Michael Mann’s Thief received mixed reviews and only modest box-office success when it opened in 1981, but it has since become acknowledged as a classic. This is nothing new for Mann, some of whose films have taken years, even decades, to find their audience. But the cosmic influence of Thief — which came out on 4K from the Criterion Collection earlier this month, and is among a collection of Mann films streaming on the Criterion Channel right now — was felt not long after its release. With its waves of electronica, its foregrounding of style, its pendulum swings between romanticism and alienation, the movie turned out to be one of the harbingers of what many deemed the MTV aesthetic.
But there is more to Thief’s achievement. Mann saw the film as a decidedly political work, showing how an independent, high-end thief, Frank (James Caan), was co-opted and exploited by the notorious Chicago Outfit. Frank, who has spent much of his life in prison, initially resists these mob bosses’ overtures. But he’s got a plan for his life, and it involves marrying Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a woman he’s just started dating and who agrees to start a family after an unforgettable late-night coffee-shop conversation (one of several long, iconic coffee-shop scenes that dot Mann’s oeuvre). Which means that now, all of a sudden, Frank needs more money. So, he agrees to work with the Outfit in order to get bigger scores. These men in turn try to run his life and keep most of his share, so they can invest it in new shopping mall developments. Mann has always said that Thief’s central dynamic of labor and exploitation could easily be transposed to other workplaces. Frank effectively quotes Karl Marx’s labor theory of value when he tells Leo (Robert Prosky), the alternately avuncular and demonic Outfit boss who seeks to control him, “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor.” When I interviewed him in 2023, Mann noted that he saw that line pop up on pickets during that year’s WGA-SAG strike.
This is also why the contemporaneous criticisms of the picture as style over substance ring so hollow today. Watching Thief, yes, we’re naturally mesmerized by its nocturnal compositions, its lovely sense of melancholy, its almost abstract robbery sequences filled with sparks and flames bursting off steel vaults. But there are emotional, political, and narrative undercurrents at work here. “You’re making big profits from my work, my risk, my sweat,” Frank tells Leo. And we see Frank’s work, his risk, his sweat: The film spends an unusual amount of screen time portraying how he and his partners prepare for their scores, gathering and building the right equipment, evading alarm systems and police; then it spends even more time showing the jobs themselves, as these men lug giant pieces of equipment (all real tools used by the professional thieves Mann hired as consultants on the film) into bank vaults and exhaust themselves drilling holes in safes. Mann dwells on these scenes not just because they’re spectacular and hypnotic to watch — they are — but because he wants to convey the fact that this is all, in fact, labor. By the time Frank sits down in front of his handiwork to take a deep breath and light a cigarette, we feel his exhaustion, his relief, his sense of a hard job well done. And, of course, we feel his frustration when the yield of that labor is taken from him.
I’ve spoken to Mann a few times over the years about his work. But we’d never really gone deep on Thief specifically. The occasion of this 4K release seemed like the right time to do so. (And yes, I did ask him about Heat 2.)
Thief was such a visually arresting film for its era. Was there a lot of visual research you did for it — films, photographs, things like that?
Not
affecting the visualization. The visualization of it was: How do I
want you to feel about Frank relative to the city he’s operating
within, the circumstances of his life? I wanted you to see and feel
that city from within his perspective. For Frank, Chicago is not this
flat city built on the Great Plains. It’s a three-dimensional
matrix. It’s a maze that he has to operate in and also decode and
pursue. So, I took advantage of what Chicago looks like when it
rains. Because as the black streets get reflective and the lights
reflect off them, you feel like you’re driving through a tunnel,
not like you’re driving on top of a surface. We wet down the
streets at night so they would be reflective, and that became the
camera perspective, as well as him having that black ’71 Eldorado
and seeing the lights reflected all over the car as he moved through
it.
This sense of him moving through a tunnel also highlights his loneliness, which feels crucial to the fact that he then falls in love.
I
don’t know that he’s lonely as much as alone. He views life very
much as an outsider, and he’s aware of it. I thought of him as a
certain kind of conventional character in literature, which is the
wild child. Somebody who, because of his circumstances, has grown up
outside of society. In Frank’s case, he has been in prison from
when he was 18 to sometime in his late 30s. He didn’t have TV. Then
he’s suddenly dropped into this society and its mores, the values,
the culture — this matrix of life as it is in 1980. How does he
prepare himself? Who
will I be? How should I conduct myself? What should my life be? So,
he’s using sources like magazines and newspapers to put together
that collage. Okay,
I’m going to have a car. What kind of car should I have? I’m
going to have a house. What kind of house should I have? Should I
have a wife? Should I not have a wife?
He also, like a lot of convicts that I met, used the time in prison to read. It was reading and researching how life is for an extremely pragmatic purpose: “Why should I not commit suicide and just end this?” That goes back to experiences I had with some convicts in Folsom when I was casting The Jericho Mile. I had guys quoting Immanuel Kant to me. One guy was quoting the labor theory of value. He had become a Marxist and a Buddhist at the same time, because he needed to get an answer to the question: “What is my life to myself?” This was a guy with a sixth-grade education. They’d go into libraries and say, “I’m doing time. Give me a book on time.” I cast 28 convicts in roles in The Jericho Mile. There’s a guy I tried to cast who said, “No, man, I like what you said you’re doing here and everything, but I can’t be in your movie.” I asked him why. And he said, “Because if I allowed myself to be in your movie, I would allow you to appropriate the surplus capital of my bad karma.” And he wasn’t being cute. Inherent in that answer was the fact that he saw the time he was doing as his labor, and that the reason he was doing time was because he had bad karma in the first place, i.e., he got caught.
This idea of labor runs throughout Thief. It’s there in the opening scene: You show that the work Frank does really is work. The heavy equipment, the long hours, the patience required to stand there and drill a hole forever. I’ve seen a million heist movies, but I’ve never seen one that actually says: This is someone’s labor.
By
the way, the prep they do is kind of like how you make a movie, in a
funny way. How efficiently you prepare, research, plan what you’re
going to do. How are you going to bypass the alarm systems, how are
you going to go in, how are you going to monitor the date, the time.
If it’s something in the northwest side of Chicago, it would be
great to do it during the daytime, during a Cubs game because all the
cops are at Wrigley Field. What’s the composition of the safe?
Because safe manufacturers are very clever in what they do. You can’t
just drill a hole through a piece of metal. You have to know where
the lockbox is. You have to know how this particular safe
manufacturer put different layers of metals within what you want to
drill through, because there’ll be some that are designed to bind
the drill. There’ll be others that are very hard. There may be a
glass wall on the inside that if you shatter it, it sets off a
secondary alarm that you didn’t know about.
And among guys who are proficient like that, it is labor. It is work. The detectives who go after them, who are really good, are respectful of those thieves who are good. It doesn’t affect their drive and their motivation to intercept them one iota. Charlie Adamson is in the movie as a detective. He’s the guy who says to Frank, “Why you got to come on like such a stiff prick? We got ways here to round off the corners.” Charlie in real life is the guy who killed Neil McCauley in 1963, and who told me the story of his meeting with McCauley, which I used as the basis of the relationship in Heat.
John Santucci, who was a professional thief, was a source for me in Thief. All the burglary tools that we had weren’t props. They were John’s burglary tools. Later, he became a continuing character on Crime Story. But the most fundamental realization I had from my contact with Santucci was a very profound understanding that his life is just like yours and mine. He’s got domestic concerns. He’s got two kids, he’s got some marital issues with his wife. I had to liberate myself from the inherited stereotype and archetype of who thieves are. Who is he as a person? What’s he thinking? What’s he feeling? What’s his outlook on the world? All of that led to the construction of the screenplay.
Santucci and Chuck Adamson were both advisers on the film, along with other people who had been thieves and some who had been cops. What was that like, having all those people on a film set together?
It
was hilarious! First of all, they all knew each other, even though
they were on opposite sides of the fence. So, you know, “You pain
in the ass, we were there when you were taking down the Wieboldt’s
store,” and “We’ve been trying to get you for …” This is
some of the dialogue that was happening in bars over drinks. It was
very Chicago, if you like. It was very Brechtian in a way, because
Chicago is a very Brechtian city, at least it was then.
Some of them, like the guy who played Leo’s number two, Bob Prosky’s number two, the one with red hair, Bill Brown, he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, I don’t know, 20, 30 years after the movie. I don’t think they ever got him. And then Dennis Farina and I connected on the work in Thief, and we became very close friends the rest of our lives until he died tragically a number of years ago. He worked with Santucci when we were doing the pilot and then the Crime Story series.
What do you mean when you say Chicago was a Brechtian city?
Chicago
had a kind of democratic corruption when I was growing up in the
1950s. Everybody had the inalienable right to have a $20 bill parked
behind their driver’s license when they got stopped running a red
light. You didn’t have to be Standard Oil of New Jersey to round
off the corners, in other words. In the same way that every alderman
had X number of jobs they could hand out, kind of no-show jobs —
you work two days, you get paid for five. If there was a blizzard
Wednesday night and your street wasn’t plowed by nine o’clock in
the morning on Thursday, you called your alderman and a plow was out
there in 30 minutes. There was a certain healthy, I think, urban
cynicism about the systems, and yet the systems worked, in a funny
way. Well, some of the systems worked. There was institutionalized
racism. And Chicago was also extremely Balkanized. The only city with
more Poles in it than Chicago was Warsaw. So, you had Polish bakeries
and everything else. Same thing with the Ukrainians, the Irish, the
southwest side and everything.
The coffee-shop conversation with Tuesday Weld is one of the greatest dialogue scenes ever. Obviously, these kinds of conversations show up in other films of yours. What’s the secret to creating a long dialogue scene like that?
I
asked myself the question, Can
I really tell an entire story within this scene? It’s
one reel, back when filming movies used to be on reels — a
ten-minute-long scene. And so right in the middle of this feature
film, I stop and tell this entire origin story. There was some risk
inherent in it to me. I was concerned about whether it would work. It
was key to understanding who Frank is, his desperation, and these two
untethered lives coming together.
That particular booth is a booth I sat in with the woman who became my wife. One time when I was driving her home, we stopped for a cup of coffee and sat there and talked for, I don’t know, probably six hours. This coffee shop on a span over the Tri-State Tollway, I don’t even know if it was a Fred Harvey’s at the time. And something about the way the cars were constantly moving, that became visually analogous to a bloodstream. Life’s moving through. People are going places. There’s motion all the time. All these myriad lives that are passing you by, coming towards you, going away from you, and you’re in a span over it. And he’s telling her in the most urgent way about this yearning that he has. And off of it, he elects to make a mistake: He drops a coin and tells Leo he’ll work with him at the end, which is the ironic twist.
There’s another thing about this scene that really strikes me now. Caan is showing Weld his vulnerability, he’s opening up in this really sincere way. And conversely, she’s showing him how tough she really is. There’s that great moment where she says, “Where were you in prison? Pass the cream, please.” The back-and-forth, the collision of these two characters, develops in a fascinating way throughout. Was that all scripted?
It’s
totally scripted, absolutely. You have this recounting of one’s
life. “Here’s who I’ve been, and this is why I am the way I am
right now and I want you to be part of what I’m trying to
construct, which is outside all the societal norms and values. But
the two of us can have something.” From the point of view of
writing it, when you’re faced with that, you start thinking there
needs to be some other things going on for it to stay real. It can’t
decay into speechifying. It has to
be dramatic. So, you’re looking for those helpful impediments to
the flow of the narrative so that you have not a leitmotif, but a
micro motif. “You’re having coffee?” “Pass the cream.”
“Pass the sugar.”
When I was writing TV, when I first began as a writer, I used to work at an all-night restaurant in Los Angeles called Canter’s. I used to sit in a booth. Sometimes, I would wind up sitting there for 24 hours drinking a lot of coffee. I became very friendly with all the waitresses. There was a fantastic waitress named Jeannie who put two sons through medical school working at Canter’s and playing poker in Gardino. She was kind of a favorite, so I brought her out from L.A., and she’s the waitress who shows up with the cream. When she says, “What’s wrong with it?” And he says, “What’s wrong with it? It’s cottage cheese.”
This scene helps develop these two characters, but it also serves a specific narrative purpose. Once he realizes that this woman is willing to start a family with him, he decides to go to Leo and accept his offer of working for the Outfit, because now he needs the big scores — and then it really becomes a story of labor exploitation.
One
of the fundamental things in Frank’s profession as a thief,
particularly in Chicago and particularly in those years, is: “What
should my relationship with organized crime be, with the Chicago
Outfit?” That comes from my research. I talked to professional
thieves about their relationship. Ideally, as a professional thief,
you don’t want to be hooked up with the Chicago Outfit because
you’ll have to down your merch to Outfit fences, and you’re going
to get 30 cents on the dollar instead of 50 cents on the dollar. And
you’ll be asked to do things you may not want to do. You don’t
want to be working for the man. You don’t want to be an employee.
You’ve said in the past that American critics didn’t really get the political and ideological aspects of Thief. Why do you think that was?
I
can’t explain why, but it is a cultural perspective, if you like.
It wasn’t the case in Europe. In Europe, the film was perceived as,
“Oh, this is about the labor theory of value.” Frank quotes it.
I wonder if in the U.S. we sometimes shy away from political readings of films, almost because we’re afraid to touch it. And in Europe, people understand the politics latent in the drama.
Yeah.
I lived in Europe. I went through graduate film school for two years
in London in the late ’60s. I’m very much a product of the ’60s,
so the film has an overtly left perspective. I wrote the film in the
late ’70s, and here I am in 1980 doing it, so it was not very far
removed from all the issues that everybody was living through in the
’60s and ’70s.
What are your memories of James Caan? You guys did the commentary on the film back when it first came out on Blu-ray, and it sounds like you really got along.
He
was terrific. He was down for the cause. He wanted to master all the
skill sets that his character should have. Because he knew that it
would affect his speech. He knew it would affect how he picked up a
glass. It would affect everything. Most importantly, the fact that
you can do all these things in real life imbues you with a
confidence. For example, when you feel an inner rage and something’s
about to come out, but then because of the scene, you’re supposed
to repress it, but you then also have to figure out, “How am I
going to get out of this office having pulled a .45?” The wariness
of it. Everything about what he’s doing is informed by the fact
that Jimmy could do every single thing in reality that his character
could do.
Any good film, we’re connected to it and moved by it; we’re in the scene with the actors. The heart of that connection is that we’re very smart animals, and every part of our brain is believing what we’re seeing, because of the authenticity. That other human being, James Caan in this case, he is Frank. It means all the training that Jimmy did, where he was drilling safes. We did time out at a place called Gunsite, Arizona, with a guy named Jeff Cooper on training with weapons. Jimmy could really handle himself. He’d been a college football player and everything, he was very athletic. He was a very tough guy to begin with.
Your work is on the Criterion Channel right now, to coincide with the 4K release of Thief on Criterion. Is there a film of yours you wish more people would see and discover and appreciate?
For
me, it’d be The
Insider.
For myself, that was very challenging. It’s a tense psychological
drama that takes place in two hours and 45 minutes. The ambition of
it is the challenge: Can I engage and deliver the intensity that
Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman lived through? In Lowell Bergman’s
case, your life’s work may be trashed, and you may be excluded. In
Jeffrey Wigand’s case, with the assault upon you and your family,
you’re reduced to the edge of suicide. So, it’s a psychological
assault by your adversaries, and it’s a mortal threat. Both in the
construction of the screenplay that Eric Roth and I wrote, but also
directorially and cinematically, how was I going to bring the
audience into the intensity of that experience? Naturally, it was a
wonderful place to push myself into. Personally, I felt that I pushed
myself onto a frontier, and I always feel that those are very healthy
places to be.
It seems that over the past 15 or so years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in your films — even with some that weren’t seen as successes at the time of their release. Obviously, I think the movies are great, but why do you think people are connecting with your work now?
I
don’t like to speculate. I think it may have to do with what’s in
the work. I’m not a journeyman director; I’d like to be, because
I love shooting. But I put a lot into a film, and so I think
sometimes they have layers of relating. They’re not simple. They
may be totally accessible — not all my films, but some of them may
be accessible just as something that’s going to flow, just going to
occupy you for two hours, or two hours and 45 minutes in the case
of Heat and Insider —
but there’s also a lot there, because my ambition was to put a lot
of depth into it. I probably shouldn’t even be answering this
question to tell you the truth.
Can I ask what’s going on with Heat 2?
I
just finished the screenplay and handed in the first draft.
In a case like this, who do you hand your screenplay in to?
In
this case it was Warner Brothers. Any more than that, I can’t talk
about. But it’s an exciting project.
There is a short scene in the 2023 movie Ferrari that I have not stopped thinking about since I saw it. It comes just moments after we meet the titular carmaker: a train pulls into a station and a man walks off. He has a leather duffel bag, tailored clothing, sunglasses. He glances in one direction, then the next, walking steadily, with precision, trailed by several attendants equally impressive in outfit, gait, and demeanor. None of these men looks at anyone else. They look instead at the horizon, walk patiently toward it, as if merely tolerating the compromises of mass transportation.
The man is the Maserati driver Jean Behra, an awed onlooker reports into a telephone. This piece of information travels through several nodes: we watch it run like lightning through the Italian countryside—this man is the Maserati driver Jean Behra. A car arrives to pick Behra up from the station—driven by men, more men—but still no one acknowledges one another. They drive away. Behra is introduced not as some supernatural visitation but as a mechanical force within this universe, noticed intensely by others but impassively by the camera—it doesn’t make a fuss of it. It responds as coolly as Behra’s colleagues and handlers do. Act like you’ve been here before. Act like you know how the Maserati driver Jean Behra lives, works, moves.
He is a man beheld by Michael Mann. He is a Mann man.
I held on to this image for weeks after watching Ferrari, thinking about the way Michael Mann presents men. Perhaps, I thought, I need a new duffel bag. The director became famous in the 1980s for a string of crime dramas across television and film. He helmed the early serial Crime Story (1986–88), pitched in scripts on Starsky & Hutch (1975–79), and then served as executive producer on the first two seasons of the stylish hit Miami Vice (1984–90). Of his three feature films from that decade, his first, 1981’s Thief, is the best, one of film history’s clearest debuts-as-thesis-statements, up there with Breathless, Eraserhead, Blood Simple. The first time you see the titular thief, he is hoisting a drill the size of a dishwasher against a vault. Synthesizers churn like ambient heat. Chicago is a neon latticework of fire escapes against which the thief, steadily, works. That is more or less all the thief in Thief does: work. The work is a means to an end—an exit—a better life, a family, a suburban estate. He visualizes this dream on a collage assembled in jail, manifesting what awaits on the other side of not just prison walls but also the years of labor to ensue upon his release.
That he would thieve again, outside the clink, was never in question. The thief perceives his skills as his identity, his identity as an economic actor. “I’m a thief!” he screams at the waitress he’s attempting to enlist as the wife for this vision. “[L]et’s cut the mini-moves and the bullshit and get on with this big romance.” It works. She stands in the glass frame of his dream house and they talk about children, adoption, retirement. It falls apart, mostly, by the end of the movie—not because the thief did anything wrong by dreaming but because he trusted a mid-level crime boss as the means to achieve it. When the thief finds this well-fed broker skimming money from him, “reinvesting” his earnings against his wishes, the thief seethes, “You’re making big profits from my work, my risk, my sweat. But that is okay, because I elected to make that deal. But now, the deal is over. I want my end, and I am out.”
“Why don’t you join a labor union?” the broker spits, mask slipping.
“I am wearing it,” the thief says, referring to his gun and standing up as if to use it. Various men assemble around him. “My money in 24 hours,” the thief retorts before leaving, “or you will wear your ass for a hat.”
The movie ends with the thief blowing the crime boss’s brains out in an otherwise soundless suburban living room. Then the thief walks off into the night, wounded but alive.
I haven’t had a boss for a couple of years, in part because of how much I sympathize with the thief in this regard. There’s a certain position you can get to where you can see the talent for what it is, the way owners and administrators siphon from it. Freelancing is hard—terrifying if you have a mortgage, a family, a middle-class upbringing. It helps to be a little pathological about things, to watch Michael Mann movies as if you yourself had something to learn from their protagonists.
The thief is the first great Mann man. But across five decades, a dozen features, and multiple TV shows, the writer-director would continue to refine, challenge, and build upon the definition. That the Mann man is a consummate professional goes without saying. It is assumed. The Mann man is an expert who travels only with other experts, working alongside handlers who understand his stark gifts. After the thief in Thief, few mess with bosses, working for themselves instead. Some men support the Mann man, stoically awaiting directives, while others—journalists, crooked cops, bosses, lesser cons—leach. Things do not end well for the parasites.
The Mann man attracts both types as he plies his trade, sometimes terrible, always profitable. When a man is this good at his job, money flows organically toward him not just as a function of the skill set but also as an almost causal response to the stimulus of his talent. Because it is not merely a job; it is a calling. It is a will to greatness. “Take pride in being good at what you do?” a high-powered lawyer asks a taxi driver as he skillfully navigates Downtown Los Angeles. “I am the greatest,” Muhammad Ali replies. The line between the two isn’t that far, in Mann’s estimation. We sometimes see Mann men working beneath their station—doing menial work, washing dishes—but it is presented as an error in the order of things, clocked and rectified by titular Mann men immediately. The vocation is the title of the movie is the Mann man. The thief in Thief, the manhunter in Manhunter (1986), the insider in The Insider (1999). The Mann man dresses immaculately, in tailored suits, wristwatch gleaming. He has a temper, a capacity for violence. Many live in icy minimalism aside an electric blue ocean that they gaze over in the predawn morning, a woman in bed nearby, warm, still sleeping. He will not say goodbye to her before he leaves for work. He will come home late. He will not respond to questions about where he’s been. He has been working.
He does almost nothing for fun. The only thing a Mann man ever does that seems like fun is go to a nightclub, and even then, it is absolutely for work—to make a phone call, to stage a handoff in a backroom, to kill a man. He drinks but never too much. We do not ever see him sleep, but we may see his dreams: icy and perfect visions of the future or the past, of work or what work might yield.
Most people agree that Heat (1995) is Mann’s best movie. It’s certainly a turning point for him, a culmination of years of work in which all his stylistic throughways—dreamlike soundscapes, ruthlessly logical plotting, roughneck philosophical reveries—coalesce into something operatic, epochal. It’s Mann’s second crack at the story of an L.A. detective tracking a crew of highly professional thieves as they prepare for a bank heist, and the first iteration, the 1989 TV movie L.A. Takedown, plays it as straight as that description sounds. Heat goes galactic. No less than three superstar actors get top billing; all play Mann men, Al Pacino in particular responding to the prompt with such over-the-top swagger that he risks rupturing the keening romanticism at the movie’s core.
But it’s right, it’s just right. The film is big enough. Robert De Niro, opposite him, is the first to play a Mann man small, simmering, constrained—a mode that ensuing leads would take cues from. Val Kilmer goes hot with it—tempestuous, young. Part of Heat’s legacy is its scale. Thief had one Mann man, Manhunter and Miami Vice a handful, but in Heat Mann assembles the greatest task force of noticeable Guys in film history, a semi full of Guys T-boning the armored truck of your action-movie cortex: there’s Sizemore, there’s Haysbert, there’s Studi, there’s Trejo (playing a man named Trejo). They all play Mann men, and they keep coming. You are still reeling from the mid-film introduction of Tom Noonan—you are still intoning “Tom Noonan” into an empty room because you saw him, you recognized Tom Noonan on the screen—when Jon Voight (!) places a phone call to William Fichtner (!!) and his bodyguard is Henry Rollins (!!!). This all happens in the same scene. These are devastating body blows to the action-movie viewer, from which recovery is impossible. The film itself is a redefinition of the form, its apex, but so singularly stylized as to be alien. Emotional turning points are set to surrealist trance music; De Niro and Pacino first lock eyes through a security system’s ghoulish night vision relay, dead silent. It has the largeness of myth, of shared hallucination.
And yet, all these men are mere chorus to the two Mann men at the center. The film’s famous diner scene, in which the two storied leads sit across from each other for the first time and discuss their careers as peers, is great talking to great, Mann to Mann, their eye movements and asides signaling things only the other can understand. What the work has meant. What it has cost them. That this climactic meeting doubles as a venue for the actors themselves meeting face-to-face (Mann filmed it, famously, in one long take, with minimal rehearsal) is just one way in which the director tells the viewer that the work transcends the frame. The actors are part of it, you are part of it. He is speaking to you as they speak to each other: mature, knowing, wry, respectful. Obsessive. To watch a Mann movie is to be swept into a seductive cosmos of pure tradecraft, of cops who respect robbers, of hackers nodding knowingly at lines of code. Of the oblivion men will seek to be the best at something, to succeed within a shadow ecosystem in which the craft and the skill are almost removed from the man, larger than him, drawing him necessarily and mechanically into conflict with the other players in his field.
The title of the movie is spoken by De Niro—“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner”—but the heat the movie evokes is something larger than any one man or agency. All of Mann’s movies gesture toward some larger system, an economy of information and power, unknowable in its vastness. Even Manhunter suggests a psychic network accessible only to murderers and deviants. Mann men probe the borders, valuations, and trade-offs of their contextual systems. They meet to exchange information in empty vistas of logistical infrastructure. Bleating mechanical light, steam, night air. Under planes and overpasses. Heat begins on a train; it ends after a terse shoot-out amid shipping containers, planes taking off and landing overhead. The two Mann men finally grasp hands as one dies, consummating an understanding arrived at in the diner. Pacino looks off into the night sky. God moves over the face of the waters, but men only float for so long.
After Heat, Mann set about dismantling the conventions of the very genre he had perfected. His next film, The Insider, is my favorite of his, turning a tobacco exec’s attempts to expose the industry’s malevolence into a three-hour symphony of men in suits snarling at each other. I can credibly say it changed my life, presenting journalism as a vocation in which information can be secured, surfaced, and presented as a tool of opposition to power. I was in eighth or ninth grade at the time and knew immediately that I wanted to devote my life to the practice that would be systematically weakened and dismantled almost entirely by the time I graduated college. Ah! Well, nevertheless. Viewed today, it’s quaint to watch information flow through the physical world via shoe-leather journalism, appointment television viewing, the data dump of print newspapers on a street corner—not to mention the way this flow is facilitated as part of an institutional structure, a necessary component of society, toward an assumed and willing audience. My heart sings to watch this work done.
Mann, too, relishes the work of journalism, staging editorial meetings like heist sequences, Pacino (now in a less swaggy register) dictating intercuts to maximize the power of the titular insider’s testimony. Many of Mann’s films crackle with the energy of great journalism, whether through the rigorous research employed in safecracking techniques, the taut framing of real-life incident in 2001’s Ali, or the utilization of nonprofessional actors to heighten a given drama’s credibility. The film is most alive at its most procedural: depositions, production meetings, footage reviews. Mann is a relentless editor too. Composers who have worked with him bemoan his capacity to shred their work to ribbons in postproduction, particularly as the ambient scores of his early movies gave way to more florid and eccentric soundtracking. Part of what makes The Insider so unlikely—so singular—is the way the film’s focus on legal, corporate, and journalistic process is soundtracked by in-the-red, wailing opera singers. Mann works the story beats into something sweaty, insane, tragic. He will rework them like a bad habit. Heat and The Insider came out whole, but many of his other films exist in multiple forms, seldom as the result of studio intervention and more because he just can’t seem to stay out of the booth.
None of his “director’s editions” are Blade Runner–style reinventions. Each version cuts alternate paths through the footage, varying by minutes. You’ll want to watch the first version of the 2006 Miami Vice movie, which features a slightly less egregious use of a butt-rock cover of “In the Air Tonight.” You’ll want to watch the third version of Ali, which Mann recut in 2016 to include scenes illustrating the broader political machinations whirring around the boxer. The broader context transforms the film, which had always resisted expectations of what a biopic should look and feel like, into a Mann movie. And Ali becomes a Mann man, a figure of astonishing force and talent transforming the very structure of the systems that attempt, and fail, to contain him.
If all of this seems a little overcooked, well, sure. Mann movies can be overcooked. His most overcooked movie by a mile is the film version of Miami Vice, which features key character beats set to the music of Audioslave. It’s a bleak film about a job that never ends. It begins in the middle of an episode, practically in the middle of a song, and that song is a Linkin Park and Jay-Z mash-up, as if you have entered an Xbox 360 that cannot turn off. The cops have no vision of a life outside of the work. Their love for work turns literal, carnal. Maybe it happened a long time ago. Detective Tubbs makes tender, playful love with a colleague in the shower, then they head out to the kitchen to evaluate new intel with the rest of the team. Detective Crockett mixes business with pleasure even more dangerously, taking an undercover infiltration operation so literally that he fucks the target. She’s great at her job. He can’t help himself.
The city of Miami seems like some technological limbo, the vice cops themselves immortal. There is no problem with the unending gloom of their trade. Cool operators smoothly extend cell phone antennas, trade terse words with informants. They do not do anything lightly. They brood between meetings, chilly and removed. The first glimpse we get of humanity from Colin Farrell (as Crockett) is an unexpectedly melancholy reading of the line “I’m a fiend for mojitos.” As if a node in a network briefly misfires, then corrects. Miami Vice came out the same year as David Lynch’s last theatrical release, Inland Empire, which is similarly bleary and labyrinthine, as if the language of cinema had broken with the emergence of digital film. Filmmakers could just shoot forever now, finding the plot and the answers in the editing booth—or not. Leave the work raw, dense, inhospitable. Mutable, even. The grainy digital textures flatten everything, turning the stars garish in Lynch’s gaze, but Mann’s camera seems to glory in the transmutation of beautiful people and neon light into undifferentiated data.
For me, both films are comforting. Lynch’s final filmic transmission is an unsolvable puzzle, a series of interconnected hallways for my brain to get lost in anew upon each viewing. And Mann’s film lets me indulge in the fantasy of endless work—a cool blue ocean of meaningful labor to rocket across, the promise of a mojito on the other side.
Mann’s middle period was remarkably productive. He released six movies and a TV show between Heat (in 1995) and Public Enemies (in 2009). He was in his prime and he knew it. The movies feel propulsive, locked in, commanding big budgets and Christmas Day releases and conducting themselves more or less accordingly. Collateral (2004) was a smash—a popcorn movie with vast reserves of heart and artistry. He became a director top actors sought out, enabling his widest-screen visions, but also, I think, enabling the actors themselves to inhabit an archetype that Mann did not invent but by this point had entrenched as one of American cinema’s most beguiling. Many—Russell Crowe, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx—were never better than when given a Mann man to portray. As if they had an inherent desire to work like this, obsessively and astonishingly, and beheld by someone who understood and appreciated, at a cool remove. Maybe that is all anyone wants. The internet is awash in hustlers guiding the shiftless and underemployed toward better professional ROI. We are all one webinar away from our best selves. There is a guy on Instagram whose entire thing is showing you how to sit in chairs, open doors, handle a laptop as a high-net-worth individual. I sometimes worry that my own propensity to overwork puts me in league with this set. I have always worked too hard, basically until I can’t. I cannot not write like this; I cannot ungrind my teeth. I don’t ever plan to retire. Michael Mann is 82 years old, and he just co-wrote the novel Heat 2 (2022), a 500-page epic that sweeps back and forth across decades and continents, haunted by a new figure of pure evil that harrows all three of the film’s leads in turn. He says he is working on a film adaptation of it seven days per week.
Mann had wanted to make a movie about the automaker Enzo Ferrari for decades—one of countless in-the-hopper projects—but it didn’t escape development hell until 2023. Perhaps the money dried up after Blackhat (2015), a dense and uncompromising foray into cyberpunk, had one of the worst debuts in film history. That Ferrari would be Mann’s comeback always felt a little deflating: I’d watch him direct cops and hitmen and hackers forever if I could, but cars do nothing for me. Yet Ferrari is a quintessential Mann movie, perhaps the beginning of a late phase, and Adam Driver (in the title role) takes the Mann man to stately, reserved new territory. The Maserati driver Jean Behra ends up being a sort of boogeyman, a spectral heat demon that Ferrari uses to goad his drivers to go faster, no matter the cost. In a speech that belongs in the pantheon of all-time-great Mann monologues, Ferrari criticizes his drivers as “gentlemen sportsmen—very nice,” especially compared to drivers like Behra who, he says, have “a brutal determination to win, with a cruel emptiness in their stomachs.” Ferrari asks his drivers to imagine racing alongside Behra, hesitating as they approach a narrow turn, and then losing to him. “Because at that same moment,” Ferrari says, “Behra thought, ‘Fuck it, we both die.’” This is the philosophy of many Mann men: to live for the work—and to willingly die for it. “Brake later,” Ferrari concludes. As in other Mann films, this rhetoric is seductive, heroic.
An opportunity to practice the “brake later” dictate emerges in the ensuing Mille Miglia race, which spans 1,000 miles across Italy. Time slows down as a young driver we have followed barrels toward the horizon, seizing an opportunity—when, in slow motion, we see his wheel clip on a road stud, spinning his car into a crowd of onlookers. Dozens go down in an instant, the bodies of children we just saw eating breakfast spinning into the air. The camera is unsparing, salacious even, as it surveys the wreckage of their bodies, bisected across the asphalt.
There isn’t a scene like it in Mann’s decades of filmmaking. Like Pacino’s character in Heat, Mann sees every corpse as a human, with parents, kids, dreams. And yet never before has the collateral damage of a Mann man’s drive for greatness been relayed with such abject horror. Ferrari responds by turning to his family, bringing his illegitimate son to meet the half brother he never knew. The closing captions tell us it’s this son who would turn Ferrari into the company we know today. It feels less like a corrective to Mann’s preceding films than a clarification. That if all you heard in the key line of Heat was a willingness to leave your attachments in 30 seconds flat, you missed something. Because all Mann men need a philosophy about this central tension between an obsessive work life and a successful family life. As Ferrari tells his men, two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time. The ambition has a cost, and it can be great.
I had hoped there was some code latent in Mann’s movies to balance these things. But he’s not so prescriptive as that. The balance, too, will be work, perhaps grueling. We see Ali—maybe the man Mann holds in highest esteem—bouncing his kid on his knee after a bout, taking meetings at the same time. If your talent is the exploitation of a vast and unknowable system, then do not expect that system to let you rest. The clearest moral principle expressed across Mann’s decades of filmmaking is to do the best you can with all this. Pursue your talent against all else; be decent to your family, the people around you. If you want it to be easy, give up on one thing or the other. But why would you do a thing like that? This is what you grind for.
That Mann is pointing and shooting at his subjects who are pointing and shooting at their subjects is not lost on anyone—Mann, the subjects, or the viewer. In Collateral, there is a scene in which a hitman smoothly executes two minor crooks in an alleyway. Tom Cruise’s performance of this scene is marveled over by firearms experts as the apotheosis of the maneuver, shown in classes to teach proper form. Mann relishes the tools of the trade, the machines that men use to do their work: cell phones, notebooks, cameras. The thermal lance we watch constructed in Thief. The rattle of gunfire, mixed so loud the viewer can echolocate danger. It turns symphonic in the editing suite, an industrial barrage. The sound of men at work. Mann fell in love with digital cameras early, filming night scenes in Ali with a 1K camera, cramming a GoPro into his fighters’ faces to destabilizing effect. Collateral can be viewed as a feature-length death match between man and tool, the director wrestling with the capabilities of digital filmmaking across the streets of Los Angeles. It contains shots still marveled over by cinematographers. The hitman and the taxi driver stop dead in their tracks at one point to watch a coyote cross the street in low light. What does this mean to each of them? The quiet beauty of the city at night? The unlikelihood of a city at all? The will to survive? None of this, I think. I think they are looking at a coyote captured in low light on digital video, looking through the movie at the man who beholds them. I think they are both, briefly, viewers.
Then they get back to work.
Mann Men. By Clayton Purdom. Los Angeles Review of Books , March 25, 2025.
