The sheer delusion of James Caan’s character in ‘Thief’
Long before Michael Mann stunned the crime cinema world with 1995’s Heat, he announced himself as a key player of the genre with his 1981 feature film debut Thief. Starring James Caan in the lead role, Mann’s debut was released to widespread critical acclaim and featured an original score written by electro-prog pioneers Tangerine Dream.
The neo-noir heist thriller, inspired by the memoir The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar by former thief Frank Hohimer, follows an ex-convict, jewel thief and professional safecracker, Frank, who tries to escape his former life with the hope of starting a family with a cashier he has recently started dating.
Thief left quite an impression on many figures in the industry, including Quentin Tarantino, who once noted, “When Michael Mann came out with Thief, with James Caan, he blew out minds. It was like, ‘Roll over, John Carpenter. Tell Walter Hill the news,’ you know? It was a new guy out there on the crime film scene who wrote great gritty dialogue, and he had a wonderful visual sense.”
Mann’s film indeed possesses impressive visual prowess, with some excellent cinematography and framing. However, at the centre of Thief’s brilliance is Caan’s portrayal of Frank, a man so desperately tied to the world of crime that he suffers severe delusions by believing that he can ever escape from it. After all, the movie’s title does everything to suggest that what Frank is/was, he will always inevitably be.
Frank is undoubtedly a flawed character with personal and professional issues aplenty. While his vision of a “normal life” with a wife and child is endearing, the way he goes about achieving it is rather abhorrent. Not only does he physically grab the woman he desires to be his wife and shove her into his car, but he also thinks that by performing one last job, he will finally be satisfied and will be able to live out a life of happiness, free from the pressures of professional criminal existence.
Naturally, though, the underworld has a stranglehold on Frank and even though he tries to tell Leo, a powerful and ruthless mob boss, about how the final job will go down, he is naïve in his obliviousness to the all-consuming nature of his work. Again, there’s a pity for Frank in that he really does seem to believe his delusions and genuinely wants the simple life, but his insistence on one final job is ultimately his undoing.
Then we throw into the fact that rather than having a child with Jessie, his hopeful bride-to-be, Frank thinks it suitable to illegally adopt a baby boy sourced from Leo, which again proves his reliance on the criminal underworld and his inability to escape from it. Eventually, as the film draws to its finale, Frank realises his delusion and metaphorically tears down his vision of a normal life by blowing up his house, having sent Jessie and their purchased new baby away to safety.
In turning his attention to retribution against Leo, Frank makes a final act that seals his eternal condemnation of the crime world by killing Leo and his associates. Without his home, legitimate businesses and possibly his wife and child, Frank is, therefore, inextricably linked to the life of a thief, proving that even with genuine desire, one might be forced to suffer their deepest delusions eternally.
