Thieves Like Us (George Litto Productions, Jerry Back, United Artists, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In 2006 my husband Charles and I watched Robert Altman’s 1974 remake of They Live by Night, shot under Edward Anderson’s original title Thieves Like Us and returned to its 1930’s setting instead of taking place in contemporary times, as a memorial tribute to Altman. I hadn’t started the moviemagg blog at that time and so here’s what I had to say about Thieves Like Us then:

The film was Thieves Like Us, a very interesting Robert Altman movie from 1974 that was a remake of Nicholas Ray’s 1948 classic They Live by Night, though Altman reverted to the original title of Edward Anderson’s source novel as well as to its 1930’s setting (Ray’s version had moved it to a contemporary time frame). Both films tell the tale of three down-home convicts, Chic[k]amaw (Howard Da Silva in the original, John Schuck in the remake); T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen in the original, Bert Remsen in the remake — and at least Altman and his writing collaborators, Calder Willingham and Joan Tewkesbury, explained that the character’s odd name is a further contraction of his initials. T. W., while Ray and Charles Schnee didn’t bother) and the main protagonist, Bowie (Farley Granger in the original, Keith Carradine in the remake), a (relatively) innocent young man — he was convicted of murder but was only peripherally involved in the killing — who enters into a desperate, doomed romance with Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell in the original, Shelley Duvall in the remake), either the daughter or the niece of one of their outside helpers: Mattie (Helen Craig in the original, Louise Fletcher — in her first film — in the remake), whose husband is also an inmate and who’s living with her brother-in-law, Mobley (Wil Wright in the original, Altman’s old M*A*S*Hman Tom Skerritt here). The critics in 1974 inevitably compared the film to Bonnie and Clyde (and They Live by Night had been one of the models for the Bonnie and Clyde movie, along with You Only Live Once and Gun Crazy — surprisingly, not Persons in Hiding, the 1939 Paramount “B” that was the first film about the actual Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow — cited by Pauline Kael in her famous extended review of Bonnie and Clyde) but, if anything, Thieves Like Us seems to have been planned deliberately by Altman as a sort of anti-Bonnie and Clyde.

Where Bonnie and Clyde was frenetic, funny (Arthur Penn, its director, was hailed as a genius for rapid alternations of comedy and violence — though that had been done before by Buster Keaton in The General and Billy Wilder in Some Like It Hot), energetic, brightly colored and punctuated with a banjo-pickin’ score by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Thieves Like Us is somber, dark, absolutely determined not to tap any opportunities for comic relief in the story, done in the past-is-brown look that admittedly wasn’t anywhere near as much of a cliché in 1974 as it is now, and with almost no non-source music whatsoever — just an ironic playing of Jimmie Lunceford’s record of “Organ Grinder’s Swing” as the three crooks go to a bank job they think is going to be easy but is going to get them into major trouble (they don’t even make it to the bank; instead their car is involved in a serious accident and Bowie is incapacitated). The rest of the film is “scored” with actual transcriptions of old radio shows of the period (the 1930’s — though, despite the credits to John Dunning as “radio researcher” and Carole Gister as “researcher,” there’s still a good deal of uncertainty as to just when in the 1930’s this takes place: a speech by Franklin Roosevelt — a recording by the real one — identifies it as 1937 and so does a travel guidebook in a bus station at the end, but one of the live broadcasts used is of the Boswell Sisters, who broke up in 1936; the heavy-duty Depression aura is characteristic of the early 1930’s but the relatively streamlined cars used[1] seem to be from the end of the decade) — sometimes ironically, as when the first lovemaking session between Bowie and Keechie occurs while they’re listening to a broadcast of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — and the 1930’s atmosphere as recreated in the film is seemingly free of anachronisms (at least I didn’t spot any, though I’m relying mostly on the movies of the period for my authentic view of what the 1930’s “really” looked like).

It’s a well done movie and its only flaw is it seems rather bookish, much the way more recent films like Million Dollar Baby and Brokeback Mountain have: it seems just too distant from the characters, too content to let us watch them from afar instead of actually involving us viscerally in their plights. Robert Altman (to whom we were watching the film as an envoi since he died recently) was mostly a pretty cerebral director — M*A*S*H, the film that made his reputation, is surprisingly atypical of his work in its comedy (Altman usually didn’t have much of a sense of humor), rapid pace and overall excitement — and that’s both the strength and the weakness of Thieves Like Us. Its strength is that Altman’s approach seems to go out of its way to de-emphasize the violence inherent in the material — the film is an hour and a half into its two-hour running time before we actually see any on-screen violence and it’s only in the final bank robbery, the one that goes incredibly wrong (the tag line in the ad campaign read, “Robbing 36 banks was easy. Watch what happens when they hit the 37th”), that we actually see the criminals in operation (though there’s one all too obvious visual quote from Bonnie and Clyde: the slow-motion in which Keechie is filmed as she watches the cops shoot her lover) — and its weakness is that we really don’t feel all that much for the characters.

It doesn’t help that, while Altman’s cast is generally at least at the level of Ray’s (and Shelley Duvall is far superior to Cathy O’Donnell in the female lead), Keith Carradine just isn’t as powerful as Bowie as Farley Granger was. Granger’s peculiarly whiny style usually was just annoying, but in the hands of a major director like Ray or Alfred Hitchcock it could turn into a quite effective portrayal of a certain kind of small-time, small-minded man with visions of reaching far beyond his “place” — and Carradine simply can’t cut it in delivering that aspect of the character, as well as he wears the 1930’s clothes and assumes the proper attitude of nice boy pretending to be bad-ass gangster. It’s also odd that Altman, Willingham and Tewkesbury left out one key piece of exposition about Bowie — that his father, also a criminal, was killed before he was born — which gave a profoundly mixed message to the ending (Bowie is shot while Keechie is pregnant with his child, and we can read that either as “life goes on” or, more pessimistically, that with his father dead before he was born the son of Bowie and Keechie will live out the same cycle and also be a criminal, shot down by police while still a young man) — and therefore deprived the ending of a good deal of the poignancy it had in They Live by Night. Still, the strengths of Thieves Like Us far outweigh its weaknesses (and it benefits from not having the attempts at literal “social significance” patched into it that were probably the product of They Live by Night’s executive producer, Dore Schary, and marred that film), and it was a good tribute to Robert Altman and the kind of filmmaking he did well. — 11/29/06

[1] — One Paul Neanover gets a credit for “cars.”