Let Us Live

A cinema is robbed and one of its employees shot dead. The three perpetrators speed off in a taxi. Shortly afterwards, taxi driver Brick is arrested, who was out and about with his bride Mary at the time of the robbery. Deeply in the love, the couple had just looked at a plot of land to build a house together, dreaming of children and a better future. Now Brick and his friend Joe have been identified as the culprits by several witnesses and are sentenced to death in a one-sided trial. Mary tries singlehandedly to find the real perpetrators.
Based on a real-life case, LET US LIVE is a strikingly dark thriller about the failure of the judiciary and was made by German émigré John Brahm, who lived in the US from 1937 after already living in exile in the UK beforehand. Mary and Brick’s trust in the law and justice, which they retain even after his arrest, is betrayed in terrible fashion: the legal system cannot admit that it has made a mistake. Fantastically acted by Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Sullivan and atmospherically shot by Lucien Ballard, the story is reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) and anticipates Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956): two films with Henry Fonda in the leading role, two films about innocent men convicted of crimes who are ground down by inexorable institutional mechanisms like in a Kafka nightmare.