This beautiful, supremely sensitive, highly emotional 1948 poetic film noir about doomed lovers on the run is cult co-writer/director Nicholas Ray’s superb first movie. The prototype for the whole couple on the run genre, it is way ahead of its time and provides the obvious blueprint for Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
An ideally cast Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell touchingly and credibly portray the doomed Bonnie and Clyde-style young couple, Arthur ‘Bowie’ Bowers and Catherine ‘Keechie’ Mobley.
Wrongly convicted of murder, Bowie escapes from prison with bank robbers Chicamaw (Howard Da Silva) and T-Dub (Jay C Flippen). Bowie, injured in a car accident, takes refuge with Keechie, a gas station owner’s daughter, deciding to marry and live an honest life. But the bank robbers return and demand that Bowie join them for one more job.
Ray here provides the right kind of emotionally intense style of directing, with its heightened mood of poetic realism borrowed from prewar French classics, and dark, expressionistic photography in a movie whose theme of the tragedy of youth alienation foreshadows his 1955 film Rebel without a Cause.
Ray’s screenplay, nurtured and supported by producer John Houseman, and written with Charles Schnee, is based on Edward Anderson’s 1937 novel Thieves Like Us, which was later remade by director Robert Altman under that same title, Thieves Like Us (1974).
The good work kind of fell on deaf ears. Though it had excellent previews, its RKO studio was unsure how to market it. Then, when Howard Hughes took over the studio, he shelved the film for two years before releasing it to a single cinema in the UK to enthusiastic reviews. It was finally released in the US in November 1949 as They Live by Night, a title chosen by Hughes following an audience poll, after toying with the title of The Twisted Road. And, sure enough, the film went on to record a loss of $445,000.
It is now hailed as one of the classic noir crime films of its time.
Also in the cast are Helen Craig, Will Wright, Marie Bryant, Ian Wolfe, William Phipps, Harry Harvey, Jane Allen, Paul Bakanas, Guy Beach, Regan Callais, Curt Conway, Suzi Crandall, Helen Crozier, Boyd Davis, Jimmy Dobson, Ralph Dunn, Frank Ferguson, Dan Foster, Byron Foulger, Fred Graham, Eula Guy, N L Hitch, Teddy Infuhr, L Louis Johnson, Tom Kennedy, Kate Lawson, William A Lee, Frank Marlowe, Myra Marsh, Marilyn Mercer, Charles Meredith, Carmen Morales, Jimmy Moss, Jim Nolan, Stanley Prager, Erskine Sanford, Mickey Simpson, Russ Whiteman, Lynn Whitney and Douglas Williams.
It is written by Charles Schnee and Nicholas Ray, shot in black and white by George E Diskant, produced by Dore Schary and John Houseman, scored by Leigh Harline and Constantin Bakaleinikoff, and designed by Albert S D’Agostino and Alfred Herman.
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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1585
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