wallet, which he made out of magazine clippings while he was in prison; the two critical vectors are getting his mentor (Willie Nelson) out of jail, and finding himself someone nice to settle down with. On the latter point, he's set his sights on Jessie (an incandescent Tuesday Weld), the cashier at the local restaurant where he fences his loot.
Thief's breakthrough scene takes place as Frank makes his case to Jessie. Moving too quickly and too purposefully for the niceties of small-time romance, Frank takes Jessie to an all-night coffee shop straddling a highway, and lays his entire situation out for her.
He tells her what he does; he tells her what he wants. She rises to the challenge and meets him point for point in an escalating sequence of called bluffs that leads to total, transcendent truth. They enter the coffee shop as strangers and leave as partners, equally devoted to building the family life they can only imagine from Frank's postcard.
Naturally, a shortcut appears: a local kingpin has taken an interest in Frank, and is willing to hire him to run high-earning scores for his organization. The first would see Frank breaking into an uncrackable bank with five separate alarm systems and pulling out untold millions in diamonds. Frank and his partner (James Belushi, in his first screen role), will net around $800,000 from the job.
Frank prefers his independence, but he's a man in a hurry; he did over a decade in jail for stealing forty bucks when he emerged from state homes as a teenager, and the idea of being a retired millionaire before the year is out is too much for him to pass up. This sets up a subtle thematic that will play out throughout the rest of the film, as the exploitative forces of capitalism encircle Frank, even in this line of work. (Late in the film and finding himself ill-used by his employer, someone advises Frank to start a labour union.)
Already in play in this early work is Mann's career-long rigour around the craftsmanship of professional crime. Frank's world is one of differing steel laminates, the mechanics of drills, the engineering of elevator shafts. Frank's job isn't violent crime, it's puzzle-solving; the satisfaction of a job well done runs all over his face as Frank takes a long, weary smoke break after the film's dazzling central break-in.
Released in 1981, Thief seems to straddle the character-driven procedurals of the New Hollywood and the slicker visual phantasmagoria of the Reagan era. There isn't a thing that Tony or Ridley Scott, or James Cameron for that matter, did in the next ten years that isn't presaged here; as a first feature, Thief is so formally and thematically complete that it feels like it could have been shot yesterday. (That it plays better than most of Mann's 21st-century films doesn't hurt.)
The Criterion release preserves the 1995 laserdisc commentary and three featurettes from the 2011 Blu-ray. In the first, Mann discusses his approach to the film with Scott Foundas; in the second, James Caan recalls the film, unfortunately with little more to add than that he had a great time doing it. (I'll bet!)
The third piece, in German with English subtitles, sits in with one member of Tangerine Dream, whose dreamy synth score for Thief (the group's second, after the equally revelatory music for Sorcerer) did as much as the movie's imagery to inform much of the cinematic vibe of the American '80s.
The film is now available to purchase direct from Criterion in a 4K/+Blu-ray edition. It is also available in separate Blu-ray and/or DVD editions.