John Brahm, a German émigré, is known for his baroque Gothic dramas The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945) but he started originally in America doing programmers for Columbia, including Let Us Live, similar to two other films by émigré directors about the darkness of the American justice system -- Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1936) and Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957) --all three films starring Henry Fonda as a good guy suffering the vicissitudes of fate.
Fonda is convicted of a murder and sentenced to the electric chair, the evidence against him somewhat weak except for witnesses' identification. His fiancée, played by Maureen O'Sullivan, searches with off-duty detective Ralph Bellamy for evidence to clear him and finally finds it, just in the nick of time. Fonda is freed but is now bitter and without hope. saying "the law can't admit it's wrong; we have no chance, us little people," the prosecutor having said it is his job to get convictions. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who later became a master of color and the widescreen working with directors Blake Edwards and Sam Peckinpah, here does a beautiful job with Brahm of showing Fonda's world changing visually and psychologically from bright and hopeful to dark, shadowy and despairing, as Bellamy and O'Sullivan trudge through the snow in the attempt to find exonerating evidence.
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