691 Thief

[whaleallright]

Except that fantastic shot where Caan visits the guy fishing on the lake. And even there, you are trapped and surrounded by water, of course.

that reminds me of http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/p ... 596/island" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[domino harvey]

I love that Tumblr. One of my own (student's) contributions was pretty popular

[flyonthewall2983]

Arrow is putting out a limited edition of the movie with an HD version of the original theatrical cut, along with the Criterion version.

[AnamorphicWidescreen]

I watched the Blu Criterion of Thief earlier this year & was blown away. The picture quality & anamorphic print are gorgeous. For me, this Blu was literally like seeing the movie for the first time (the several other times I saw the film were on the older non-anamorphic DVD). This new release brings the film from merely good status to great status; it just goes to show how much a sub-par, non-anamorphic print can severely mar the quality of an otherwise excellent movie...

As to the film itself, excellent story & acting. And, the Tangerine Dream score is incredible - to the point that I can't imagine the movie having a score by anyone else. The neon lights, rain-soaked night streets, & early '80's sheer urban vibe of the film are all improved by their music.

One of the many scenes that really stood out here was the POV from the top of Caan's car, and the various neon lights/signs that are reflected on the hood as he's driving late at night....

Also enjoyed the brief jazz music in the Chicago blues bar where Caan meets Tuesday Weld for their date.

And, the ending was perfect:

SpoilerShow

Frank is very straight-forward & immediately cuts all family ties, then goes and destroys his bar & car dealership to remove all traces of his old life. This is all to set-up the superb confrontation at the very end.

[flyonthewall2983]

The ending may even be more awesome if you consider...

SpoilerShow

that in Heat, a throwaway line suggests that Pacino's character killed Frank shortly afterwards.

[David M.]

I watched the Blu Criterion of Thief earlier this year & was blown away. The picture quality & anamorphic print are gorgeous.

Scan from the negative, not a print (If it was a print it wouldn't look half as good!)

[Orlac]

Hell, I even like the rocktastic Craig Safan score used in Thief's climax.

One rumor I keep hearing floating around is that Michael wanted to use Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" (I'm assuming the guitar solo at the end specifically) for the end or (more likely) that he temped the scene with it. There's a bit of resemblance to it in Safan's piece, but strangely enough even more in Michel Rubini's "Graham's Theme" from Manhunter.

I wonder if this is why we never got a DVD or official soundtrack release for The Keep? The opening and closing music is TD covers of other's work - not something they normally do, so I expect it was Mann's idea. It's probably the most surreal thing I've ever seen/heard, ending a horror film with an electronic cover of a moving theme from a children's film!

[captveg]

Looks like this one is getting separate BD / DVD re-issues on 12/15/15

[flyonthewall2983]

I love Thief but I have to ask, have you ever seen Drive?

MANN: Yes.

Someone else must have asked you about this by now. There seems to be a loving homage.

MANN: I didn’t feel that when I saw Drive. I did read a piece about it, how he—I don’t know the director—but how he referenced one or two of my movies. There is a similarity but it has to do with internalization. It doesn’t have to do with form necessarily.

I was thinking of the use of music cues and the color pink. There were a few things. I was just wondering if you had ever seen it.

MANN: Thief has a different purpose. If somebody asked me, “What’s Thief to you?” To me, it’s a left-extensionalist critique of corporate capitalism. That’s what Thief is. What is interesting is that no critics in the U.S. got that, no critics in the U.K. got it. Every critic in France got it when the film came it. It was like this crazy kind of cultural litmus test or something....It received a lot of critical attention but people seeing it as, “Wait a minute, this is an analogy. It’s a very political and very thematic film.”

[oh yeah]

I know this has been discussed before here, including by myself, but I continue to be troubled by and uncertain about the teal-tinted transfer of this film that Mann supervised for Criterion. It looks good, but I just feel like some scenes in particular are way too blue, to the point that it seems odd Mann would have shot/color-corrected the movie that way in 1981. I first saw the film in its earlier and more natural-looking transfer, examples of which are on the old MGM DVD, the MGM-HD transfer that I saw on Netflix in 2012, and the recent Arrow blu-ray transfer of the Theatrical Cut (packaged along with Mann's teal-tinted version). For a comparison of the two versions, these stills are very good.

I suppose my uncertainty about the Criterion disc is caused at least partly by my familiarity with the warmer, more flesh-toned version that I saw first. But it's not just that. I feel that this must be revisionism to some degree. We know that Mann, as great as he is, is guilty of tinkering with his films endlessly and releasing versions on DVD/blu which are different from the original/theatrical cuts in degrees varying from the tiny (Public Enemies supposedly was changed from theater to DVD but I've never heard anyone notice how) to the moderate (Heat's blu-ray snipping the "detritus" line) to the extreme (this case, or Last of the Mohicans whose DC changes quite a bit even tho' there's no theatrical cut available to buy). So it is certainly not unlikely he would go for the blue look when doing the transfer today (a look much more common to his late 90s or digital-era films than Thief).

And that's my other point -- just like the Blade Runner 2007 Final Cut transfer sports a totally lifeless, teal-enshrouded look which is the opposite of the theatrical/DC versions with their bright golds and vivid colors and which is not common to films shot in 1982, I feel that this super-teal look of the Criterion transfer for Thief is not what it could have looked like in 1981. I'd love anyone who has actually seen an original 35mm print of the film to chime in, but I suspect that it would look closer to the MGM-HD/old DVD version. Or maybe somewhere in the middle. It may be erroneous to do so, but just looking at other decent transfers of crime/neo-noir type films from, say, 1978-1983, you see a lot of these natural skin tones present in the MGM-HD transfer -- or, certainly, you don't see everything de-saturated and colored over by teal, teal, teal. This seems to me a very 21st century phenomenon. Also compare The Jericho Mile, The Keep, Manhunter, etc. with the teal Thief and you can see that they, even at their most stylized, hew more to the naturalistic warmer flesh tones of the MGM-HD cut.

Actually, and pivotally, none of Mann's other films contain the same kind of coloring as the Criterion Thief, where the entire movie is bathed in a single color. Although he's infamous for bathing scenes in blue (Will's house in Manhunter, Neil's house in Heat, many Miami Vice scenes, and so on), these scenes are just that -- scenes. Mann color-codes his movies, he uses different elements and colors for different locations, scenes and characters; he doesn't just put one color over the whole canvas. All of his movies have this kind of visually dynamic look to them, from The Keep to Blackhat, they're quite colorful and hardly monochromatic like this Thief transfer is. So this is one of the biggest alarms going off in my head.

And yet if I watch the Criterion I can kind of forget about the colors, usually, and enjoy the film. Like I said, it looks very good for what it is. It's just when I look at the older transfer again, I can't believe that that isn't the more correct one. But who knows...

[bugsy_pal]

I share your concern. I think the teal transfer of the director's cut on the Criterion and Arrow sets is way over the top. I am not familiar with how the movie looked when it first came out. But I find the teal push to be ridiculous in the extreme. Whites look blue. The theatrical cut on the Arrow set looks a whole lot better to me.
I don't understand this trend in bluray transfers of older movies. Another offender is the US bluray of 'Desk Set'. And it seems that the Criterion 'Fantastic Planet' has also been similarly afflicted.

[oh yeah]

I share your concern. I think the teal transfer of the director's cut on the Criterion and Arrow sets is way over the top. I am not familiar with how the movie looked when it first came out. But I find the teal push to be ridiculous in the extreme. Whites look blue. The theatrical cut on the Arrow set looks a whole lot better to me.
I don't understand this trend in bluray transfers of older movies. Another offender is the US bluray of 'Desk Set'. And it seems that the Criterion 'Fantastic Planet' has also been similarly afflicted.

Indeed, it does seem that there is a general trend of making older movies more teal on blu-ray, and Criterion isn't immune to this at all. Yet I wonder how many of these examples are truly retrospective tinkering and how many are hewing to how the film really did look. For example, the Criterion of Badlands has a blue tint, subtle but unmistakable when you look at DVD Beaver and compare to the old DVD. But the picture is so superior overall, and this blue is so subtly integrated, that I feel like it could be what it looks like in 35mm. So it's hard to know, until you get to a case like this one which just seems SO over-the-top that I can't believe it's correct.

It's just unfortunate that getting a director or DP to supervise a transfer now doesn't ensure it will look faithful to the source, but rather brings up all sorts of problems... especially when you've got guys like Friedkin, Lucas, Mann, Scott, etc. who have shown themselves to be more interested in what they want the film to look like at the moment, not what it actually did look like on release.

[MichaelB]

It's been very well established, with hard evidence in the form of a "director-approved" laserdisc release that's consistent with the colour scheme of other video releases, that Thief looked nothing like that on its original release.

There's no way critics of the time would have failed to mention it (as they did mention the strong blues in Diva, a film with a far less radical colour scheme than Thief sports now). And if you look at the wording of Criterion's description of the transfer, every syllable has clearly been precisely chosen to simultaneously convey the impression that it's what Michael Mann wants while being very careful not to say that that's what it looked like in 1981.

Which is why Arrow's first decision when embarking on the project was not to make use of Michael Mann in any way, as he'd undoubtedly have vetoed the inclusion of MGM's existing master of the theatrical cut - which, given the controversy about the Criterion disc, Arrow very much wanted to include.

[tenia]

On the other end, the MGM-made master included on the Arrow release since magenta-pushed to death, so neither presentation looks like what it might have looked like theatrically.

[oh yeah]

Thanks for the input Michael. Now I'm fairly convinced that the Criterion is Mann's 2014 "take" on the film, and not the 1981 original. Have there been examples of this in the Collection quite so extreme? Looking at the MGM transfer, there's virtually no hint at all of the blue coloring we see on the Criterion. I feel a little almost cheated now, but it is great that Arrow included both transfers.

tenia, I'd probably agree the MGM transfer is perhaps a little too "warm" (mostly visible in the courtroom scene), but to me it doesn't have this unnatural, obviously wrong and specifically sickly look of the 2014 one. Again, this is where opinions from those who've seen the film on 35mm would be most welcome -- Michael, have you?

[tenia]

Have there been examples of this in the Collection quite so extreme?

One might say that their All That Heaven Allows BD color-scheme is quite different from what we saw so far, and Criterion themselves have expressed they may have gone too far on L'enfance-nue yellow color-timing.

[bugsy_pal]

I am very grateful about the fact that Arrow recognised this as an issue with their Thief release, and provided the theatrical cut.

I still find it mind boggling that some studios can screw with the colour-timing of their films in this way, and expect people not to notice. Maybe they want to make older films look a bit more like modern films, but take it too far.

[hearthesilence]

To be fair, this is Michael Mann, who's notorious for endlessly tweaking his films years, even decades after their release. It's impossible for him to let go. If he wants to change the color timing and is adamant about it, I'm sure the studio would rather just let him do what he wants and save themselves the headache of getting involved.

[MichaelB]

Yes, this was absolutely Mann's decision, nobody else's. Hence my comment about the very careful wording of the transfer info in the Criterion booklet.

[oh yeah]

Mann tinkering with the home video transfer is nothing new of course, but I don't think he's ever changed a film this radically before -- certainly not the look of the film, as he usually snips/adds music or whole scenes. It's not entirely surprising, but it's still disheartening seeing as the film gains nothing from this alien blue tint and looks much more fitting with a more natural palette (since the story itself is often taken from various real-life sources, and the film's overall tenor arguably closer to 70s pics like Straight Time or French Connection than it is to, umm, Suspiria... making the look of the thing super-stylized in the most superficially gaudy way kind of jars with that).

[hearthesilence]

FYI this is getting screened in 35mm at MoMI in Astoria (Queens, NY) this Sunday, July 11, at 4:00 p.m. and one more time on Saturday, July 17. Guessing it's the original color - I don't think 35mm prints were ever struck of the new color scheme, were there?

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I caught it on 35mm at the New Beverly years ago. Judging by the quality, it was either an archival print or studio print due to the richness of the color (no fading) and the quality of the print itself and probably not from Tarantino’s collection. If MoMI plays this same print, not only is it the original, more neutral color scheme, it’s also the original cut where the beach sequence and finale are edited slightly differently.

[dwk]

FYI this is getting screened in 35mm at MoMI in Astoria (Queens, NY) this Sunday, July 11, at 4:00 p.m. and one more time on Saturday, July 17. Guessing it's the original color - I don't think 35mm prints were ever struck of the new color scheme, were there?

Mann's personal answer print, which was used to time the color for this release. But no chance they are screening that.

[Drucker]

FYI this is getting screened in 35mm at MoMI in Astoria (Queens, NY) this Sunday, July 11, at 4:00 p.m. and one more time on Saturday, July 17. Guessing it's the original color - I don't think 35mm prints were ever struck of the new color scheme, were there?

Mann's personal answer print, which was used to time the color for this release. But no chance they are screening that.

I actually could have sworn new prints were struck from the recent restoration.