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Thieves Like Us
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by MGM (Video & DVD)
Sales Rank: 28217
Price: $14.95
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Every few years Robert Altman gets rediscovered by critics and audiences, yet somehow this middle-period gem remains underviewed. It's hard to understand why. In 1974, when he made <I>Thieves Like Us</I>, Altman was in top form. He'd recently made <I>McCabe and Mrs. Miller</I> and <I>The Long Goodbye</I>, and the next year would bring <I>Nashville</I>, his touchstone masterwork. As with his other films, <I>Thieves Like Us</I> at first has a homemade immediacy, chugging along like back-porch skiffle music. Set in the Midwest of the 1930s, early scenes between the three thieves (Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, and John Schuck) feel like silent-movie era routines about a trio of affable farm boys turned bank robbers. Altman's subject--the "thistledown" critic Pauline Kael once described as Altman's real material--emerges by degrees. The story of hell-bent innocents devolves into a tale of the spell cast over the boys by the newspaper stories that mythologize them. (They turn a corner when their pictures appear in an issue of <i>Real Detective</i>.) The string of bank robberies, interlaced with episodes of a shy romance between Carradine and his Coke-sucking girl, Keechie (Shelley Duvall), becomes an agrarian noir by way of <I>Madame Bovary</I>. These thieves lived just at the point when American pop culture was emerging; the cities may have had Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, but in the Altmanesque countryside sheet music was wallpaper and what pulled were radio serials such as <i>Gangbusters</i>. Compared at the time to Arthur Penn's <I>Bonnie and Clyde</I>, <I>Thieves Like Us</I> now seems singular, a fable of fatal crime and punishment amid barbershop-quartet music and cricket song. <I>--Lyall Bush</I>
Viewer Reviews
This was the first Robert Altman film I ever saw. The realistic re-creation of the period and the "no-acting" acting sucked me right in, thereby 'hooking' me on Altman (and Altman-ish) films forever.
The remarkable transformation of Shelley Duvall's "Keechy" from greasy-haired, floppy-eared picayune in the background to Leading Lady is one of the elements of the film which make it unforgettable.
Louise Fletcher is flawless as the matron Mattie, cautioning her children to mind their manners even as bad news looms darkly over the dinner table.
The DVD of "Thieves Like Us" came from seemingly nowhere -- Can "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," "Welcome to L.A." "Remember My Name" and "Health" be far behind?
Bring them on!
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Thieves Like Us
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