With "Thives Like Us", director Robert Altman takes such gangster films as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "They Live By Night", removes the nostalgia and mythos typical of the genre, and inserts a tone of disinterested irony.
The film revolves around a gang of four (Chicamaw, T-Dub, Bowie and Keechie), but with its omnipresent Coca Cola bottles, billboards and radio advertisements, "Thieves Like Us" seems more interested in consumption. Altman's criminals are myth buyers, consumers who are not only products of the American Dream (co-opting their images from radio shows and newspapers) but wide-eyed dreamers who fuel it as well.
Like "McCabe and Mrs Miller", Altman thus seeks to ridicule The American Dream. While most gangster films mythologise/glorify their criminals, turning them into heroes, celebrities or wild freedom fighters, Altman is less interested in pitting capitalists against criminals and the proletariat as he is in showing that they are all ultimately part of the same all inclusive system. As such, The Depression is never invoked as the cause of our gang's behaviour. No, unlike Nicholas Ray's 1949 take on the story, in which Bowie and Keechie emerge as brooding rebels, rallying against the world of social convention, Altman's thieves are tricksters and comedians, content to play games of bank robbery in parody of the institutionalised thievery they see around them. Consider the film's title, which itself is a line spoken by T-Dub: "them capitalist fellows are thieves just like us!"
But the biggest character in "Thieves Like Us" is the Radio. The Radio functions as a myth tradesman, spewing fantasies of love, glamour and Home Appliances to a populace who struggle to afford its prices. Indeed, with the exception of Chicamaw, the ultimate goal of Altman's outlaws is to simply acquire enough wealth to live out their own banal interpretation of the American dream: a car, a house, a wife and an easy life. Consumption and acquisition are the goals.
And so Altman uses the Radio throughout "Thieves" to create brutally funny, but ultimately pathetic, contrasts between the illusions to which the characters cling and the prosaic reality of their lives.
Consider how T'Dub's sister listens to "The Shadow" whilst the thieves play cops-and-robbers in the living room or when the radio squeals "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" the moment Bowie walks into the kitchen and offers to help with the dishes. Similarly, during a love scene, a radio version of "Romeo and Juliet" plays in the background. The result is that, at every turn, Atlman short circuits or undermines the romanticism of the gangster. The gangster on screen is precisely not the myth, rather, like we the audience, just another exploited customer who buys into it.
Even the film's bank robberies, usually employed as action or thriller set pieces in similar films, is here treated with disinterest. During the first few robberies we don't even enter the bank. Instead, Altman's camera remains outside with a waiting car, "Gangbusters" and "Seabiscuit" playing on the radio. During the third robbery, when we finally get to go inside a bank, Altman retains his detachment, yet also shows us the swift brutality of the crime (a man is matter-of-factly shot). Meanwhile, on the radio, President Roosevelt addresses the American people on the subjects of prosperity and security. Here Altman has flipped the previous bank robberies. The internal has become external and the audio has jumped from flowery romance to stark reality.
Gangster films typically end in bloodshed, our heroes marching into history or myth, their bloody bullet perforated bodies gloriously collapsing in slow motion, but here Altman forces us to meditate on these rules. When his climactic shootout occurs, Altman immediately cuts to the gangster's wife (Keechie). She screams in slow motion whilst the bloodless violence occurs indoors, obscured by a rickety old house. In this sequence we see how Altman operates. All traditional iconography is rejected, whilst what's typically denied is given precedence. The norms are subverted while the spaces that exist between them are given room to breathe.
Reversals like this take place constantly throughout Altman's filmography. Enjoyment of his films thus depends on the audience having an intimate awareness of what is being subverted, deconstructed and undermined, which is why Altman is so despised. Those who like his films like him for what he doesn't do, what he sets up and then rejects, rather than what he ultimately does.
"Thieves" ends with the pregnant Keechie waiting at a train station. As she sits, an evangelist - another charlatan - speaks on an overhead radio, delivering a passionate Resurrection speech to farmers and labourers about the need to bear burden and turmoil in silence; the poor need to learn to be poor for the "greater good". Keechie then strikes up a conversation with a woman sitting next to her. "My child," Keechie says, "will not be named after his father." There will thus be no resurrection. Keechie carries her burden in silence, refusing to let Bowie's death be mentioned and mythologized. But as she stands up and climbs the staircase, now an ordinary woman lost in a large and faceless crowd, we know what Keechie (Shelly Duvall) has become something else. She is another naive consumer, waiting to be seduced by the prophets of the airwaves. Significantly, this is exactly what happens within her next two collaborations with Altman. You might say that Duvall's character in "3 Women", a vacuous slave to social and corporate trends, is Keechie all grown up.
8.5/10 - Altman had a remarkable string of masterpieces during the 70s, films like "MASH", "McCabe", "Thieves" and "3 Women" defining him as one of the most idiosyncratic and prolific directors of the decade. Worth two viewings.
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