Heist

Esteemed writer/director David Mamet fashioned this homage to the elegant, character-driven "tough guy" genre pictures of Warner Bros. in the 1930s and '40s, even using vintage scores in the soundtrack. Gene Hackman stars as Joe Moore, an accomplished thief whose career is jeopardized after he's caught on security cameras during a job. Broke, Joe and his associates Bobby (Delroy Lindo) and Pinky (Ricky Jay) are blackmailed by their longtime fence Bergman (Danny DeVito) into jacking Swiss gold bars from an airplane. As they plot the complicated score, Joe and his crew become suspicious of the relationship between Joe's young wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon) and Bergman's nephew Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell), who has been planted on the crew to keep an eye on them for his uncle. Betrayals and backstabbings are the order of the day as Joe gets closer to the payday of a lifetime. In an effort to reinforce the solid storytelling of classic crime dramas, Mamet eschewed the use of computers or high-tech gadgetry in the complicated plot. Heist (2001) co-stars Patti LuPone.