Rent They Live by Night (1948)
3.8 of 5 from 85 ratings
1h 32min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
Legendary director Nicholas Ray began his career with this lyrical film noir, the first in a series of existential genre films overflowing with sympathy for America's outcasts and underdogs. When the wide-eyed fugitive Bowie (Farley Granger), having broken out of prison with some bank robbers, meets the innocent Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell), each recognizes something in the other that no one else ever has. The young lovers envision a new, decent life together, but as they flee the cops and contend with Bowie's fellow outlaws, who aren't about to let him go straight, they realize there's nowhere left to run. Ray brought an outsider's sensibility honed in the theater to this debut, using revolutionary camera techniques and naturalistic performances to craft a profoundly romantic crime drama that paved the way for decades of lovers-on-the-run thrillers to come. - Actors:
- Cathy O'Donnell, Farley Granger, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig, Will Wright, William Phipps, Ian Wolfe, Harry Harvey, Marie Bryant, Will Lee, James Nolan, Charles Meredith, Teddy Infuhr, Byron Foulger, Guy Beach, Jane Allen, Paul Bakanas, Regan Callais, Lewis Charles
- Directors:
- Nicholas Ray
- Producers:
- John Houseman
- Writers:
- Charles Schnee, Nicholas Ray, Edward Anderson
- Aka:
- Your Red Wagon / Thieves Like Us
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Romance
- Collections:
- Films by Genre, inema Paradiso's 2023 Centenary Club: Part 2, The Best American Road Movies, A Brief History of Film..., The Instant Expert's Guide, The Instant Expert's Guide to: Robert Altman
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 20/04/2020
- Run Time:
- 95 minutes
- Languages:
- English LPCM Mono
- Subtitles:
- English Hard of Hearing
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.37:1
- Colour:
- B & W
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
- Bonus:
- Audio commentary from 2007 featuring film historian Eddie Muller and actor Farley Granger
- New interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith
- Short piece from 2007 with critic Molly Haskell, filmmakers Christopher Coppola and Oliver Stone, and film noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini
- Illustrated audio excerpts from a 1956 interview with producer John Houseman
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Reviews (2) of They Live by Night
Road Noir. - They Live by Night review by Steve
Nicholas Ray's stylish debut is set in Texas in the 1920s. It's a road noir which starts out like it's going to be about rootless, rural outlaws but detours into a study of adolescent love, superbly played by Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell. The film looks realistic with the support cast all convincing as the poor of the depression
Three criminals escape from jail and go on the run holding up small banks in hick towns. Granger is a naive kid who has been inside since he was sixteen. His associates are tough, dumb career crooks. They get wounded in a raid and hole up at a safe house where the boy falls in love with a lonely rural teenager.
They live outside the law, like Bonnie and Clyde. There are longueurs and the narrative swerves all over the road but this is an elegant, innovative film, from the famous opening helicopter shot to the slow, sad final fade out on O'Donnell's face. Ray always finds interesting and artistic perspectives for his camera.
They Live By Night recalls the social protest gangster films of the thirties. The youngsters have no alternative but to break the law. Crime is the class they are born into, with its own etiquette. Ray makes his stars immortal as the gentle, doomed lovers who are forced to survive, while they can, in the only way they know.
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First film of a Hollywood legend shows amazing talent from the start. - They Live by Night review by KW
They Live by Night is the impressive directorial debut of Nicholas Ray and, like so much of what was to follow, it engages with themes of alienation, youth and social injustice, in this instance through a hybrid film noir/romance. Cathy O' Donnel and Farley Granger are the young people who don't have a chance from the start - she because she has come of age looking after a gangster parent in a hideout, he because circumstances have led him to spend his adolescence in prison. They are both innocents on the run and that innocence is perhaps best exemplified in a sequence in which they have a date in the daytime like normal people and find that everyday world mysteriously, intoxicatingly beautiful. Much of the film takes place at night in a depression era world of victims on every corner. They get married at 2 a.m. in an all night budget wedding chapel that offers 20 dollar basic weddings, 30 dollars including a phonograph recording, and wedding rings for sale at 5 dollars or to rent for 1 dollar. The proprietor of that establishment also offers them a car to drive away from trouble and justifies his behaviour as being about selling hope.
They Live by Night is ultimately a romantic tragedy, a tale of people not being able to escape the shackles of the past. It is, for the time it was made, technically innovative with good use of more natural sound and what might be Hollywood's first action sequence shot from a helicopter.
A fascinating slice of rural romantic noir.
Criterion collection bluray looks great and has good extras.
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