Thieves Like Us opens with T-Dub (Bert Remsen), Chicamaw (John Schuck) and Bowie (Keith Carradine), meeting up on a rural Mississippi backroad after breaking out of jail. Faced with no employment options under the circumstances, the trio take up bank robbing again and stay on the move constantly, living hand to mouth with relatives in between jobs. While the threesome are not particularly skillful in their robberies and often wound or kill people in their raids (most of which occur off-screen), they seem to enjoy reading about their own exploits in the newspapers as much as they enjoy the freedom of their routine. When Bowie is seriously wounded in a car accident and forced to recuperate while his partners fend for themselves, he falls in love with Keechie (Shelley Duvall), the niece of Chicamaw, who nurses him back to health. Their romance is short-lived, however, once Bowie teams up with his former partners for one last bank job.
Joan Tewkesbury, who had worked as an extra and Altman's script supervisor on McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), was an aspiring screenwriter who was given a chance by Altman to prove herself. "We couldn't get any movie financed and he had a book he needed to be adapted, Thieves Like Us," she recalled (in Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff ). "I read it and adapted it in about four days for him. By this time I had been around Bob long enough. It's almost like when you find a really good dance partner you know where the next step's going to go. It's not that you anticipate it, but you can relax enough to go with it."
In terms of casting, Shelley Duvall and Keith Carradine, who had appeared in some scenes together in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, proved to be ideal choices for the central young couple. (They would also go on to co-star in Altman's Nashville [1975].) Three members of the director's acting ensemble Bert Remsen (a well respected casting director in Los Angeles), John Schuck and Tom Skerritt - were cast in the main supporting roles and, in her first substantial film role, Louise Fletcher, a television actress who began working in the late fifties, played the pivotal role of Mattie, T-Dub's sister-in-law, who betrays Bowie in the film's violent climax.
Tewkesbury commented, "In the film I always thought that Bert Remsen's character was Bob, reading his reviews the newspaper stories Bert would read about the bank robberies. You know, "Why'd they say that? They got that part wrong." It's interesting how the personal becomes part of the overall in those things."
Although Altman made his directorial feature debut in 1957 with The Delinquents and followed it with the documentary, The James Dean Story (1957), he didn't get another opportunity to direct a movie until 1968 with Countdown; he had spent the years in-between toiling in the television industry where he directed countless episodes of The Roaring '20s, Bonanza, Combat! and other popular series. His big critical and commercial breakthrough hit M*A*S*H* (1970) had made him a hot commodity in Hollywood but none of his subsequent films had made money and he had difficulty getting Thieves Like Us made. Tewkesbury said, "The money fell out for the project about three times. It was really by the grace of George Litto and Bob and the other producer, Jerry Bick, standing in a room and practically mortgaging their houses and saying, "Let's go ahead." It was a really good lesson in terms of not backing down."
Despite the fact that the Edward Anderson novel was set in the Midwest, Altman decided to shoot Thieves Like Us in Mississippi in rural towns near Vicksburg such as Canton, Pickens, Jackson and Hermansville. Equally unorthodox was his choice of cinematographer Jean Boffety who had been working in the French cinema since 1960 and would go on to work with Altman again on the director's much reviled sci-fi film, Quintet (1979). Severe weather and flooding during the filming of Thieves Like Us interrupted the production more than once and caused the relocation of some scenes. Boffety's work, however, is lush and muted, and evokes a pastoral and poetic vision of the rural South in the thirties. The film is also unique for dispensing with a traditional music score and using natural sound and radio broadcasts to punctuate and comment on the events on screen while still adding the necessary atmosphere. In one of the movie's most famous sequences, a radio production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet plays throughout an extended lovemaking session between Keechie and Bowie. Other popular radio programs from the '30s which are heard in the background include Gang Busters, The Shadow, The Royal Gelatin Hour, Speed Gibson and The Heart of Gold.
As for the famous scene where Bowie is ambushed by the law, Tewkesbury said, "Bob wanted more gunfire because of course we were living through all the assassinations. Bob wanted them to just kill, to kill the house with bullets. Overkill. Without asking any questions they just went in and shot the house until it fell down, literally. And then when Bowie was carried out, he was like another deer they shot while hunting."
When Thieves Like Us first opened in theatres, it was lavishly praised by many high profile critics. Vincent Canby of The Time York Times wrote, "There's nothing elegiacal about Thieves Like Us. Its feelings are expressed tersely. It seems to have been stripped down like a stock car, as if excess verbiage were another form of chrome finish. Nor does one get the feeling of victims cornered by society, which was one of the marks of the Ray film and a carryover from those thirties movies that possessed social consciences...Like the Anderson prose, the film is lean, uncluttered, even though Mr. Altman's method is full of irony and contrasts." Pauline Kael, an early convert of the director, said, "Robert Altman finds a sure, soft tone in this movie and never loses it. His account of Coca-Cola-swigging young lovers in the 30s is the most quietly poetic of his films; it's sensuous right from the first pearly-green long shot, and it seems to achieve beauty without artifice...the movie has the ambiance of a novel, yet it was also the most freely intuitive film Altman had made up to that time." And even Variety chimed in with "Thieves Like Us proves that when Robert Altman has a solid story and script, he can make an exceptional film, one mostly devoid of clutter, auterist mannerism, and other cinema chic. It's a better film than Nicholas Ray's first jab at the story in 1948."
Despite all of the positive reviews, moviegoers didn't flock to see Thieves Like Us and it was a box office disappointment for the distributor United Artists. Co-star John Schuck later said, "Thieves was a picture that was so non-mainstream that the studio had no idea how to promote it. They treated it like a bank-robbery movie, which it isn't, of course. And thank God for television and cable and all that. It's developed a sort of cult following and it got extraordinary reviews...But it was released and went in a few weeks."
Altman, of course, rarely took the time to ponder the reception of his films and was always thinking about and planning the next ones. Even during the making of Thieves Like Us he sent Joan Tewkesbury to Nashville to do research and keep a diary about what she saw and heard there, all of which became the basis and inspiration for his next major success Nashville, a film that garnered him his second Oscar® nomination for Best Director as well as a Best Picture Academy Award nomination.
Producer: Jerry Bick
Director: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Robert Altman, Joan Tewkesbury, Calder Willingham; Edward Anderson (novel "Thieves Like Us")
Cinematography: Jean Boffety
Film Editing: Lou Lombardo
Cast: Keith Carradine (Bowie), Shelley Duvall (Keechie), John Schuck (Chicamaw), Bert Remsen (T-Dub), Louise Fletcher (Mattie), Ann Latham (Lula), Tom Skerritt (Dee Mobley), Al Scott (Capt. Stammers), John Roper (Jasbo), Mary Waits (Noel Joy), Rodney Lee, Jr. (James Mattingly), William Watters (Alvin).
C-123m.
by Jeff Stafford
SOURCES:
Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff
www.afi.com
IMDB
