Outlaws, Auteurs, and Actors
The ideal audience for Robert Altman's THIEVES LIKE US would probably be composed, not of moviegoers, but of film critics. It has all the qualities that critics rightly prize: a perfect control of mood, an elegant austerity, a deft avoidance of cliché, an almost European semi-detachment from its outlaw heroes; it offers compassion but refuses to judge. Unfortunately, though, most viewers would trade all these felicities for a raw blend of DILLINGER and LOVE STORY—which THIEVES LIKE US is, but refined to the point of recognizable art.
The film is a “masterpiece” (to quote the first of three assertions Pauline Kael has made about the film) in the original sense of the word: the kind of work a medieval craftsman would submit to a guild for admission to the rank of master. It’s textbook cinema at its best: self-contained but not confined, and full of understated, unexpected epiphanies. Precisely because THIEVES is “the most nearly flawless of Altman’s films,” it is certainly not his “most accessible.” What attracts the critics repels the spectators.
THIEVES represents a real departure, almost a reversal for Altman—a kind of French Academy draftsmanship following the Salon des Refusés iconoclasm of THE LONG GOODBYE. It even suffers slightly from that current Americana epidemic, the Polly Platt Syndrome: the reconstruction of Mississippi in the Thirties is almost too meticulous, with images and sounds of the period papered over the film like the wall of the lovers’ hideout. And some of the dialogue is flossier than need be. When the garrulous T-Bone wants to say “kiss my ass,” he says instead, “let the mistletoe hang off my coattail.” Readers of the Edward Anderson novel will recognize how faithfully Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewksbury have treated their source. And followers of Altman’s career will register surprise when they discover that a director notorious for throwing out scripts and winging it with his cast has made as close an adaptation as, say, the film versions of THE GRADUATE and THE EXORCIST.
KEITH CARRADINE: THIEVES was a lot more pre-prepared than McCABE AND MRS. MILLER. When I arrived in Vancouver to begin work on McCABE, I asked Altman, “Well, could I see a script now?” And he said, ” Oh, no, you don ‘t need to see the script.” With THIEVES, it was as if he had a much more definite idea about what he was going to do. When he came up with the idea of Shelley [Duvall] and John Schuck [who plays Chickamaw] and Bert Remsen [who plays T-Bone] and me doing the film, there was a manuscript of the novel [by Edward Anderson] passed around to all of us so we’d have a chance to read it. And then when we started rehearsing, a year-and-a-half later, we all read the book again.
SHELLEY DUVALL: Joan Tewksbury wrote the script in such a way that every word you say is as though you said it or thought it up yourself. You didn’t have to change a thing.
But there are other moments when a seemingly fortuitous bit of business acts as a visual correlative for some later action. Example: Tom Skerritt, as a hillbilly Stepin Fetchit who is sheltering Bowie (Carradine), closes a screen door; it falls off its hinges onto his back; he looks around but doesn’t see it; the door drops to the ground; Skerritt mumbles to himself and shuffles off. At the end of the film, as the police ventilate Bowie’s cabin with bullets, the cabin screen door falls off. It’s the kind of offhand reverberation that makes you suspect Altman was in complete control of the film, calibrating the effect of every piece of art direction, every arrested forward zoom shot, every millimeter movement of an actor’s eyebrow. Altman still encourages improvisation from his actors, but he seems to have arrived at the stage where he can work the accidental into the fabric of his film plan.
Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974). Photo by United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock
CARRADINE: There’s something that Altman does, especially where the actors are concerned, that makes you feel so relaxed. He draws things out of you. Not only does he allow things to happen—which a lot of directors don’t, because they’re so in secure about having to be on top of this film that they tend to stifle themselves and their actors as well—but he makes things happen. I think Bob’s ideas form as it happens on film; I don’t think he locks himself down with preconceptions.
Like another lineal descendant of BONNIE AND CLYDE—Terry Malick’s BADLANDS—THIEVES views its characters from an ironic, oblique angle. Altman and Malick were both in their teens when they lived through the periods their respective films cover, and they both bring to their projects the informed skepticism of analysands re-examining their youthful fantasies. Where the filmmakers part company is in the degree of their detachment. Malick, the former philosophy student with the cool eye of a behavioral scientist, is utterly dispassionate and occasionally condescending toward his characters; he never apologizes, never explains—and his pristine reticence has, I think, a lot to do with Miss Kael’s unfavorable reaction to BADLANDS. Malick may romanticize his mass murderer, Charlie Starkweather (who had the scraggly Texarcana features of a Buddy Holly), into a James Dean lookalike and actalike; but only to make a critical statement about the Fifties. If THIEVES LIKE US is THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (Nicholas Ray’s 1949 version of the Anderson novel) as remade by Truffaut, BADLANDS is BONNIE AND CLYDE as remade by Bresson.
Altman, for his part, is clearly fond of Bowie and Keechie (Duvall), and with reason: they’re likable losers who are forced into crime less by choice than by circumstance. While his more grizzled colleagues rob a bank, Bowie is usually on the periphery of the action, gently ushering the startled depositors to places of safety—a gesture straight out of Good Ol’ Henry Fonda’s repertoire in JESSE JAMES. And Keechie wants nothing more than to be allowed to stand by her man and carry his child. The “thieves” here are really underworld versions of the aimless, amiable quartet in RIO BRAVO—the gimpy elder statesman (Walter Brennan/Bert Remsen), the alcoholic masochist (Dean Martin/John Schuck), the young gunslinger (Ricky Nelson/Keith Carradine), and the wry, maternal “loose woman” (Angie Dickinson/Shelley Duvall)—but without a steadying, John Wayne influence. Having no moral center of authority, the thieves fallout, and fall apart.
CARRADINE: They’re losers, victims of their times. They had such nothing goals. Bowie just wanted to be a big-league baseball pitcher, but somehow wound up being a bank robber. The perspective that these people had about what they were doing was so naive, so ignorant. But there’s a knowledge that Keechie has, a basic thing that women understand about life and that men can never seem to get together. These men can only see this small area; they can’t think in terms of the whole world, or of the rest of the country, because they have such a small universe that they exist in. At a very early point, they somehow took the wrong turn, and can’t go back.
DUVALL: I think it comes out when Keechie says to Bowie, “It was me or them, and you took them.” All she wanted was to be with him and to have somebody take care of her, and just let the rest of the world go.
However much THIEVES LIKE US gives the appearance of a work shaped and polished by Altman, it still gains much from the presence and talents of its young leads. Without them, the film would be admirable but perhaps not so likable. Keith Carradine may occasionally seem too “smart” for his character—there’s no giveaway smile after he cracks a joke, and there’s often the TV announcer’s resonance of the California Middle class behind his Ozark drawl—but he carries himself with the effortless conviction of the born actor and potential star. And his perpetually flexing jaw muscle adds an undertone of psychopathy to what might otherwise be Bowie’s almost suicidal sweetness.
CARRADINE: By the time I was about fifteen I had formed the idea that I wanted to go into acting. But I didn’t tell anyone for a couple of years, because I had the fear that people would say, “You just want to be an actor because your dad did that.” Finally in my last year of high school I made up my mind, and I called up my old man, and said, “Hey dad, I’ve decided to do this thing.” And we talked about it, and he was delighted. Since then, I’ve worked with him twice professionally—in a dinner theater production of Tobacco Road, and in one terrible movie, IDAHO TRANSFER. When we were offstage it was father-and-son; onstage, it was father-and-son too, but it was also the case of an actor with forty years’ experience helping, teaching someone who was just beginning.
Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974). Photo by United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock
DUVALL: I’d never acted anywhere before meeting Bob Altman; I never studied drama or speech or anything like that. I grew up in Houston, and in the high school I went to, none of my friends were interested in it. Drama students were always really weird, believe me! Guys walking around all the time with combs and mirrors—”acting” all the time. I was studying to be a scientist. Then one night these three guys walked into a party I was giving, and one of them asked me, “How would you like to be in the movies?” And I answered, “Oh, man, I’m not an actress!” But it all happened so fast; BREWSTER McCLOUD just flew by. It seemed so easy. I had no fear whatsoever, of the cameras or anything. I didn’t know what a grip was, or a dolly, or an agent! I’ve since learned! Anyway, I thought, “People actually study to do this!?” That’s the way I felt about it then, but now I know it’s hard. I’ve realized there’s a technique to it. On THIEVES, after Keith and I have our big fight, Bob, who doesn’t talk much about acting, said, “Well, Duvall, you’re an actress. I didn’t know it before, but you’re really a good actress.”
Shelley Duvall is a natural. Her looks, and her character, grow on you: the bucktoothed backwoods girl grows into a Flemish madonna, washed-out and agelessly wise, before your eyes. Altman has Duvall work throughout the film with two handy props (Cokes and smokes); it’s an old director’s trick to occupy the hands of a nervous novice. But by the end of the film, when she has to bring off the kind of hysteria scene that has revealed the limitations of so many other actresses, Duvall gives evidence that—in the space of a single film—a quiet gift has somehow been alchemized into an instinctive technique that can bring alive, with perfect pitch, a mood, an emotion, a character.
DUVALL: There was the scene where I watch them kill Bowie. Even when we saw the film again the other night, during that scene my chest felt like a rock and I started to breathe really rapidly. Of course, while I was doing that scene, there was nothing happening in front of me; it had all been shot before and I was just imagining it. Boy, that scene upset me. I couldn’t quit crying for an hour afterward, because it was the next to last day of filming—we shot the film pretty much in sequence—and I thought, “It’s all over, and he’s dead.” It was horrible. I still have dreams about it sometimes. It was like something terrible had really happened.
Even this ending is muted; there’s no strain for catharsis à la Penn. We don’t see Bowie’s body being animated into a ragtime puppet by the hail of bullets; we can’t count the Peckinpah perforations. All our reactions must be filtered through Keechie’s emotions—and these Altman has chosen to stylize, into a slow-motion keen. It’s the one significant departure from Anderson’s book (where both the lovers were killed), and, typically, it diffuses the narrative impact. What Andrew Sarris had described as “the agonizingly adolescent intensity” of the lovers in THEY LIVE BY NIGHT is rarefied by Altman (and Carradine and Duvall) into a serene passivity. It’s a passivity that affects the viewers of THIEVES LIKE US and can leave a moviegoer either stoned in admiration or glazed by the realization that the commercial American cinema’s most consistently audacious director has decided to prove that he too can construct a well-made film.
