My Epic Trip Through the Films of James Belushi Kicks Off On a High Note with a Loving Look Back at the 1981 Michael Mann Masterpiece Thief

It doesn't get any better than this!

It almost doesn’t seem fair that James Belushi made his film debut in 1981’s Thief, one of the greatest crime movies ever made rather than, I dunno, a sex comedy with a title like General Pervert’s Boner Patrol. 

Writer-director Michael Mann has had a hard time living up to the timeless genius of Thief and he’s widely considered one of our greatest filmmakers. James Belushi would go on to make a LOT of bad movies with total hacks. 

Yet at the very beginning of his career as a movie star John Belushi’s less talented but more alive younger brother worked with major filmmakers like Michael Mann, John Landis (Trading Places), Oliver Stone (Salvador), Frank Oz (Little Shop of Horrors) and Walter Hill (Red Heat). 

Belushi started at the top, then worked his way down. Debuts don’t get much more impressive than Thief. Heck, movies don’t get much more impressive than Thief. 

Watching it for the third or fourth time I felt like I was watching a different kind of home movie. There are traditional home movies that common people make to document their lives and the lives of their family in an informal, nostalgic manner. 

Then there are movies that feel like warm, loving and supportive homes that we can return to again and again and always get something of value and meaning from the experience. 

When I re-watched The Blues Brothers during the ill-fated Blues Brothers Convention that inspired the final chapter in the extended version of The Joy of Trash, this column AND the column on Saturday Night Live movies I felt like I was watching the second kind of home movie. 

Geography played a huge part. I used to brag that I was a third-generation Chicagoan, with all of the toughness and character we Chicagoans like to think comes with living in a city filled with character-builders like crime, murder, rampant political corruption, arctic, soul-crushing weather and terrible schools. 

Then I had a crazy epiphany and realized that I did not HAVE to live in a city filled with character-builders like crime, murder, political corruption, arctic, soul-crushing weather and terrible schools just because my father did and my father’s father did.

Now I live in suburban Atlanta, oddly enough, but I go home regularly via the magic of cinema and much less regularly through the much costlier and time and labor-intensive process of buying a plane ticket to visit my dad in his nursing home. 

This morning I logged onto Vudu and pressed a button that took me back in time to my hometown of Chicago at the very beginning of the Reagan decade. The vehicle? A movie called Heat that knows Chicago as intimately and completely as any film I have ever seen, and that includes The Blues Brothers. 

The Blues Brothers and Thief are two of the greatest movies ever to be filmed in Chicago but they have other commonalities as well. The Blues Brothers is famously about a hip ex-con trying to turn his life around after an extended stint in Joliet Prison. Thief is also about a hip ex-con trying to turn his life around after an extended stint in Joliet Prison. 

In The Blues Brothers, the hip ex-con is of course John Belushi’s Joliet Jake. In Thief it’s Frank (James Caan), a career criminal at a personal and professional crossroads. He’s not just good at what he does: he’s great at it. He’s a goddamn genius, a virtuoso, someone uniquely gifted at an exceedingly difficult, dangerous trade. 

But because Frank’s art is cracking safes it has no value in the straight world. It’s not the kind of thing you can put on a resume or an application in hope of landing a normal job. 

So Frank is forced to live outside the law. He’s ostensibly the owner of a successful used car business but that’s just a front for his real business pulling off high-end, high-risk heists with accomplices like Belushi’s Barry, who has an Elvis Presley hairdo and his more famous brother’s face and voice. 

Belushi isn’t the only unexpected name in the opening credits. Willie Nelson is quietly heartbreaking in an out of character turn as Frank’s mentor and dear friend, a master safecracker who taught the younger man all he knows but is doomed to die in jail unless the state takes pity on him. 

Nelson brings the same effortless authenticity to a small but crucial role that he does to his music. Belushi and Nelson’s roles here feel like reverse stunt-casting. He hired a beloved icon of country music and the lookalike younger brother of one of the biggest comedy stars alive for major supporting roles that they play totally straight. 

Mann isn’t interested in Belushi or Nelson as celebrities or pop icons or famous people, only as actors and they deliver fine performances devoid of shtick or shenanigans. 

Frank begins Thief in a very familiar place. On an existential level he is exhausted. Planning and executing heists has taken a lot out of him. He doesn’t know how much longer his luck will hold out so he purposefully pursues an end game for his life as a professional thief. 

The master criminal who just needs to pull off one last job so that he can go straight and escape the ever-looming specter of death or imprisonment is one of the most ubiquitous and exhausted cliches in all of film, not just in thrillers, crime dramas or Neo-Noirs. 

It ultimately does not matter that Thief has one of the most common premises in crime films. What does matter is what writer-director Michael Mann, with one of those debuts for the ages does with the material.

Working with The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar, a memoir from real-life thief  Frank Hohimer, Mann has created a hypnotic, mesmerizing portrait of an existential nowhere man doggedly pursuing escape and redemption in an ugly world intent on robbing him of even a single moment of happiness or contentment. 

In a performance on par with his career-making, Oscar-nominated turn in The Godfather, Caan is all fire and ice, apocalyptic fury and superhuman restraint. He is, after all, cool and tough enough to withstand inhuman pressure in myriad forms yet vulnerable enough to have important things in his life that can be taken from him at any moment, including a relationship with Jessie, a tough waitress/fellow survivor played by a perfectly cast Tuesday Weld. 

Beloved Joe Dante repertory player Robert Prosky makes a stunning and out of character debut as Leo, a high-level operative in the Chicago mob. 

Prosky is an unusual and inspired choice to play a cold-blooded monster because, with his beard, belly and glasses he looks disconcertingly like Santa Claus and, when it suits him, behaves with an avuncular, even fatherly warmth. 

When he learns that Frank and Jessie have been turned away by the adoption agency for reasons that are understandable if unfortunate the older man volunteers to get them a baby off the black market. 

The dramatic gesture epitomizes the pragmatic complexity of Prosky’s character and performance. On one level he’s playing a mobbed-up Saint Nick and giving a desperate couple what they want most in the world but that nature and the adoption system are intent on denying them: a baby of their own to take care of and love forever. 

On another, the evil fuck is straight up BUYING a baby so that he can have even more leverage over a man he’s intent on squeezing for all he’s worth so that he can toss him aside cavalierly in the garbage once he’s done with him. 

Thief is a film of extraordinary debuts. There’s Mann, first and foremost, as well as Prosky and Chicago actors James Belushi, William Peterson and Dennis Farina but it also marked the extraordinary cinematography debut of Donald E. Thorin, who would go on to shoot An Officer and a Gentleman, Purple Rain, Midnight Run and Tango & Cash. 

Chicago has never looked better or more Chicago than it does in Thief. Thief occupies a lonely, sad world of lurid neons and inky blacks, a realm that’s eerily lonely and strangely devoid of people and warmth. 

Mann has created a movie that shares its protagonist’s ineffable sadness and sense of regret. Thief captures its anti-hero’s existential confusion and exhaustion on a visual as well as thematic level. 

The result is a movie that never sacrifices style for verisimilitude. Style is substance here. Mann’s work on Miami Vice would become synonymous with style devoid of substance but Thief’s elegantly grim look and Tangerine Dream’s moody electronic score are in perfect unison with the film’s moody motifs. 

Frank is savvy enough to know that there’s no such thing as a clean getaway or an uncomplicated happy ending in the world where he lives, works and gingerly attempts to avoid violent death. Yet he nevertheless tries to escape the impossible situation he finds himself in because, for him, life has been nothing but impossible situations he somehow manages to wiggle his way out of. 

Thief is a strange movie to write about in terms of James Belushi’s career because he’s so restrained and understated. He has to be. A wacky comic relief performance by Belushi would ruin the all-important mood of loss and sadness that Mann cultivates so brilliantly. 

The roles would get bigger and more overtly comic but, with the possible exception of Little Shop of Horrors and Trading Places, he would never make another movie as brilliant as Thief. 

Film-wise, at least, Belushi peaked early. As someone who began their career near the top and have been steadily sliding downwards for decades, I know what that’s like. 

Next up: Trading Places, then a bunch of movies way worse than Thief and Trading Places