DIRECTOR: Robert Altman
PRODUCTION CO: George Litto Productions
PRODUCER: Jerry Bick
SCREENPLAY: Joan Tewkesbury, Calder Willingham, Robert Altman, based on the novel by Edward Anderson
PHOTOGRAPHY: Jean Boffety
EDITOR: Lou Lombardo
WITH: Keith Carradine (Bowie), Shelley Duvall (Keechie), John Schuck (Chicamaw), Bert Remsen (T-Dub), Louise Fletcher (Mattie), Ann Latham (Lula), Tom Skerritt (Dee Mobley)
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FESTIVALS: Cannes, In Competition

REVIEWS

“Thieves Like Us has never gotten its due as one of [Altman’s] finest directorial efforts. Two reasons spring to mind: The film followed Arthur Penn's Bonnie And Clyde, another seminal work about bank-robbing outlaws, and it was lodged in the middle of the era's greatest creative winning streak, when Altman turned out M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville in the space of five years. But Thieves Like Us stands up to any one of them, because it plays to Altman's strengths for upending genre expectations and evoking a specific era so rigorously that it hardly feels staged at all…”

– Scott Tobias, AV Club


“Robert Altman finds a sure, soft tone in this movie, from 1974, and he never loses it. His account of Coca-Cola-swigging young lovers in the thirties is the most quietly poetic of his films; it’s sensuous right from the first pearly-green long shot, and it seems to achieve beauty without artifice. Keith Carradine is Bowie, a boy who escapes from prison with two bank robbers, Chicamaw and T-Dub (John Schuck and Bert Remsen), and Shelley Duvall is Keechie, the girl whose drunken father runs the gas station the convicts hide in. Made in the vegetating old towns of Mississippi, the movie has the ambience of the 1937 novel by Edward Anderson on which it’s based, yet it was the most freely intuitive film Altman had made up to that time. Carradine and Duvall have an easy affinity; when Keechie and Bowie fall in love, it’s two-sided, equal, and perfect. As the heavy-drinking, half-mad Chicamaw, Schuck has a comic, terrifying scene when he’s in a home and insists on playacting a robbery with a couple of small children and then explodes in a murderous rage when the kids lose interest. Louise Fletcher is impressively strong as the kids’ mother, the no-nonsense Mattie.”

– Pauline Kael, New Yorker

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Hamilton   
Monday, 21 March, 8.00pm

​Auckland   
Monday, 11 April, 6:15pm

Nelson     
Tuesday, 26 April, 6.00pm

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 2 November, 6.00pm

Dunedin
Wednesday, 9 November, 7.30pm

​Wellington   
Monday, 21 November, 6:15pm
ROBERT ALTMAN selection >>