Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

JasparLamarCrabb Anyone expecting another rift on the Bonnie & Clyde legend are encouraged to look elsewhere. This Robert Altman film, based on the classic novel previously filmed as THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, is in a class (and genre) all its own. Bank robber Keith Carradine, along with two other cons, escapes from prison & finds refuge at the seedy gas station of Tom Skerritt. The three begin to rob more banks (rarely seen in action) until fate splits them up. Carradine ends up on the lam with Shelley Duvall, a bumpkin who seems to know nothing except movie magazines & Coca-Cola. Part love story, part bleak expose of life in the American south during the depression, Altman's film is wildly entertaining. There's bleakness mixed with a lot of comic moments. Carradine and Duvall excel in their roles and the supporting cast features many from Altman's "repertoire" including Skerritt, John Schuck, Bert Remsen and Louise Fletcher.

tieman64 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" seems more interested in consumption. Altman's criminals are myth buyers, consumers who are not only products of the American Dream (co-opting their images from radio shows and newspapers) but wide-eyed dreamers who fuel it as well.Like "McCabe and Mrs Miller", Altman thus seeks to ridicule The American Dream. While most gangster films mythologise/glorify their criminals, turning them into heroes, celebrities or wild freedom fighters, Altman is less interested in pitting capitalists against criminals and the proletariat as he is in showing that they are all ultimately part of the same all inclusive system. As such, The Depression is never invoked as the cause of our gang's 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 fantasies of love, 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. Consumption and acquisition are the goals. And so Altman uses the Radio throughout "Thieves" 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, 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 swift brutality 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 perforated 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. All traditional iconography is rejected, whilst what's typically 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."Thieves" ends with the pregnant Keechie waiting at a train station. As she sits, an evangelist - another charlatan - speaks on an overhead radio, delivering a passionate Resurrection speech to farmers and labourers about the need to bear burden and turmoil in silence; the poor need to learn to be poor for the "greater good". 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", "Thieves" and "3 Women" defining him as one of the most idiosyncratic and prolific directors of the decade. Worth two viewings.

MisterWhiplash Thieves Like Us takes the same elements of the plot from the book of the titlee as did Nicholas Ray's 1948 debut They Live By Night. But the chief differences are separate forms of lyrical interpretation, and as well a certain freedom that Altman has, not simply in it being the 70s (i.e. rated R for violence, language and sex/nudity), but in the interpretation carrying more than just a satisfying B-movie. It's a certain attitude Altman tries to convey with the casting of the actors, all of whom would fit in in an old 40's noir but have some other qualities that keep them a little more grounded, part of that "Altman-esque" feel many critics talk about. And in the details that come up, real points of interest that makes us see these people past their simple clichés; Bowie (Keith Carradine) isn't just a country boy, and his fellow bank robbers aren't just an obnoxious drunk and aging cripple respectively. And Bowie's girl, Keechie, is no fool with what he's doing either.It's a shame then to find out that it's one of Altman's lesser seen pictures when it may be one of his finest in the prime of his career in American movies. He does tell the story of the three bank robbers well enough to keep interest on that alone, but he puts in things that make it a richer experience than another director (hell, even Ray) could've accomplished. The aspect that struck me the most was the use of radio, how it's always flowing into a scene naturally, and with some of what's on there (i.e. Romeo and Juliet, the Shadow) corresponding beautifully to what's in the scene. No music, in actuality, is used from a composed score but from all songs and programs and (of course) news bulletins from the 30s. It's maybe a symbol of the slightest escapism possible for these characters, something that comes in and takes one away for a little while, and sometimes acting like a balance to the tenion on camera, like the first bank robbery.Also commendable, I might add, are the bank robberies. This isn't quite Bonnie and Clyde, with getaways put to hokey banjo plucking or with lots of ultra stylized violence. If anything Altman is apprehensive to go with the conventions of typical bank robbery scenes, so it is not until 3/4 of the way through- till the Yazoo robbery- that we're even shown what's going on inside the bank as the robbery goes on (the other are seen from the outside, every detail of the outside adding to what is not quite the usual suspenseful, but not boring either). And even then the scene is shot mostly in a high angle master take, and the very act of the bank robbery in a movie is somewhat, subtly deconstructed till it becomes just that much more disturbing, particularly for the Chicamaw's latest, unnecessary 'hit'. I'm sure this will not be done like this again any time soon in another movie, certainly not in a hyperactive genre movie ala Tarantino.But what about the lovers-on-the-run convention? This is also handled with about as much care and tact that Altman can muster; having Carradine and Duval together, as Pauline Kael noted, is about as close to "perfect" a companionship imaginable, if doomed of course by fate. And we're not made to feel forced into liking them or feeling sympathy. I'm almost reminded in some of the scenes midway through when Bowie and Keechie become a lot 'closer' some of the bedroom scenes in Breathless, minus the loads of dialog and self-consciousness. They're very natural, joking, light-hearted, sensual, and even with an innocence to their lovemaking. Things are stripped down between them, and as the tragedy starts to unfold there's a stronger connection made because of the actors playing it naturally and without unforced drama (every conflict stems from Bowie's crimes, a lie, and not being able to be together full-time). It also adds another somber dimension to the final scenes where the expected comes, but with an extra kick of emotional power.Full of witty and smart dialog, fine supporting work from Fletcher, Remsen, Latham and Skerrit (only Schuck nears being over-the-top, but only nearing), and a style from Altman that is cool but not detached, Thieves Like Us is great, subtle work from a director looking to peel back some of the layers of pulp fiction while staying truthful to the power and sorrow in what's typical.

tripolarproduce When altman chooses to not show t-dub getting killed, rather reveal it to bowie the same time he reveals it to us in a news broadcast, i thought it was a very strange choice, but also an appropriate one. most of the action in this movie is in radio broadcasts and newspapers, with very only two full robberies. I sometimes have problems watching the 70's altman stuff only because the sound recording technologies didn't really match up to his vision, and frequently things are too muddled to understand more than one or two words(IE the rainstorm.) That was a pretty terrible fake rainstorm, either that or the copy of the film we screened was damaged. I liked it more than bonnie and Clyde, mostly because it was more subdued, less flashy, more subtle, more about friendship and consequences.it was good. real good.they oughta put it on a DVD.