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32 reviews in total

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27 out of 30 people found the following review useful:
Unjustly overlooked, 21 July 2002

Author: craigjclark from Haddonfield, NJ

This film may have been a box office disappointment when it was first released, but that's no reason why it should be so completely forgotten today.

"Thieves Like Us" was Altman's second major period piece (after "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"), and he gets the details just right. From the cars to the clothing to the ubiquitous Coca-Cola bottles, everything adds to the feeling that these events could have taken place. It, of course, also helps that he has actors who look like they fit the time period. Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck and Bert Remsen were born to play these roles, and they get able support from Tom Skerritt and Louise Fletcher.

Instead of a typical soundtrack, Altman uses vintage radio programs to underscore the action (crime dramas during robberies, "Romeo and Juliet" during a love scene). It's a brilliant gamble that pays off and takes the film to a whole new level.

In short, this is one of Altman's most fully realized films. For it to remain unseen is a crime.

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19 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
Was this movie made by the Coca-Cola Company?, 16 January 2003
Author: mockturtle from New York

This is one of Altman's very best pictures. As another comment puts it: it looks like he took his cast and crew back in time to the 30's and shot on location. The script adaptation is first rate and things keep moving forward even when we're sitting around just observing. The thing that makes this such a great Altman pic is the growth and unfolding of the characters over the course of the movie. There isn't a plot, but there is a story, and that will prove to be a crucial distinction, separating Altman from everyone and good Altman (this) from bad, aimless Altman (H.E.A.L.T.H.). The performances are excellent. Carradine, John Schuck and Bert Remsen make the absolute most out of opportunities they've never really been given again, Remsen is an old pro and Schuck really is unforgettable. Louise Fletcher makes an impression a year before her Oscar for "Cukoo's Nest" and an eternity of typecasting. Shelley Duvall tells a rambling, loosely-if-at-all connected story with the best of them. She always sounds like she's trying to spit out her lines as quickly as she can before she forgets them. Carradine falls prey to this during some of his scenes, particularly opposite her, but his composed silence makes him an ideal protagonist, someone whose almost visible thoughts define him even more than his actions. It's just that Duvall is the same almost all the time, and while that works for some actors it doesn't work so well when they do a movie in present day then 1930's right next to one another and do everything the same. Also, there seems to be something in her contract requiring shots of her screaming her blamed head off in every movie she's in.

It is impossible not to see how this film is influenced by "Bonnie and Clyde." If it weren't so darn good everyone's subject lines would read "Bonnie and Clyde knock-off." It is set in the same time period, and the artwork on the box recalls the earlier movie. What distinguishes it is the bond between the three escapees, and the box should really show the three of them, the title isn't "A Thief Like Me." I can't vouch for mirrors and reflections necessarily meaning that the film is about self-perception and etcetera, because often with Altman he just felt like shooting it that way. But go ahead if you want to, I'm sure the film is strong enough to support any such conjectures.

Coke. I've never seen so much of one product in a movie, even when Louise Fletcher comes out of her house she has coke in a glass, the prison in Mississippi is sponsored by Coke.

I've left out the best part of the movie so far. Altman runs radio programs over some scenes, like bank robberies, and behind other scenes, humorously commenting on the action. I wish he would have stuck with it during the last half hour a bit more, but it's a brilliant device.

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14 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Just a word about the prevalence of Coke----, 26 September 2007
Author: jshaffer-6 from United States

Back to the 30's, folks. I was there, I know. It wasn't that you saw Coke everywhere, it was the only soft drink you saw. There were no machines with a choice. There was a big red Coke cooler sitting at the service station, another outside the grocery. Some of them were serviced by the local ice company, that is; no motor, just ice. A lot of times they had a padlock on them, in other places you just lifted the lid, helped yourself and left your nickel. Later they graduated to some with slots where you could put your nickel. No point in showing people in this movie drinking anything else, except maybe iced tea. No one else had the coolers, and so all you saw was Coke. Add to that the amount of fountain coke we drank. And it took Robert Altman to make us all think about it.

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14 out of 18 people found the following review useful:
A Great Altman, 21 October 2004

Author: Pamsanalyst from New Jersey

I am not an Altman fan, but this film is superb. For those who say he ripped off Bonnie and Clyde, check out They Live By Night and see almost the same story, but here the relationship between Carradine and Duvall forces us to root for them and hope that somehow they can change their life. Was there ever a bath more haunting than Duvall's?

The robberies are shot so matter of fact. There's no pounding score in the background, no elaborate plans are set and we don't see men looking at their watches, timing things. The radio plays, people swizzle Cokes and dogs bark, while the three men pull almost casually stroll in and rob the bank.

I am struck by the similarity between the last scene here and in From Here to Eternity: the lover of the dead man traveling to another place, while painting an idealized picture of their beau. Watch it and pay attention; it's a fine work of art.

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8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Coca Cola Cinema, 15 March 2009

Author: tieman64 from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

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" is more interested in consumption. Altman's criminals are myth buyers, consumers who are not only products of the American Dream (co-opting their image from radio shows and newspapers) but wide-eyed dreamers who fuel it as well.

Like "McCabe and Mrs Miller", Altman thus seeks to expose the dark underbelly of the American Dream. While most gangster films mythologise their criminals, turning them into heroes, celebrities and wild freedom fighters, Altman is less interested in opposing capitalists to the proletariat as he is in showing that they are both ultimately part of the same all inclusive system. As such, The Depression is never invoked as the cause of their 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 its American Dream of love songs, 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.

And so Altman uses the Radio throughout "Thieves Like Us" 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, he is 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 brutal reality 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 ridden 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. The external is hidden, the myth is rejected, whilst the 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.

The film ends with the pregnant Keechie waiting at a train station. As she sits, an evangelist speaks on an overhead radio, delivering a passionate Resurrection speech to farmers and labourers about the need to bear burden and turmoil in silence. 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 and Mrs Miller", "Thieves Like Us" and "3 Women" defining him as one of the most idiosyncratic and prolific directors of the decade.

Worth two viewings.

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10 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall as Lovers on the Lam, 21 May 2007

Author: brocksilvey from United States

"They Live by Night," the 1948 screen adaptation of the Edward Anderson novel "Thieves Like Us," and other films that have obviously been inspired by it, like "Gun Crazy" (1949) and "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), have all been so good that it makes you wonder if yet another version of the same story is necessary. The answer is yes, because Robert Altman is behind this version, and if Altman proved nothing else as a director, he proved that he could take any material and make it his own.

Altman's "Thieves Like Us" is a beautiful and heartbreaking version of the lovers-on-the-lam story, with Keith Carradine cast as Bowie, the soft spoken, sensitive member of a trio of escaped convicts and bank robbers (the other two, Chickamaw and T-Dub, played by Altman regulars John Schuck and Bert Remsen, respectively). During a lull in their series of robberies, Bowie sets up house with Keechie (Shelley Duvall), a shy, simple country girl, and they take a stab at a sort of domestic bliss despite the fact that Bowie is doomed and it's only a matter of time before the law catches up to him. Meanwhile, T-Dub's sister-in-law, Mattie (Louise Fletcher), who has helped the fugitives because of family obligations, begins to tire of the example the trio are setting for her own children, and becomes an accomplice to the police trying to track down the criminals.

Previous screen versions of this story cast gorgeous actors as the lovers and made us fall in love with them. In 1948 it was Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell; in 1967 it was Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. We fall in love with Carradine and Duvall too, but for different reasons. They are decidedly NOT gorgeous actors -- they're both skinny, ungainly and awkward. But they're both incredibly simple and sweet, and they have some lovely and naturalistic moments together that make us wish these two could just settle down, have a family and achieve their own small share of happiness. Altman constantly reminds us of the happiness these two are denied through use of an endless parade of print and radio advertisements that serves as a running commentary throughout the film. During a horrible depression during which so many people could afford nothing, Altman seems to be accusing the American consumerist culture of incessantly reminding everyone of what they didn't have. The way to happiness, Altman implies, seemed to lie in material comforts; no wonder the trio of men in this film prefer robbing banks to the alternatives available to them.

And there's another theme winding its way through Altman's version, one which appeared again and again in his work, that of frustrated male inadequacy. The men in this film turn to the most destructive behavior (thieving, drinking, sexual aggression) in order to cope with a world they feel they've lost control of, and this behavior is continuously juxtaposed to the feminine, domestic sphere represented by Mattie, eternally capable and resourceful, and resentful of the disruption the men bring along with them.

"Thieves Like Us" does not have that beautiful, ethereal sheen to it that characterized Altman's other early-1970s films, mostly because he did not use expert cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond on this outing. But thanks to the winsome performances of Carradine and Duvall, and the touching representation of their characters' tentative relationship, this is one of his warmest and emotionally resonant films from that time period.

Grade: A

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10 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Wonderful, 14 March 2006

Author: amosduncan_2000 from United States

As an Altman fan I have seen "Theives" many times over the years; it was to me the sort of film one admires rather than loves; it has a slower pace than Altman's big atmospheric classics like "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "Calfornia Split."

Since I caught up with the novel last fall I sat down with the movie last night; and I have to say for the first time I really agreed with the lavish praise heaped on the film by Pauline Kael, it may just be a masterpiece.

It is a film about how the ordinary were for a time drawn into the exceptional world of crime. The gallows laughter of the three killers is nervous and frightened; they know they are having a good old time while they can; dodging prisons where men cut there own limbs off to avoid being worked to death. Kitchee's specialness is a kind we would never notice in life; and in the film's lovely coda (diferent from the book) she melts back into the crowd, probably never to be touched by something transcendent again; and the cruel pop Christianity of the day drones on.

As the movie is unshakably shadowed by Bonnie and Clyde, the novel was partly inspired by the real life couple. Bowie's ability to break Chickama out of jail is better explained in the novel.

The film was not shot in Panivision so the video probably doesn't lose too much. Give this one a chance.

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10 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
likes it, 25 March 2003
Author: vsavino99

I think this is one of Altman's best movies. I enjoyed his use of authentic time radio shows. The movie was beautiful to look at in it's simplicity and grittyness. The characters played by Carradine and Duval were youthfully sweet. I appreciate Altman's director's eye in filming this movie. Make more like this!(all of you)

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10 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Small Diamond in a Coal Mine!, 9 July 2004

Author: shepardjessica from sparks, nevada

Another under-valued R. Altman flick (compared to Bonnie and Clyde), but more similar to Gun Crazy crossed with They Live By Night, has yet to achieve ANY kind of respect, critically or "financially".

In the 1970's Altman was cranking out quirky, Americana, hopeful, black comedies and satires, that this one slipped under the radar, just like California Split did. Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall found themselves working with this old Cat and were never the same without him (any they knew it), but they got wonderful careers out of it, so pity the poor beggar as Dylan would say. Add in spunky, disturbing performances from John Schuck and Bert Remsen as ghoulish career small-time criminals, Louise Fletcher (just before Cuckoo's Nest), great cinematography as usual, and a simple story that scares some folks because it involves sacrifices, naivety, and hopelessness (almost).

A lot of people drank Cokes in those days like Shelley Duvall's character does (incessantly)...so what? What should she be drinking - Root Beer? An under-rated gem that will never be looked at for what it might be - a tale of survival with minimal options down the long highway of hope. An 8 out of 10.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Achingly ordinary...an asset for the subject, if not for the movie itself., 5 December 2010

Author: secondtake from United States

Thieves Like Us (1974)

I really like most Robert Altman Films, but I never quite love any of them, even famous films like "MASH" or "Short Cuts." And "Thieves Like Us," which is a kind of loose remake of a favorite of mine, "They Live by Night" (1949, Nicholas Ray), is another really enjoyable, well made movie that lacks some kind of edge--creative, aesthetic, social, something--to set it off as remarkable and fresh.

You might get the most out of this by just settling in and enjoying it, a plot that purposely lacks some of the high romance of, say, "Bonnie and Clyde" or some other outlaw-on-the-run movie. But if you do see the earlier Ray version, which is based on the same novel, you'll at least notice the way movie production has changed from the great Hollywood years of the 1930s and 40s to the New Hollywood inventions of the late 60s, early 70s. This movie lacks the sheer beauty of the first, the perfection, made possible by studio shooting. Here, it is all location work (in Mississippi), which adds authenticity and atmosphere, but which also keeps it from the kind of tight control of a typical 40s film.

Another difference might simply be that this is a Altman movie and the other is by the inimitable Ray, who was able to fill his characters with humanity and heart, and so even lesser known actors (all of them) come alive fully. Altman's characters have all the quirks and nuances of real people, and though it doesn't feel a bit like a documentary, you do have a feeling that none of this rises above. It is meant to be grounded in a kind of realism that gives it authenticity over heightened drama. It's a choice I appreciate, even if it sometimes deadens the film.

The plot is important for how it makes bank robbers as ordinary as you or me (hence the title). The augment to this is that we are supposed to identify with them--or by a stretch, we could picture ourselves doing the same thing. But that's just not true. The robbers seem very regular and normal, but they also seems selfish and stupid. They plow ahead regardless of better options. And it's too often about money--money they never actually use (they live in squalor) or know how to dream about using (they have few dreams, in fact). The leading couple here does have a romance, and it's truly touching, but also tragic. Altman can't help but pull a "Bonnie and Clyde" ending, of sorts (slow motion violence) but it feels hard and nasty. Maybe it's supposed to, a reaction to police authority appropriate for 1974.

So what do we really have? A substantial, well made, restrained movie that plays a little too much by the book--the new book, the New Hollywood book, but a little timid cinematically.

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