Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), his feature film debut, is having a moment. It was mentioned in “One Last Job” (a recent episode of Poker Face that focused on an aspiring filmmaker) and a track from the movie’s score, by Tangerine Dream, was featured prominently in the opening episode (“Groundhogs”) of the latest season of The Bear. The latter makes particular sense, since both the movie and the show are based in Chicago. The Bear team knows what it’s doing, in that the track used in the episode, “Diamond Diary,” is buried under a lot of dialogue, which is true to how Mann’s movie, even when a scene was free of actors speaking, generally mixed the music with a lot of diegetic sound.
