Thieves Like Us 4K 1974 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A young murderer and bandit escapes with a hardened criminal from a Mississippi penitentiary. On the loose, they again take on a "job", the only one they know how to do - robbing banks. The last robbery goes extremely badly, and the gang has to pay for all previous successes.

Review 4K Movie

The American writer Henry Miller, in his travel notes about his homeland, “An Aeroconditioned Nightmare,” convinced himself and his readers that the true America is in the south. The north is the mecca of consumer society, a stuffy stone jungle of rumbling steel and soot that drenches the miserable parks and equally miserable minds of obsessive philistines with nauseating miasmas.

The South, with its Civil War scars, the same times of aristocratic megalomania, appeared to the writer as a real human dream, inspiring a creative outlook on things not yet displaced by the American, based on pragmatism, the thirst for consumption, imposed through manipulation of the subconscious.

And iconic director Robert Altman offers us a look at the destruction of this illusion and the recycling of the Myth, along with all its characters and leitmotifs. The land on which Bonnie and Clyde wielded their weapons, which William Faulkner extolled as the arena of biblical battles, no longer nurtures heroes. South appears before the audience of “Thieves Like Us” in the image, fixed for him as a stereotype back in the days of the Great Depression - a kind of Daddy Warner, a veteran and amputee, all day long cradling his stump in a rocking chair, at times staring, suddenly becoming eagle-eyed at the horizon, where he imagined the hordes of Yankees. Benjamin Horne from Twin Peaks, with his soldier boys and Confederate flags, would have gotten a free rocking chair here. Famous incest seems to have burned an extra chromosome into every other member of the gene pool. Timid policemen, banks without guards, prisons with a meter fence - Robert Altman conveys the atmosphere of the South, detached and as if forgotten by the whole world, with ironic, sometimes grotesque images, in which, no, no, and slip a sadness for the greatness, having lost its footing, so easily turned into nothingness. On the skill of the director as an illustrator will clearly tell the episodic role of Louise Fletcher, the evil nurse from “Cuckoo's Nest” - it was Altman saw in her despotic type, which she and embodied in “Thieves”.

At the beginning of the century and up to the famous events in its middle, the United States actively practiced eugenics, applied to persons whose reproduction would be undesirable against the background of general prosperity. Here, the South, that atavistic offshoot preventing society from rushing forward over graves to supermarkets, is being sterilized. According to Altman, the moment is chosen perfectly - it is the time of least resistance, when the object will not even notice the manipulation. Accordingly, the media become the weapon. Altman describes the stages of infecting the emptying “rocking” consciousness with a new mythology of consumption, designed, first of all, to destroy the remnants of the old one, in equally scathing, mocking details. Invisible but omnipresent, here, Edgar Hoover wanders from receiver to receiver. The heroes, in turn, can't take a step without touching a glass pacifier labeled “Coca-Cola”. This brings to mind Marco Ferreri and his Coca-Cola Airship, a symbol of the new age, sailing over the heroes of “The Seed of Man”, lost in the desert.

The most interesting part begins when the heroes, young lovers, incidentally incestuously similar to each other, find themselves in the “abode of the American dream”. Here the irony of the director reaches epic proportions - the young people, hardly knowing what they are doing and why they are doing it, wander around the house as if drawn from postcards, carry on conversations as if overheard on the same radio, in short, enjoy step by step through their subconscious, the embodiment of their aspirations. The characters are confused, as they seem to have wanted something quite different. Their fate is repeated by the other characters, the hero's partners. Once out of prison, all they had to do was tuck them into the printer. What was done - through the development of the plot, we see how each of them acquires caricatured features corresponding to the images circulating in hyperreality. So now people, finding themselves at a dead end, try on the faces neatly laid out in shop windows, choosing from those that seem more favorable to them in terms of a carefully crafted image.

Therefore, when you realize who these “we” are, it becomes difficult not to sympathize with Altman's characters, who did not forget to endow them with a humanity they themselves did not realize. The most picturesque artistic detail, the triumph of the director's Homeric irony, decorating the entourage of the movie space is... the bedspread. From generation to generation, this masterpiece of needlework was passed from one marriage bed to another - here is the incestuous subtext, and a hint to the famous Indian blankets, and, in principle, the main meaning-forming detail of the allegorical pattern. In the ending, again reminiscent of Ferreri, the blanket becomes a kind of carpet. It spreads out as if from someone's trunk, dropping someone's corpse on the way, outside the closed circle, guiding from the void into the unknown.