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Rating: The night, the neon lights, the luminous signs reflecting black rain. The sleeping city, skyscrapers like sentinels, the geometry of the city. Already at its first cry for the big screen, dated 1981, Michael Mann had in mind his entire cinematic epic: that formal and visual structure that has distinguished and continues to do so to this day, the cinema of one of the few remaining American masters.
Frank (a great James Caan) is a thief, one of the real ones, meticulous, precise, obsessive. 11 years in prison weren't enough to make him a different man. Crime attracts him, he can't help it. Not even the company of the beautiful Jessie (Tuesday Weld) will make him change his life. By day he sells cars, by night he steals jewels. But we know, the life of a criminal is profitable, but also dangerous...
With these premises of a classic crime movie (a more or less recurring plot in his filmography), Mann shapes a linear, extremely solid, essential debut. Mann's realism is already well defined: the theft sequences are extremely credible and totally devoid of those spectacles without which it seems impossible to shoot an action film nowadays. Nothing is left to chance and Mann's direction is perfect in balancing reality and narrative rhythm.
Beyond the aesthetic aspect, the true focal point in the career of good Michael, "Strade violente" should be remembered also and especially because it begins that set of themes that still define the work of the Chicago filmmaker today. The city (that Los Angeles also recurring in Mann's films) is a conglomerate of steel, lights, and buildings that engulf man, who is tiny and insignificant in front of it. The city is a real "other" character, both in this film and in other Mann's works. In the deep black of the night, Frank is the first in a long series of lonely, lost, wandering characters, a common trait with many other heroes and anti-heroes in Mann's cinema. The inner doubts of those who struggle to protect those they want (or would like) to love and those who know they are endangering their own and others' lives with their choices. The man lost in the modernity of the metropolis and in solitude. Defeated men, very similar to those of John Huston, another cinematic father of Michael Mann along with Sam Peckinpah. In this sense, the slow motions in the finale to underline moments of violence are a sort of homage to the great Californian director. Above all this, chiseling Mann's work even more, the music by Tangerine Dream, absolutely perfect to emphasize the night-time and expansive atmospheres of the film.
"Thief," the original title of completely different meaning compared to our "translation," is the first work for the big screen of one of the names capable of redefining and even revolutionizing American crime/thriller in recent decades. A film that is already as "cold" and emotionally icy as Mann's cinema has shown us in subsequent years. A cinematography that is an indispensable element of Mann's filmic structure. "Thief" isn't a masterpiece, but a great piece in Mann's career, the film that defines the boundaries within which much of his future work moves (though with some exceptions).
A small cult of the eighties.
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