In Breathless (1959), Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small time thief who has casually killed a policeman, listens to Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, K622, as his girlfriend (Jean Seberg) plans to betray him.
Was she a small-time thief with dashed dreams or an expert con artist?
Luis Guzmán is all lowlife sparkle as an admiring small-time thief who calls Pluto the Tito Puente of smugglers.
Soon they had their story: Mr. Bloom had had a hand in the robbery, but an acquaintance, David Ranta, a small-time thief and drug user, was the gunman.
After watching a former schoolmate named Jack Ellery beat a robbery rap, Scudder loses sight of this small-time thief until they both show up at the same Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
The latter role went to Amanda Plummer, who was always Tarantino's first choice, with Tim Roth also his first choice for the small-time thief's partner in crime, Pumpkin.
Brad Pitt was first noticed by movie audiences in 1991 as a persuasive small-time thief in "Thelma and Louise," but it took three more years for him to become a movie star.
Belmondo's character, a small-time thief on the run after having casually killed a policeman, may not be shocking in his amorality these decades later, but he's still disturbing, as is Seberg's - Sunday at 3 p.m. on AMC.
Eddie Coyle, or Eddie Fingers, or "the stocky man" (as Higgins often describes him) is a familiar face in crime fiction: the small-time thief in and out of prison, a middling, occasionally charming gun-runner that never makes the big score, but rather gets pinned for all the little ones.
