John Brahm worked in the theatre in Germany prior to his first film experience in England in the mid-thirties. He came to Hollywood in 1937, and made his two classics at 20th Century Fox in 1944-45 - The Lodger and Hangover Square - two visually stunning, quasi-expressionistic thrillers starring Laird Cregar. However, Let Us Live remains a seriously underrated work, and bears comparison with Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, made two years before and also starring Henry Fonda.
Based on a famous crime case which occurred in Boston in 1934 - when two Boston cab drivers were identified by seven of eight witnesses as having been among the three men who held up a Lynn theatre and shot and killed a bill-poster in making their getaway - the film dramatises 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 swift 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?...

“Although it is the film's direction that has made it good, if not great, Mr. Brahm must share his credit with Allen Rivkin and Anthony Veiller for a splendidly turned script, and to Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Sullivan, Ralph Bellamy, Alan Baxter and the others for the incisive performances....”