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.
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.