Never. Ever. Ever. Call the cops. Ever. They teach this in schools, right? Doesn't everyone know this? (I'm thinking this because of this film's end. As soon as someone called the cops, I knew our hero was in trouble.)
Once a Thief is also a good movie about San Francisco, and one of its highlights is surely Yuki Shimoda (who was a Japanese-American) playing a Chinese undertaker, speaking perfect Italian to Jack Palance (who was a Ukranian-American playing Italian-American here), and a Chinese store-owner character speaking to a white cop who understands him perfectly and speaks back to him in perfect Mandarin.
Something that Once a Thief articulates so well is the way that police and other state institutions make criminals. If the state decides you are a criminal, then you are one. A man can go straight, work hard, stay away from thieves and murderers, have a child, try to get his life together. But the state gets in his way, hauls him in to be questioned, forces him to lose his job, till he has no way to make money but to steal it. Then the state says see I knew it all along. You've always been a thief. This a surprisingly sympathetic and intelligent film. This is probably because it was written by Zekial Marko.
Another thing to say about Once a Thief is that the film refers to lesbians several times, although no lesbians are characters in the film. In the opening sequence over the credits, we are at a mixed bar and a woman hits on another woman, and we also see a pair of women who are clearly a couple. Later in the film Delon's cellmate, we find out, runs a kind of flophouse for lesbians, some of whom are heroin users.
In another queer twist, we get this odd bit of dialogue at the very end of the film:
Cleve: It's there! The end of the rainbow. Long cars and beautiful women.
Saragatanas: I don't dig women.
No comments:
Post a Comment