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Thieves Like Us (1974)

Posted By: Efgrapha

Date: 9 Feb 2015 19:49:54

Thieves Like Us (1974)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL, 16:9 (720x576) VBR | 01:57:45 | 7.83 Gb
Audio: AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps (each): English, French, German, Italian, Spanish
Subs: English HoH, French, German HoH, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish
Genre: Crime Drama, Romance

Released in the same 12-month span as Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) and Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (1974), Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us (1974) also tells a story of doomed outlaws in love. Depression-era criminals T-Dub (Bert Remsen), Chicamaw (John Schuck), and Bowie (Keith Carradine) band together to rob banks after escaping from a prison farm. Hiding out with Dee Mobley (Tom Skerritt) and Keechie (Shelley Duvall), and then with T-Dub's in-law Mattie (Louise Fletcher) between bank jobs, the three crooks are a loyal group, but increasingly sensational news accounts of their bloodless robberies force them to split up before their next crime. After a car accident, Chicamaw leaves the injured Bowie in Keechie's care. Love blossoms between the two naïfs, compelling Bowie to find a way to balance his bond to Keechie with his loyalty to his friends and the need for money to head for Mexico. With the law closing in, Bowie and Keechie learn the hard way about the finite honor among thieves, and the need to survive. Adapted from the same Edward Anderson novel as Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (1949), Altman, writers Calder Willingham and Joan Tewkesbury, and Altman's acting "regulars" reworked not just the classical crime movie but also the 1967 hit Bonnie and Clyde, presenting a resolutely unglamorous portrait of this Coke-swilling outlaw couple and the survivors' stoic drive to carry on. With the radio providing soundtrack and commentary, and the newspapers sending a veiled warning, Bowie and Keechie cannot escape the outside world, but they also cannot transcend it into the realm of myth. Rather than turning the crimes into stylish exploits, Altman's camera remains outside most of the robberies, observing the banal action on the street; he saves the slow-motion in the climactic shoot-out for the witnesses rather than the dead. His zoom shots hover between fragments of emotion and place, while they maintain their observational distance. Unfortunately for Altman (and Malick and Spielberg), audiences preferred outlaw glamour to genre-bending introspection. Still, with its deceptively laid-back tone, eye for expressive detail, and ear for ironic juxtaposition, Thieves Like Us takes its place in Altman's exceptional body of early 1970s work.

Synopsis by Lucia Bozzola, Allmovie.com

Like so much of his work, Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us” has to be approached with a certain amount of imagination. Some movies are content to offer us escapist experiences and hope we’ll be satisfied. But you can’t sink back and simply absorb an Altman film; he’s as concerned with style as subject, and his preoccupation isn’t with story or character, but with how he’s showing us his tale.

That’s the case with “Thieves Like Us,” which no doubt has all sorts of weaknesses in character and plot, but which manages a visual strategy so perfectly controlled that we get an uncanny feel for this time and this place. The movie is about a gang of fairly dumb bank robbers, and about how the youngest of them falls in love with a girl, and about how they stick up some banks and listen to the radio and drink Coke and eventually get shot at.

The outline suggests “Bonnie and Clyde,” but “Thieves Like Us” resembles it only in the most general terms of period and setting. The characters are totally different; “Bonnie and Clyde” were anti-heroes, but this gang of Altman’s has no heroism at all. Just a kindof plodding simplicity, punctuated by some of them with violence, and by the boy with a kind of wondering love. They play out their sad little destinies against two backdrops: One is the pastoral feeling of the Southern countryside, and the other is an exactly observed series of interior scenes that recapture just what it was like to drowse through a slow, hot summer Sunday afternoon, with the radio in the background and the kids playing at pretending to do Daddy’s job. If Daddy is a bank robber, so what?

The radio is constantly on in the background of “Thieves Like Us,” but it’s not used as a source of music as it was in “American Graffiti” or “Mean Streets.” The old shows we hear are not supposed to be heard by Altman’s characters; they’re like theme music, to be repeated in the film when the same situations occur. “Gangbusters” plays when they rob a bank, for example, even though the bank would have been closed before “Gangbusters” came on. That’s OK, because the radio isn’t supposed to be realistic; it’s Altman’s wry, elegiac comment on the distance between radio fantasy and this dusty, slow-witted reality.

At the heart of the movie is a lovely relationship between the young couple, played by Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall. They’ve both been in Altman movies before (just about everybody in view here is in his stock company), and it’s easy to see why he likes them so. They don’t look like movie stars. They share a kind of rangy grace, an ability to project shyness and uncertainty. There’s a scene in bed that captures this; it’s a two-shot with Keith in the foreground and Shelley, on her back, eyes to the ceiling, slowly exhaling little plumes of smoke. Nothing is said. The radio plays. Somehow we know just how this quiet, warm moment feels.

The movie’s fault is that Altman, having found the perfect means for realizing his story visually, did not spend enough thought, perhaps, on the story itself. “Thieves Like Us” is not another “Bonnie and Clyde,” and yet it does end in a similar way, with a shoot-out. And by this time, we’ve seen too many movies that have borrowed that structure; that have counted on the bloody conclusion to lend significance to what went before. In “Thieves Like Us,” there just wasn’t that much significance, and I don’t think there’s meant to be. These are small people in a weary time, robbing banks because that’s their occupation, getting shot because that’s the law’s occupation.

Altman’s comment on the people and time is carried out through the way he observes them; if you try to understand his intention by analyzing the story, you won’t get far. Audiences have always been so plot-oriented that it’s possible they’ll just go ahead and think this is a bad movie, without pausing to reflect on its scene after scene of poignant observation. Altman may not tell a story better than any one, but he sees one with great clarity and tenderness.

Review by Roger Ebert, Allmovie.com

IMDB 7,1/10 from 2 683 users

Wiki

Director: Robert Altman

Writers: Edward Anderson (novel), Joan Tewkesbury, Calder Willingham, Robert Altman

Cast: Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Louise Fletcher, Tom Skerritt