Thieves Like Us

Thieves Like Us is a 1974 American crime film, set in the United States of the 1930s. It was directed by Robert Altman and starred Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall. The film was based on the novel of the same name by Edward Anderson, which also supplied source material for the 1948 film They Live by Night, directed by Nicholas Ray. The Altman film sticks much closer to the book. The supporting cast includes Louise Fletcher and Tom Skerritt. The film was entered into the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. Plot summary Bowie, a young man convicted of murder when a teenager, and Chicamaw, an old lag, escape from a Mississippi prison in 1936 and join up with another old lag, T-Dub, who has hired a cab to meet them. They hide out with an acquaintance, who owns a garage and set to work robbing banks. Here Bowie gets to talk to Keechie, the garageman's daughter. They next hole up with T-Dub's sister-in-law Mattie and her children, including her older daughter Lula, the object of T-Dub's lascivious attention. Bowie is injured in a car crash, after which Chicamaw guns down an inquisitive officer. He leaves Bowie at the garage, where Keechie takes care of him. They become lovers but Bowie has no intention of turning his back on crime. Bowie leaves to meet up with the others and they rob a bank but the trigger-happy Chicamaw shoots and kills a bank clerk. The robbers split up and Bowie returns to a distraught Keechie. We learn that T-Dub has been killed and Chicamaw recaptured and returned to prison. After persuading an unwilling Mattie to let the pregnant Keechie stay in a cabin at her motel, Bowie, posing as a sheriff, springs Chickamaw from prison but the latter, while claiming to have merely tied the warden to a tree, has instead shot him dead.