Fields's motivation
This whole discussion may amount to a SPOILER if you want to view the protagonist's behavior with fresh eyes.
Allan Fields, played by Ray Milland, works for the US Government as a nuclear physicist but spies for a foreign power, presumably the Soviet Union in this 1952 film. I'm going to try to work out his motivation as much as possible while remembering that one can't be sure in the end.
Several reviewers have remarked that Fields is apparently an unwilling agent, and that does seem a reasonable starting point for trying to imagine his motivation. Milland's acting makes it clear that Fields is suffering mental anguish about what he is doing from the beginning of the film, which appears to be early in his spying career -- before his masters tell him to go beyond his own research and start stealing secrets from the offices of colleagues.
We can therefore eliminate ideological conviction as the motive. The remaining possibilities, broadly stated, are (1) money and (2) coercion, with the forms of coercion breaking down into (2a) blackmail and (2b) a threat of physical violence that can't be dealt with simply by going to the FBI (someone here on IMDb has wondered about a wife being held hostage). Since it's known that money and blackmail are everyday tools of the spy-recruiter's trade, and the threat of violence is exceptional, we may as well narrow the field of motives down to the first two. It is, after all, easier to keep control of a morally compromised agent than of one acting purely under duress. So -- money or blackmail.
At this point, let's pick up a hint from the images we're shown in the film. Early on, we see Fields looking at a plaque he has received for his contributions to nuclear physics. His gaze could simply be that of a man thinking, "Once I was a respectable scientist, and now look at me." However, I think the plaque means more to him than that. Later in the film, when his moral crisis reaches its peak, he grips the plaque in both hands, stares down at it for a few seconds, and then smashes it in a fit of rage. Now, let's take a look at the inscription that's before his eyes during those seconds (I have it freeze-framed as I write):
INTERNATIONAL PHYSICISTS ACADEMY
AWARDED TO
DR ALLAN FIELDS
OF THE UNITED STATES
FOR HIS CONTRIBUTIONS
IN THE FIELD OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1950
In the last two lines, which stand apart from the rest, the filmmakers surely are not giving us the address of the academy that awarded the plaque, but are letting us know where and when Fields received it: at an international conference or ceremony held in a city that is itself an international community and a center of diplomatic activity, in the year the Cold War gave rise to the Korean War. I think that's where he was recruited as a spy. If so, it's no wonder that the plaque, which practically speaks to him of the occasion, starts driving him mad.
Now the going gets tougher for us, but I think we can narrow the field of likely motives a bit more.
Money is less likely than blackmail. Geneva, with one outlying casino that probably wasn't even there in 1950, was not a city where a man might have been expected to lose heavily at the gaming tables. Lacking such a sudden panic over money, financially-motivated spying would probably begin either with the scientist carefully approaching a prospective buyer or with the buyer carefully drawing the scientist into a web of debt or dependency and making him pay back with secrets. Either scenario is more likely to be played out over time on the scientist's home ground than during a brief trip abroad. Anyway, the venal peddling of secrets is hard to reconcile with Fields's obvious mental distress. Yes, it's possible that he wasn't unwilling after all, but is only worried about getting caught or belatedly overcome with remorse; but the mercenary spies that we know about have tended to become addicted and numbed, not increasingly alive to their guilt. As long as we're playing a game of probabilities, I suggest we dispense with money as the motive.
That leaves blackmail. It seems that the form of blackmail most commonly used in recruiting agents is a threat to reveal some sexual indiscretion. The two kinds of sexual indiscretion that are useful to blackmailers are the extramarital affairs of apparently faithful married people and the homosexual affairs of apparently heterosexual people. Fields lives alone. Unless indeed there is a wife being held hostage somewhere, and she has been in durance vile so long that her dungeon shows more of the woman's touch than the apartment does, he is single. Here, then, is a possibility that deserves to go on our short list of "hooks" for Fields's recruitment: the threat of exposure as a homosexual, perhaps after an entrapment in Geneva.
Other threatened revelations might involve petty embezzlement and the like (not big-time embezzlement, in Fields's position), but then the mental grip on the recruit would be weaker than with the fear of being stripped naked before the mind's eye of the world. This is not a very promising line.
However, there is one form of blackmail that becomes especially plausible when the victim is an academic of Fields's generation and the setting is America at the height of the McCarthy Era; a form that could easily have occurred to people watching The Thief in 1952: ideological blackmail. Many intellectuals and artists of that time had become enamored of the Soviet Union in their youth (and in the world's youth, as far as its experience of statist socialism is concerned). For some, the object of their affection never lost its charm. For many others, it soon became a hoary skeleton in the closet -- and one that could truly wreak havoc if it got out. As we see in George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), people were struggling to defend their careers against false charges of past association with communists. A true charge would have been devastating.
So it seems to me that we're left with only two highly plausible motivating forces behind Fields's spying: blackmail over homosexuality, and blackmail over ideology. Which to choose?
As for Fields's sexuality, his reactions to the sultry Rita Gam defy analysis. After their first encounter, does a faint look of disgust cross his face? If so, is it merely the disgust of a refined heterosexual who finds himself in a coarse milieu? Is it the self-reproach of a man who knows he shouldn't let himself be distracted by a woman at such a time? During their second encounter, is he fighting off desire? He certainly does stare (albeit rigidly). Or is he wondering if she has her door open to keep an eye on him? Or is he trying to taste the sexual inclination that would have kept him free from blackmail? When she finally closes the door, smirking at him, does it mean her trained eye discerns that he can't feel anything? Or does it simply mean he'll have to knock if he wants to see more? It seems we're being told emphatically to draw our own conclusions about Fields's attitude toward the woman -- which, in itself, suggests that there is some special conclusion to be drawn.
There may seem to be another piece of evidence for the homosexuality thesis: the fact that Fields wears a ring on the little finger of his left hand. In the 1950s, as Wikipedia tells us, that could mean the wearer was signalling homosexuality to others who knew the code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinky_ring). However, there are three increasingly big problems with this interpretation. First, as the same Wikipedia article notes, a ring on the little finger had other meanings as well. Second, a man who deliberately wore an emblem of homosexuality would not fear exposure so much that he would commit treason and risk the electric chair to avoid it. Third, and most conclusively, Ray Milland was among those heterosexual men who wore a ring on the little finger of the left hand. He did not assume it for the film.
Homosexuality was such a taboo subject in films up to the 1950s that in Crossfire (1947), the homophobia that had motivated the villain in the novel had to be changed to anti-Semitism; and in These Three (1936), the accusation of lesbianism in the original story had to be changed to an accusation of heterosexual hanky-panky. In Strangers on a Train (1951), Robert Walker subtly suggested the nature of his character's interest in Farley Granger's character without ever committing himself; so oblique intimations of homosexuality in The Thief could be seen as consistent with a cautious new trend. Still, I'm inclined to think that if the filmmakers had any particular transgression in mind as their blackmail hook, it was more likely to be the currently topical one (forbidden political orientation) than the perennially toyed-with but discarded one (forbidden sexual orientation). Of course, we're free to imagine what we will about Fields's sexuality while concluding that it was political wild oats that got him in trouble.
I recognize that in any case I've been chasing a MacGuffin: one of those plot elements that serve to set things in motion without mattering to the filmmakers, like the unspecified state secrets that cause such a fuss in Hitchcock's films or the fanciful "letters of transit" in Casablanca. That's all right. The chase has left me feeling much as I do at the end of those films: entertained. It's a good thing I'm able to feel that way myself, because I may never have an audience for this stuff. share