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starring: Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Louise Fletcherdirected by: Robert Altman
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302995770
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
ISBN: 6302995779
Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Release Date: September 01, 1998
Running Time: 123 minutes
Sales Rank: 12621
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Theatrical Release Date: February 11, 1974
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
Every few years Robert Altman gets rediscovered by critics and audiences, yet somehow this middle-period gem remains underviewed. It's hard to understand why. In 1974, when he made Thieves Like Us, Altman was in top form. He'd recently made McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, and the next year would bring Nashville, his touchstone masterwork. As with his other films, Thieves Like Us at first has a homemade immediacy, chugging along like back-porch skiffle music. Set in the Midwest of the 1930s, early scenes between the three thieves (Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, and John Schuck) feel like silent-movie era routines about a trio of affable farm boys turned bank robbers. Altman's subject--the 'thistledown' critic Pauline Kael once described as Altman's real material--emerges by degrees. The story of hell-bent innocents devolves into a tale of the spell cast over the boys by the newspaper stories that mythologize them. (They turn a corner when their pictures appear in an issue of Real Detective.) The string of bank robberies, interlaced with episodes of a shy romance between Carradine and his Coke-sucking girl, Keechie (Shelley Duvall), becomes an agrarian noir by way of Madame Bovary. These thieves lived just at the point when American pop culture was emerging; the cities may have had Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, but in the Altmanesque countryside sheet music was wallpaper and what pulled were radio serials such as Gangbusters. Compared at the time to Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us now seems singular, a fable of fatal crime and punishment amid barbershop-quartet music and cricket song. --Lyall Bush
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - It's about time this DVD was released!
This was the first Robert Altman film I ever saw. The realistic re-creation of the period and the "no-acting" acting sucked me right in, thereby 'hooking' me on Altman (and Altman-ish) films forever.
The remarkable transformation of Shelley Duvall's "Keechy" from greasy-haired, floppy-eared picayune in the background to Leading Lady is one of the elements of the film which make it unforgettable.
Louise Fletcher is flawless as the matron Mattie, ... Read More
Rating:  - Another Altman Gem
I would have loved the pitch meeting for this film. I'm sure the studio honchoes had "Bonnie and Clyde" dancing in their heads with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway and a ballet of bullets. Their jaws must have dropped when they got...Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall. All kidding aside this Depression era bankrobber saga is a great mood piece. Director Robert Altman isn't so much concerned with the visceral but with charaterization. Carradine and Duvall are certainly fine as our perfunctory ... Read More
Rating: - Slow-moving 'Thieves' finally captured on DVD
"Thieves" is getting its first U.S. release on DVD. Robert Altman convinced UA to finance the pet project by promising to do its country music project "Nashville" (which the studio later discarded!).
Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall star in the tale of some 1930s band robbers who are just plain folks, unless they're packing heat. The movie's leisurely narrative means a lot of the time we're lying low with the gang (Carradine, John Schuck and Bert Remsen), playing with the kids and ... Read More
Rating: - Another Altman Classic
Nice to see this classic finally get a DVD release in the US. Altman was at the top of his game in the early 70s (between MASH and Nashville) and this movie fits in perfectly alongside such classics as McCabe & Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye and California Split. Great performances from Shelley Duvall and Keith Carradine dominate this gangster film that's much more interested in the two young lovers than in bullets or blood.
A must-see for all Altman fans. For collectors, be forewarned ... Read More
Rating: - One of the reasons Altman's considered a genius.....
This movie, a better rendition, if you ask me, of the whole "Bonnie & Cllyde" type of story, with Shelley Duvall practically owning the movie as Keechie, the quirky love interest of Keith Carradine's Bowie in this film, was made THIRTY-THREE YEARS AGO by the late, legendary Robert Altman. All things seem to come together nicely in this film: the art direction, something which Altman and his protegé Alan Rudolph were noted for on generally small budgets; the acting, by Duvall, Carradine, Remsen, Schuck ... Read More
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