“Thus did Romeo and Juliet consummate their first interview by falling madly in love with each other.” Just a little over halfway through Robert Altman’s ninth feature film, Thieves Like Us, we watch as the film’s two central characters, the fugitive bank robber Bowie (Keith Carradine) and the woman he’s falling madly in love with, Keechie (Shelley Duvall), as they cuddle in bed and have a playful back-and-forth over whether they should have sex again. On the radio behind them, the above line repeats again and again. They’ve been bed-locked for long enough now that the radio play is looping back on itself, each time accompanying them falling back into tenderly consuming each other. In a film that has zero conventional soundtrack — it’s a regrettably-overlooked case study in the power of diegesis, instead choosing to give us music playing on shitty radios around its characters instead of battering us with a more conventional score — the repetition of this line within a radio production of Shakespeare’s most famous tragicomedy sticks out like a sore thumb. We know what happens to Romeo and Juliet, as it’s what must always happen to them: certain doom.
The film, set in 1936 Mississippi, opens on Bowie, his friend Chicamaw (John Schuck) and veteran convict T-Dub (Bert Remsen), as the three manage to break out of jail, where they’ve been serving time for their love of robbing banks. Once out, they’re quick to jump right back into that old habit. That is, until Bowie meets Keechie, the daughter of the drunken garage owner giving the trio a place to stay, which throws the young criminal off his axis. The moment Bowie sees her, he’s transfixed, even in moments where she seems repulsed by him; she knows he’s a bank robber, and that he was convicted of murder. Still, his charms work on her, and thanks to a couple of breaks in between robberies, they, too, fall madly in love with each other. As we watch their tentative romance blossom, we also watch Bowie grapple with the pull of his life of crime. Now in a constant state of being on the run from the law, there’s a sense that the two are playing house a little bit with all of their tender, charming interactions on their way to that aforementioned lazy evening in a rickety twin-size bed — one day later, he sees in the paper that the car crash that he was just in has tipped the cops off to the fact that he, Chicamaw and T-Dub are alive and well in Mississippi, a dumb accident that begins the spiral that leads to Bowie dramatically dying in his last-ditch hiding place from a hail of police gunfire, while a newly-pregnant Keechie watches in horror.
Movies about doomed romances aren’t exactly tough to come by — romance is probably the most fertile ground for cultivating stories about tragedy since young love is so damn precious — but the key to the film’s energy is the fact that all of the people you see onscreen have been working together in Altman films for a few years. Duvall, acting onscreen for the first time ever, worked alongside Schuck and Remsen in Brewster McCloud (1970), and then again with Carradine in 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The last time Duvall and Carradine worked together in McCabe, he was also shot and killed, their romance permanently shuttered. Though that was an incredibly small part of that movie, Thieves shows us that the chemistry they shared there wasn’t a fluke. Even toward the end of the movie, as she grapples with leaving Bowie for his part in a robbery turned grisly, you can really feel the love that makes her choose to stay after all.
All that familiarity means that all of the quiet, tender, nothing-much-happening scenes of the movie are spared the curse of ever feeling boring. Thieves is by no means a fast-paced film, but Altman is able to wring an immense amount of tenderness from even the simplest of scenes, like the early one where Bowie takes shelter under some train tracks, cuddling a dog that wandered his way (“you’re a thief like me, aren’t you?” he asks the sad-eyed pup) so that he doesn’t feel too spooked after his jailbreak, or the one where he tells a bathing Keechie that he’d never want her to shave her armpits. For a chunk of time, the fresh couple live in a cabin near a pond, leaning as hard into their life’s simple joys, where he tells her that she made him understand “why a fella gets himself a missus and swing a dinner pail,” perhaps the film’s cutest line. One moment in Thieves takes the cake, though: Bowie, standing in a doorway, listening to T-Dub reading an article about their criminal activities, as he watches her mend a pink sweater, seemingly hypnotized by this simple act. Bowie likely heard the siren song of domestication the moment he laid eyes on Keechie, but it was this moment that underscored the fact that he’d never be able to outrun the demons that would ensure he’d never find the hard-earned peace that comes from those simple moments — but convinced him that he needed to try.
Despite the fact that the stain of violent crime is such a constant focus within Thieves Like Us, it makes the wild choice to make the actual robberies seem as boring as possible; this is, after all, a movie largely about a man who wants to escape the life of robbery, but finds himself drawn back into it, time and time again. The romance and character-building take center stage in Thieves, with the film making the daring choice to only show our boys walking into and out of the first two robberies. (The first robbery takes roughly a minute, and the second escape isn’t even in the foreground — it happens in the background, behind a truck handing out free Coca-Cola to a group of kids.) It’s only during the film’s third robbery — which culminates in bloodshed spurred on by a bank teller tripping while walking — that we get to see any of the action happening. The end result is that we feel the successes and failures of Bowie, Chicamaw and T-Dub, and feel for Keechie when the man she loves is blown to pieces and carried out in the quilt that kept them warm together as their limbs twisted together in that twin-size bed and dropped in a mud puddle.
Midway through Thieves, T-Dub grapples with the fact that he wishes he didn’t do what he does. “I shoulda been a doctor, or a lawyer, or run for office. I shoulda robbed people with my brain instead of a gun,” he says. If Thieves is about any sort of inevitability, it’s about the ways that our nature keeps us trapped within cages of our own making. Even when T-Dub imagines a better life for himself, he’s unable to see being a doctor or lawyer as anything but a different form of stealing from others. Bowie finds a love that feels pure and makes him stronger than anyone can imagine, but he still goes on that last robbery, and still tries diligently to break Chicamaw out of jail. Maybe we should have foreseen Bowie’s impending doom when he confessed, “I don’t suppose I coulda done anything except what I have – except maybe pitch ball.” While T-Dub imagines something better, Bowie simply can’t see a life outside of the one he’s trapped in. (Chicamaw, elsewhere, presents a third option, a position of pride, rather than regret: “There’s only three things I love to do: love, drink, and rob banks!”) It doesn’t matter that he’s surrounded by violence and men who paw at the blonde teen daughters of their sisters-in-law. Much like how Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t be Romeo and Juliet without their own spiral into melodramatic oblivion, romances like Bowie and Keechie’s were always bound to end in tragedy.
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