Let Us Live Reviews

After just a few minutes of its innocent-man-is-sentenced-to-death-but-beats-the-rap-at- the-last-minute story, one needn't be a psychic to know how LET US LIVE will end. Fonda and Baxter are erroneously arrested for robbery and murder. They are tried, convicted, and sent to jail to await their execution. O'Sullivan is Fonda's fiancee and believes him to be innocent, so she persuades Bellamy, a police lieutenant, to help her clear Fonda and Baxter, while Fonda spends most of the movie pacing his cell bewilderedly. Bellamy and O'Sullivan manage to find the real villains and make the evidence known just one hour before the condemned men are to meet their fates. This is a short, tight film that the studio offered either as a top or bottom feature for a double bill. At the same time, there was a case pending in the Massachusetts courts that was quite similar to the one in the film, and the state insisted that the studio not trespass too deeply into the real situation. (In the actual case, the accused cab drivers were also innocent.) Fonda made two other films with nearly the same theme, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE and Alfred Hitchcock's THE WRONG MAN. Both surpassed this in critical and box-office success.