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As the down-and-dirty pictures of the late ’70s and early ’80s started getting scored by tech-savvy musicians (Giorgio Moroder, Vangelis—even John Carpenter) who brought out the pulpiness in many a nocturnal popcorn flick, Germany’s Tangerine Dream were an oft-recruited collective. 

Throughout their careers as ambient, prog-rock dispensers, Tangerine Dream also scored plenty of movies, movies that were usually about desperate men who often make bad decisions. Roy Scheider and his crew of explosive-carrying truckers in Sorcerer. Tom Cruise’s suburban-teen-turned-bad in Risky Business. Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso’s past-their-prime lotharios in Heartbreakers. Adrian Pasdar’s conflicted vampire-in-training in Near Dark. Casey Siemaszko’s fight-avoiding nerd in Three O’Clock High. All these protagonists went on some harrowing journeys, and Tangerine Dream was there to provide sweaty, synth-heavy sounds.

But they arguably did their finest work in Thief, Michael Mann’s 1981 feature-film debut. (The Criterion Collection is dropping a new 4K UHD on March 11.) After spending the ’70s writing and directing crime stories for the small screen, Mann officially began his run as this country’s answer to Jean-Pierre Melville with this film, the first of many stylish pulp odysseys he would lace with existential ennui.

Inspired by Frank Hohimer’s memoir The Home Invaders: Confessions Of A Cat Burglar, Thief tells the story of Frank (James Caan), a businessman who also has a side hustle as a professional jewel thief. With the movie set in Chicago, Mann was initially going to pepper the score with Chicago blues music. Chi-Town blues guitarist Joseph “Mighty Joe” Young performs at a dive bar in one scene, while blues legend Willie Dixon has a brief cameo as Frank’s fishing buddy. 

But Mann eventually hit up Tangerine Dream, which consisted at the time of founding guitarist-keyboardist Edgar Froese and keyboardists Chris Franke and Johannes Schmoelling. A fan of their 1979 album Force Majeure, Mann thought they’d be perfect to provide badass music for his badass protagonist (“Igneous,” one of their pieces in the movie, is a remix of their 14-minute Majeure track “Thru Metamorphic Rocks”). “Their music reflected the raw, cutting edge of Frank’s character,” Mann told the Boston Globe in 1981. “It does to the sound what Frank’s face does for the video. It’s chaotic, but it also strives for coherence.”

In an interview on the Criterion release, Schmoelling remembers Mann saying he needed experimental musicians who could create the organized noise he was looking for. Mann even showed up at their Berlin studio, mixing and fading on the sound boards with them. “He always made clear, ‘I’d like to work with your group, because you have electronic equipment, you’re not classically oriented, you don’t work with an orchestra,” Schmoelling said. “I want the otherness of sound… I want to make him co*e across even harder than he already does.” 

The synthesizers get to work during the film’s bravura opening sequence, where we first see Frank in the middle of a job. Titled “Diamond Diary,” the piece has the Dream serving up a squirrelly, rising tone, matching the damp, early-morning night moves Mann presents in the opening minutes. (Mann beat Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner by a year in giving us a rain-soaked neo-noir with moody synth music, something also mentioned by Nick James’ essay, which acco*panies the Criterion release.) The score reaches a choppy, feverish tempo when Frank starts drilling on the vault. Froese’s guitar kicks in when Frank and his right-hand man Barry (a young Jim Belushi) co*plete the job and make a speedy getaway back to their stashed cars. 

Mann makes it known that the music is mainly there for Frank. Whirring music cues often appear when Frank gets down to brass tacks, whether it’s pulling a gun on a guy who’s stolen his money or trying to convince Jessie (Tuesday Weld), an easy-on-the-eyes waitress, that they should get married and start a family. In order to do that, he must do One More Job, taking on an impossible robbery in L.A., orchestrated by an obviously shady crime boss (Robert Prosky, very Faustian). 

The Dream assembles some antsy cues for scenes where Frank rides through the Windy City streets in his Caddy, cracking on getting the right tools while dodging the crooked cops who’ve been keeping tabs on him and his new partner. You could say this is where Mann started his knack for merging slick driving scenes with slicker music cues, as he famously did when he had Crockett and Tubbs speed through Miami to Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” in the Miami Vice pilot.

Once again, the job goes off without a hitch, which leads to Thief’s sunniest (and sunniest-sounding) moment, where a shirtless Frank is walking on the beach with Jessie and their new baby, while Barry and his girl are playing in the water. This sequence has Tangerine Dream sounding particularly like Giorgio Moroder with “Beach Scene,” with Froese once again co*ing in on the guitar. (On the soundtrack album, there are two versions of this piece.)

While this seems like a happy note to end the movie on, we have another half-hour of Frank predictably finding out that it’s not so easy getting out of the heist game. This leads to a climactic shootout where Frank goes on a rabid, self-destructive tear, and Mann was looking for a Pink Floyd-esque, “co*fortably Numb”-sounding finale to acco*pany it. When the Dream couldn’t co*e up with one, he hit up co*poser Craig Safan (The Legend Of Billie Jean), who co*posed “Confrontation,” performed by him and session musicians. Mann definitely gets his spaghetti Western on with this ending, giving us the kind of bullet-riddled, burn-the-whole-place down climax those horse operas dropped, usually to the sounds of a defiant Sergio Leone score.

Thief, only Tangerine Dream’s second soundtrack, would kick off a fruitful decade for the group. Mann would work with them one more time, for his 1983 horror film The Keep. After that, they would score several other movies before getting back to their regular groove as prog-rock provocateurs. But over those ten years, when filmmakers were beginning to realize that foreboding, atmospheric synth tracks made perfect B-movie music, Tangerine Dream was the most prolific at giving movies, as Mann would say, the otherness of sound.