John Brahm, who came to Hollywood from Germany in 1937, directed two classic, quasi-expressionist thrillers, The Lodger, and Hangover Square (see March 27), as well as the incisive film noir, The Locket. His Let Us Live remains a seriously underrated work, and bears comparison with Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once.
Based on a famous 1934 crime case in which two Boston cab drivers were identified by witnesses as having been among the men who held up a theatre and killed a bill-poster in making their getaway, the film dramatizes a story of innocent men wrongly accused. In the original New York Times review, Frank Nugent noted:
“Under the goad of John Brahm's forceful and eloquent direction, it explores its familiar theme with anything but contempt. Mr. Brahm is as alert as any director of Class B melodrama to his opportunities for swift and exciting action, to the inherent suspense in a death-house deadline when a clock is ticking away the last hours of an innocent man's life, to the frenzy of the condemned's sweetheart as she tries to convince officialdom that justice has not been done. But, instead of stopping there, Mr. Brahm has underscored his physical drama with the psychological. What, after all, must happen to a man who finds himself victimized by a legal machine which he always had regarded as his protector?...”