THIEF (125')
by Michael Mann
cast: James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Willie Nelson, Jim Belushi, Robert Prosky, Tom Signorelli
USA, 1981
Restored version in 4k in 2025 by The Criterion Collection
Print courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
through Park Circus
Introduced by Adriano De Grandis
Though the definition of “neo-noir” feels too restrictive for many of the films considered to be representative of this category, in Thief the formula acquires the characteristics of an artistic project. In his first feature film for the big screen (after the made-for-television The Jericho Mile), Michael Mann demonstrates such a thorough understanding of the genre (and of classic cinema) as to transform and reshape it through its deepest mechanisms. The melancholy of the thief in the title of the film is a mix of disillusionment and existentialism destined romantically to make happiness impossible. In James Caan he found an actor who expressed himself through a completely original use of the body and gesture. Then there is the urban space, so skilfully deconstructed (only in Collateral would Mann achieve these heights again) as to look like a manifesto of contemporary urban photography, a metropolis of intense solitude and nocturnal bewilderment, steeped in danger and individualism. The abstraction is absolute, heightened by a soundtrack (by Tangerine Dream) which made history for its surprising experimental electronics and rhythms. This passion for geometric patterns, the doors, the windows, the streets, the architecture, the labyrinths never dims the light of a fundamental humanism, fuelled by ancient sentiments (love, friendship, the desire to put down roots) in a universe that ignores or eliminates them within the context of a cold criminal capitalism that has become unstoppable. As a neo-noir, therefore, Thief updates the dark vision of the fate of the classics (and those of the polars) to a modern, hermetic and synthetic aesthetic, in which human passions remain intact, only rarer and more unexpected. This was the early 1980s in which – together with the new languages of fashion and videoclips – auteurs such as Mann, Schrader (American Gigolo), Friedkin (Cruising), Coppola (One From the Heart), rewrote the surface of the images. (Roy Menarini)
