Thieves Like Us (1974)

Last Tuesday a new bells and wells anniversary edition of Bonnie and Clyde was released, and while I bought it with little thought, I’m afraid I haven’t gotten the opportunity to watch it yet. I probably wouldn’t have tackled it anyway, chances are if you’re interested enough in movies to read my humble blog, then you know Arthur Penn’s justifiably legendary masterpiece. Perhaps you also know Robert Altman’s similarly themed picture, Thieves Like Us, too, but the odds of you not are at least a bit greater.

This week was the first time I had seen Thieves Like Us and, having seen most of Altman’s films, you’d think I’d cease to be surprised by the very particular mojo that that American master was able to work in any given project. Altman’s intuitiveness, his humanity, and his versatility are all beyond reproach; the man excelled in virtually every genre, with the possible exception of the horror film, though a case can be made for the underrated The Gingerbread Man as almost belonging to that genre. Gingerbread Man is certainly the only Grisham movie with any real tang, with Francis Coppola’s appealing, leisurely The Rainmaker coming in second.

But I digress. Thieves Like Us is, in broad terms, Altman’s outlaw thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Edward Anderson, which also inspired the Nicholas Ray picture They Live By Night, which I have not yet seen. The film’s set-up is traditional to the genre: it’s Mississippi in the 1930s, and three criminals Chicamaw (John Schuck), T-Dub (Bert Remsen) and Bowie (Keith Carradine) escape prison and go on the lam, robbing banks and getting famous in the process. As with much of Altman’s work, the scenario is only a framework, and appears to be of little actual interest to the director. Thieves Like Us is a day dream of tangible, dialed down, lived in little nuggets, a story of the life the idealized criminal lives in between the idealized portions.

As with most outlaw pictures, Thieves Like Us revels in a certain conflict of sympathy. We’re lured into rooting for Chicamaw and Co., despite the fact that Chicamaw is a remorseless killer, and that the other two have no real problem going along with it so long as it continues to pad their pockets. Many of these films have a more innocent criminal, perhaps the male embodiment of the hooker with the heart of gold cliché, and in this film that responsibility falls to Carradine.

Keith Carradine is an unusual presence of largely 1970s American films that I’m sad to see gone, he’s a rare specimen: a man of star charisma and fascination blessed with a character actor’s lack of baggage. As memorable as Carradine has been in many pictures, many of them by Altman, I find it nearly impossible to associate those parts with whichever part I’m watching him in at the moment. It’s insane and impressive to think that this is the same man who would play a callow, self-absorbed heartbreaker in Altman’s Nashville the following year, or that this is the same man who appears in the most terrifying scene of Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller a few years before, or that this is the man who would duel Harvey Keitel a few years after all of these.

Carradine has an eerie malleable child-like sensuality: it can be creepy and manipulative one moment, authentically naive the next; and that serves his Bowie well. Bowie is one of the more convincing criminal naïfs I’ve seen in a crime picture: he feels less like a device to divide our sympathy and more like the kind of authentic contradiction that can confuse and break a man, and that contradiction powers the poetic final few images of Thieves Like Us.

The entire picture is poetic though, this is one of the most sensual pictures Altman has ever made, and that is saying something. Thieves Like Us captures that hazy daydream of Southern summer that children who grew up in that part of America probably find themselves fantasizing about from time to time. The film, as I mentioned earlier, is about fantasy, idealization, but it also finds the day to day surreality that many viewers will be able to recognize as being in sync with their own lives. This consistent ability to merge the stylized with the day to day might be the key to Altman’s genius, and the very thing I spent many, many paragraphs laboring over in my Short Cuts review last week.

Because the plot doesn’t matter, it’s the little episodes of loneliness, love, and connection that people will hold from Thieves Like Us, the connective tissue fading into distant memory. Bowie’s lonely night under the bridge, using a dog as a blanket, will linger, just as how quickly he pretends to disregard that dog when it wanders away will linger. The men drawing straws to decide the getaway driver when they’ve already decided the getaway driver will linger. T-Dub’s vaguely incestuous, strangely innocent love for the sister of his brother’s wife will linger. The drunken pretend heist with children as extras will linger.

And Shelly Duvall will linger, this is perhaps, next to The Shining and Popeye, her strongest work, and most certainly her fullest collaboration with Altman. Her elusive thin vulnerable flaky quality compliments Carradine wonderfully, and when they exchange that Altmanish shorthand movie dialogue they appear to be sharing our deepest movie dreams of instant understanding and attraction. When they kiss and make love for the first time as a radio broadcast of Romeo and Juliet plays in the background (the radio is a constant wry comment of the overstatement of most grand on the run movies) you feel, in a way that romantic films rarely get across, the odd perfection of their union. Carradine and Duvall lend the picture its broken heart, which in turn imbues that painterly Altman atmosphere with meaning.

The film doesn’t have the raw genre force of a Bonnie and Clyde (though Chicamaw has his moments) nor is it meant to. This is the picture for people who watched Bonnie and Clyde, or Gun Crazy, and wanted more of the scenes between the lovers in the motels, wondering what they wonder. This is a picture for curious people who want just a little bit more from a familiar genre. Thieves Like Us is, in short, a picture for the Robert Altman fan.

★★★★

Posted on March 29th, 2008 in Reviews, Crime, 1974 |

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