Hamburg Noir
PULP TO FILM
Thieves Like Us
PULP
Thieves Like Us (Edward Anderson, 1937)
FILM
They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)
Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1973)
In this noir gem from the Great Depression, Edward Anderson tells a rugged but touching love story about two Dustbowl Okies on the run from the law.
Raymond Chandler called Thieves Like Us “one of the great forgotten novels of the 30s.” In substance and style, it’s a cross between Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled Red Harvest and John Steinbeck’s heart-wringing Grapes of Wrath. The former was based on the Anaconda Road massacre of 1920, in which striking miners were shot down by company guards in Butte, Montana. The latter memorialized a generation of tenant farmers who, in the late 1930s, fled drought-plagued dirt farms in Oklahoma to California’s lush San Joaquin Valley, only to be treated like second-class citizens.
In this tradition of hard-bitten underdogs, Thieves Like Us tells the story of three small-time gangsters who have just broken out of Oklahoma’s Alcatona Penitentiary, or “Alkie” as they call it, where they were serving life sentences. Like moths to the flame, they return to the one thing they know: robbing small-town banks. The crew is headed by T.W. (“T-Dub”) Masefield, age 44, a calm, rugged career criminal with dozens of bank robberies under his belt. His right hand is Elmo (“Chicamaw”) Mobley, age 37, “an Indian looking feller” with a weakness for alcohol and violence. The youngest member of the crew, Bowie Bowers, age 27, was convicted of killing a storekeeper when he was 18. He barely escaped getting “burned” in the electric chair. These characters fit the desperate times.
During the 1930s, many people who had literally lost the farm to the bank cheered on bank robbers like John Dillinger, another prison escapee, who they saw as one of their own, what Bowie calls “Normal People,” sticking it to bankers, who he considers to be “thieves like us.” And they had no use for the gun-happy “Laws” and the “Square-Johns” who supported them. Fittingly, the FBI tracked down its Public Enemy No. 1 at his father’s farm in Mooresville, Indiana. Dillinger slipped their tail, only to head right into the center of their dragnet in Chicago, where they shot him down outside a movie theater on the North Side. He had been watching a gangster film called Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. You can’t make this stuff up.
In Thieves Like Us, the Dillinger stand-ins hide out in Keota, Iowa, with Chicamaw’s cousin, who runs a service station and sells bootlegs corn whiskey. His daughter doesn’t approve of the bank robbers. But she approves of Bowie. The feeling is mutual. “The voice of the girl, Keechie, made Bowie’s veins distend and there was a velvety, fluttering sensation in his spine.” He calls her “Little Soldier,” first in his mind, later to her face.
This is where the real story begins. It’s about two innocent souls in an evil world. Keechie, who was raised like a boy by a criminal, has a heart of gold matched by a strong sense of morality. And Bowie, who spent the better part of his youth behind bars, where he was raised by wardens and inmates, wants to reform himself, if only for Keechie. The two of them end up inventing their own rules, unwittingly defining true love for the rest of us.
In the delicately awkward relationship between Bowie and Keechie, every look, every gesture counts:
Keechie took a pack of cigarettes from her polo shirt pocket, pushed up one and offered it to Bowie. When touched her hand, the velvety glow stiffened his blood.
Keechie expresses her love with direct questions that bring out the best in Bowie:
“Did you shoot that man in Selpa?”
“It was me or him,” Bowie said. “He was coming around the car after me with a gun.”
The chair under Keechie creaked a little as she moved.
...
“I can still square myself up.”
“No, Keechie said. “You can’t beat it this way.”
“Deep down in me I know I can’t, but I myself says I can.”
After their initial heart-to-heart, Bowie immediately backslides, establishes a recurring pattern in the story: misplaced loyalty. Against his better judgement, he drives his less-than-honorable partners down to West Texas in an old Model-T to meet up with T-Dub’s sister-in-law, who supplies them with a furnished house to hide out in. In exchange, they give her a cut from bank robberies to help get her husband out of prison.
After hitting a couple of banks -- and stealing over a hundred thousand dollars -- the robbers divide up the proceeds and go on a spending spree. Among other luxury goods, Bowie buys a “lady’s wrist watch with six diamonds on the band. That Little Soldier will open her eyes when I had her this.”
Of course, things are going a bit too good. Time for trouble. On the road back to Keota, Bowie gets into a traffic accident with his new Ford V-8. Two uniformed cops arrive at the scene. Chicamaw, who has been following Bowie with his own V-8, pulls up and shoots the cops, bang-bang-bang, just like that. “Pain seized Bowie’s back with the grip of a twisted monkey-wrench and his belly muscles became as rigid as a washboard.”
Bowie wakes up in severe back in Keota. Keechie is standing over him with a hot, wet towel in her hands.
He makes the mistake of trying to impress her:
“I got money. On me and that brown bag under the bed. Nineteen thousand dollars.”
She sets him straight:
“I would do this for a dog. If you will turn over and pull your shirt up I will put some liniment on your back.”
Her tough love works. Before long, the two of them are quietly eating soft-boiled eggs and crumbled crackers out of peanut-butter glasses like children -- or an old married couple.
Not that Keechie’s rough femininity is lost on Bowie:
She had paint on her mouth tonight, but looking at her lips was like spying on her unclad through a keyhole.
In typical film noir fashion, what comes next is signaled by what comes after: Keechie frying bacon for Bowie the next morning.
Over breakfast, Bowie reads aloud about himself in the newspaper. Realizing that the cops are hot on their trail, they hit the road for Oklahoma. Keechie, wearing a military coat and behaving like a gangster, is at the wheel, “taking curves like they weren’t there.” They rent a small, primitive cottage cat the back of a former sanitarium that Bowie says “looks like a jail.” Before long, Keechie turns it into a home.
And she begins wearing Bowie’s clothes:
She was funny that way, always wearing something of his and even sleeping at nights in one of his shirts and he had paid fifteen dollars for that negligee and boudoir slippers.
Not that it helps. Bowie keeps getting pulled back into his past, robbing Keechie of her dreamed-of future for them both. In the end, the two outlaws are betrayed by people closest to them -- family -- suffering the same fate as Dillinger. Given all the character development that has come before, the final scene is so horrible that Anderson resorts to “reporting” it in a local newspaper. Despite the literary sleight of hand, it isn’t easy reading.
* * *
Audiences are spared the gruesome ending in Nicholas Ray’s 1948 cinematic version, They Live by Night, which was co-written by Anderson. It was Ray’s directorial debut. Although the film made history with a remarkably realistic opening shot from a helicopter -- which follows the bank robbers in their Model-T convertible on a dusty country road for a full two minutes -- what has endeared it to generations of viewers is the delicately awkward relationship between Bowie and Keechie on the silver screen.
The prequel to the opening credits shows an intimate moment (which doesn’t look acted) with the almost-too-well-cast Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger. As the two lovers laugh and kiss, subtext fades in and out: “This boy ... and this girl ... were never properly introduced to the world we live in....”
In a scene that improves on the book, their raw innocence is beautifully played out when Bowie gives Keechie a wristwatch:
Bowie: “What time is it?”
Keechie: “I don’t know.”
Bowie: “There’s no clock here to set it by.”
Keechie: “It’s a nice watch.”
Bowie: “Well, what time do the hands say?”
Keechie: “Five minutes to 2.”
Bowie: “That’s close enough.”
Keechie never sets the watch, but Bowie keeps asking her what time it is. Both know that’s his way of saying what he can’t. And Keechie keeps responding with “five minutes to two,” meaning she feels the same. Their awkward intimacy is humbling to watch.
Nevertheless, the film doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable topics. Near the end, Bowie is less than happy to learn about Keechie’s pregnancy, which would definitely complicate their run from the law. Keechie’s shot-from-the-hip response makes another kind of film history: “You don’t see me knittin’ anything, do you?” Despite stepping around the letter of the Hays Code, the line is shocking -- even to modern audiences -- coming from Keechie.
In the film, Bowie and Keechie’s love is put to the ultimate test as armed men on both sides of the law close in. The two overcome the impossible with remarkable dignity and calm, albeit at a very high cost. It’s their very personal -- and poetic -- form of triumph.