Mann has said that working on The Jericho Mile helped him understand what those years in prison would be like for Frank in Thief, what it would be like to live outside of society for so long and then return to it. While it may go down in the books as his first feature film, a lot of Thief’s DNA is found in his 1979 TV movie about a prison inmate who trains for the Olympics. It’s based on a book by the real-life thief John Seybold - The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar written under a penname - who served as the technical adviser on the set while he still had FBI warrants outstanding, before ending up back in a New Jersey prison in 1995. Thief is the story before the fall, or more accurately the story between the falls: it’s never simple in a Mann movie when you’re a broken guy trying to get fixed. It’s where Frank lets hope in, knowing that hope is an indulgence. It’s where you talk about your dreams and fears while the blurry blue and red lights of the city flash through the windows. In a Michael Mann movie the diner is where you come clean late at night over weak coffee. It’s him telling her where she fits into it and hoping she’ll come with him. It's also in a diner, Frank and Jessie sat in a booth, Frank laying out the life plan that he cut out of magazines in his prison cell and glued to a card he keeps in his wallet. Like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro sitting in a diner in Heat, the most memorable scene in Thief has no guns. He’s desperate to catch up with the rest of the world by doing one last job for prominent gangster Leo (Robert Prosky) with his partner Barry (James Belushi), and by cramming in the big life plans that everyone else had an extra decade to do. You gotta get to where nothin’ means nothin’.” But now time is all he can think about: his ailing prison father-figure Okla (Willie Nelson) doesn’t want to die in his cell, and Frank’s finally got something to live for in the family he's planning with cashier girlfriend Jessie (Tuesday Weld). “You gotta not give a fuck if you live or die.
“You gotta forget time,” he says, explaining how he made it through prison. James Caan stars as Frank, a thirtysomething, no-nonsense safe-cracking jewel thief who’s been out of the joint for four years after 11 behind bars. Released in 1981 with a Tangerine Dream score, Thief is the emotional blueprint for every film he’s made since. That thing men do in Michael Mann films, that obsessive and nihilistic act where they burn down their lives and bail when they feel the heat around the corner - that all arrived fully-formed in Thief, Mann’s first feature film as writer and director.
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