Three misfit white lifer trustee convicts–Bowie (Keith Carradine), Chicamaw (John Schuck) and T-Dub (Bert Remson)– escape from a Mississippi prison farm by kidnapping a taxi driver (John Roper) during the Depression and go on a bank-robbing spree. Chicamaw is part Indian and can become surly, who declares he likes three things about living–women, drinking and robbing banks. T-Dub is the mastermind of the gang, who has a bum leg. Later on in the story, when on-the-lam with a big reward posted for his arrest, is so carried away with lust over a young beautician (Ann Latham) with burnt-blonde hair that he gives his real name on the license when he marries her. The 23-year-old Bowie was convicted at 16 of a grocery stickup murder that his friends talked him into as a means of getting easy money, while the two others are career bank robbers in their forties because they don’t think they are capable of doing anything else. They are pictured as not the swiftest heist team to ever hit the road, but dumbly proud of the attention they receive in the newspapers. Bowie is depicted as an innocent who once again falls in with the wrong crowd (the same reason for his crime as a youth) and then falls for the ordinary looking, gawky, uneducated farm girl Keechie (Shelley Duvall), who makes him feel important and wants him to be loyal to her and not the gang. They are both at odds with a world that seems uncaring and cold, and don’t know how to deal with it. Their doomed lower-class romance is laced with ironical bitter-sweet truths, and becomes the heart of the film.