THIEVES LIKE US

(1974, Robert Altman) Escaped cons Bert Remsen, John Schuck, and protégé Keith Carradine hole up at a rural gas station before going the bank robbery route, but Carradine and station owner’s daughter Shelley Duvall find love. Second, more faithful adaptation of Edward Anderson’s novel (after Nick Ray’s They Live By Night), with the 30s effortlessly recreated on Mississippi locations. Approx. 123 min.

“The most quietly poetic of Altman’s films; it's sensuous right from the first pearly-green long shot, and it seems to achieve beauty without artifice. When Keechie and Bowie fall in love it's two-sided, equal, and perfect.”
– Pauline Kael

"Altman went back to a poetic example of ‘30s social realism for his underrated and seldom seen version of the Bonnie and Clyde myth—starring Duvall and Carradine as a charmingly sweet and rustic version of the doomed outlaw lovers."
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

"The world of Thieves Like Us is beautiful and strange, in all its stunning everydayness...Each scene plays out with equal measure given to humor, pathos, eccentricity of character, the unpredictability of life, and the blundering work of getting through the day as a human being. It's emblematic of Robert Altman's human (and humane) universe."
– Slant magazine

"Altman's most persistently charming film. Never portentous, never a mere spoof, this is a touching, intelligent,
and - in its own small way - rather wonderful movie."
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)

"An engaging, sharply observed account of a long-lost time, and of some of the people who briefly inhabited it...A integrated work. It is full of things to think about, that hang in the memory like the details of a banal crime story on page 32, which, though read quickly, won't go away. Somehow you know that this happened."
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times. Click here to read full review