Nicholas Ray broke many Film Noir clichés in this, his first film, about misunderstood young people who live in the fringes of society… Oh wait, that’s Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955) .
I can see this film a hundred times, never tiring of the convincing performances by Cathy O’Donnell as Keechie and Farley Granger as Bowie. They’re so adorable together, probably one of the most likeable couple of criminals. And you want them to succeed.
The characters were heavily inspired by the real Bonnie and Clyde, and later would inspire Arthur Penn’s 1967 movie named after the Texan outlaws.
The Penn film marked the end of the Hays Code, but in 1948, Ray was already pushing the envelope with innuendo, such as this short dialogue of the recently-married couple:
KEECHIE: Oh, Bowie.
BOWIE: What’d I say funny?
KEECHIE: I like you so much. I don’t know much about kissing. You’re gonna have to show me.
BOWIE: I don’t know too much about it myself.
KEECHIE: We’ll learn together.
Nicholas Ray’s directorial debut, They Live By Night, is a romance wrapped in a criminal plot. Both in the spring of their Hollywood careers, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell personify the corruption of innocence as Bowie and Keechie, two young adults living hard-knocked lives but whose newfound relationship inspires each to dream of a brighter future. Having just escaped a prison farm with T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) and Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva) and taken shelter at a service station owned by Chickamaw’s brother, Bowie agrees to help the guys rob a bank so they can hire lawyers to take on their wrongful conviction cases. When the heist goes awry and a police officer ends up dead, the men split up and an injured Bowie returns to the service station to recover under the care of Keechie, Chickamaw’s niece. After fairly instantly falling in love, Bowie and Keechie run away and get married, hoping to begin life anew in a faraway town and start a business, but Bowie’s criminal past won’t let him get away so easily. The underlying sense of doom is maintained throughout the film, even heightened by marriage and pregnancy, so the tragic ending is almost a relief. It’s a striking debut for an inexperienced director: Ray achieves both scope (through technical achievements like roving crane shots) and intimacy (the Granger-O’Donnell romantic chemistry is entirely convincing), creating a sort of poetic realism in the wide open country.
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