Altman is a director who works on the periphery: he can take a tired motif and move around it with such precision and freshness that the very form seems altered, expanded. He looks at his subjects sideways. His talent is an original one, but it's probably the most erratic now at work in American movies. The technique can jell to extraordinary effect (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) or get lost in muddle (The Long Goodbye) and occasionally even fall apart completely (Brewster McCloud), Thieves Like Us is one of Altman's more successful movies, coherent and rich in detail, and it plays without a hitch. It has the rhythm of a hazy Mississippi heat cut with flashes of rain and it's so firmly set in its period that it can't be accused of cashing in on the nostalgia run. (p. 115)

Thieves Like Us isn't condescending about its characters, though it scores...