Robber Barren

The Thief of Paris. The outlaw has been an object of fascination for the French cinema from Pepe le Moko to La Guerre Est Finie. In Thief, the subject for study is Jean-Paul Belmondo, an impenitent housebreaker operating in the gleaming fin de siecle Paris of

Lautrec and Bonnard. A perverse Robin Hood, he takes from the rich and gives to the rich--in this case himself. But like his society-thief predecessors, Raffles and Arsene Lupin, he has more to him than simple avarice. As he rifles the treasures of a boarded-up town house, waves of Proustian memories flood his brain.

Raised as an orphan, he is cheated of his inheritance by an unscrupulous uncle and jilted by a beautiful cousin (Genevieve Bujold). He recoups by stealing the family jewels of the cousin's fiance, pauperizing him in a single stroke and canceling the marriage vows. That starts him on his career: for what was begun in fun continues in earnest. He turns pro, pilfering privileged homes and allying himself with a series of outcasts: a spoiled priest, anarchists, and demimondaines who find him criminally good-looking.

Occasionally, the arresting thought of retribution plagues him, as when he sees a thief led to the guillotine or watches an associate shot down before his eyes. But even the disappearance of his closest cronies, who drop out or die one by one, does not subdue his larcenous spirit. Finally, he has everything: riches, an elegant home and the beautiful cousin, who rejoins him to share his life. He still cannot quit. In the camera's last view he has completed his heist, and is sitting on a train with satchels full of loot. Before the viewer's eyes he slips from youth to middle age, a pathetic pariah whose luxurious tastes cannot disguise his barren obsession.

Director Louis Malle (The Lovers) unreels his film novelistically, in segments. The beginning, reminiscent of the early Guinness films, is delightfully allusive and elusive. But in the middle, Malle abruptly switches to a pictorial history of burglary as Belmondo goes through a repetitious series of tedious jobs of greater interest to criminals and cops than to ordinary citizens. The end is something else again: sympathetic character studies proving Nietzsche's dictum that the criminal is only a strong man made sick.

All along, the second-story man could have used a first story, a plot to join the disparate chapters of his life. Still, Thief has a number of hidden treasures, notably the subtle, restrained performances of Belmondo and Genevieve Bujold against the richly reconstructed backdrop of period Paris. As a film, it all adds up to nothing, but as De Gaulle has taken pains to prove, no one says nothing so grandly as the French.

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