They Live by Night (1948)

They Live by Night is an American thriller film first released in 1948, directed by Nicholas Ray.  The film is based on a novel by Edward Anderson and stars Cathy O’Donnell, Farley Granger, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen and Helen Craig.  It has also been released under the title: The Twisted Road.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


During the 1930s, three convicts make a successful break from a prison farm and go on the run in a stolen car.  Two of the men are seasoned bank robbers, Chicamaw and T-Dub; the third, Bowie, is a young man wrongly convicted for murder.  Bowie is determined to hire a lawyer to establish his innocence but for this he needs money, so he agrees to help Chicamaw and T-Dub pull a bank robbery.  With the police on their trail, the crooks hide out in a gas station.  Here, Bowie gets to know Keechie, the daughter of the station’s owner.  Realising that they are in love, Bowie and Keechie decide to strike out on their own and start a new life with Bowie’s share of the stolen money.  What they do not know is that the police mistakenly believe that Bowie is the bank robbers’ leader and are determined to capture him, dead or alive...

Nicholas Ray’s debut feature may not have been particularly well received when it was first released but today it is considered one of the finest examples of American film noir, even if it does play a little fast and loose with some of the unwritten rules of the genre.  They Live by Night stands apart from most noir thrillers in that the central characters are genuine innocents who, in no way, deserve the cruel fate that is in store for them.  They are hapless victims of a world that shows them no mercy and, in the best tradition of film noir, once they have begun their descent into Hell, there is no reprieve, no way back.  This is film noir with a searing human edge to it.

They Live by Night was based on Edward Anderson’s Depression Era novel Thieves Like Us, which was itself inspired by the real-life exploits of Bonnie and Clyde.  Although he had only a few screenwriting credits under his belt at the time, Nicholas Ray was so keen to adapt the novel as a film that RKO executive Dore Schary was encouraged to take a gamble and allow Ray to direct the film.  Crucially, Ray was given a level of creative control over the film that was exceedingly rare in Hollywood at the time, and this is apparent in the end result, which is as much an auteur piece as a conventional film noir thriller.

The most significant of Ray’s innovations was the use of a helicopter to shoot the famous tracking shot at the start of the film, where the robbers are pursued by police after their prison break-out.  This is the first occasion in which a helicopter was used for this purpose and is one of the elements that contributes to the film’s striking modernity and realism.  Ray strives for authenticity throughout the film and achieves this though naturalistic performances, extensive use of real locations and some highly inventive camerawork which draws the audience right into the heart of the action at crucial moments in the narrative.

Much of the film’s impact derives from the contributions from its two lead actors, Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger, who epitomise the young innocents caught up in a vicious, ugly, vice-ridden world.  Granger, too often cited as an actor of limited ability, is perfect in the role of the hopelessly naive Bowie and brings a suitably understated pathos to many of the film’s most memorable sequences - notably the 20 dollar wedding scene and the tragic denouement.  It was Granger’s arresting portrayal in this film, arguably one of his best, that led the actor to being immediately cast in Hitchcock’s Rope (1948).

The themes of disaffected youth and youngsters unable to free themselves from the uncompromising adult milieu that surrounds them would resurface in Nicholas Ray’s best-known film a few years later, Rebel Without A Cause (1955).   They Live by Night would be subsequently remade by Robert Altman in 1974, as Thieves Like Us, although this scarcely bears comparison with Ray’s gripping debut masterwork.

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