Let Us Live (John Brahm, 1939)

Playing at Harvard Film Archive on November 7. – EK

This extraordinarily grim tale of an innocent cab driver called Brick (Henry Fonda) who, on the eve of his marriage to Mary (Maureen O'Sullivan), is mistakenly identified by eyewitnesses as a robber and murderer, prefigures Fonda’s similar role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, made two decades later. Yet in its pessimism and poignancy, it surpasses that later take on the themes of mistaken identity, fate and the threats lurking behind civilized facades.

In the 1930s and 1940s, several European Jewish exiles fleeing the Nazis found refuge in Columbia Pictures’ B unit and enjoyed extended collaborations there. Among them was the German-born John Brahm, who directed seven films for the studio. Though he is now mostly remembered for his later work at Fox (Guest in the House, Hangover Square), that distinctively Germanic touch—the terrifying conveyance of the world’s instability and a visionary sensibility in portraying the American nightmare—was already fully in place in films like Let Us Live, which also benefits tremendously from Lucien Ballard’s cinematography.