They Live by Night: Ray's Doomed Young Couple

Before a frame of story, Nicholas Ray puts a title card on screen telling us that the boy and girl we are about to meet were never properly introduced to the world we live in. It is an odd, almost defensive gesture — a director asking for mercy on his characters’ behalf before they have done anything to need it. Then the film cuts to an aerial shot of a car tearing along a road, taken from a helicopter, one of the earliest uses of the technique in an American feature, and the two moves together tell you the whole film. Ray is going to look down on these people from a great height and love them anyway.

They Live by Night was shot in 1947 and then sat. Howard Hughes had taken over RKO, and the picture went onto the shelf while the studio worked out what it had. Britain saw it first; American audiences did not get it until 1949, by which time its young director had made other films and its moment had drifted. It has been catching up ever since, and it is now hard to watch anything about two kids in a stolen car without seeing Ray’s fingerprints on it.

Bowie, Keechie, and the trap of good company

Bowie (Farley Granger) went to prison as a teenager for a killing he maintains he did not commit, and the film opens with him escaping in the company of two older men — Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva) and T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) — who are career bank robbers and who regard him as a useful pair of hands. Bowie’s plan is simple and touching: rob enough banks to afford a lawyer who can clear his name, then stop. He has worked out an entirely rational route back to a normal life, and it runs directly through the thing that will make a normal life impossible.

Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) is the daughter of the man who garages the gang’s cars, a young woman raised at the edge of this world who has no illusions about any of it. She and Bowie fall together with the shyness of two people who have never had anyone. Granger plays Bowie soft and slightly stunned, a boy carried along by men more certain than he is; O’Donnell plays Keechie watchful, tired, and very much the adult of the pair. Their scenes have almost no swagger. When they marry, it is in a roadside chapel run by a man doing a brisk trade in weddings at twenty dollars a time, and Ray lets you see the transaction plainly — the sacrament these two can afford is the one being sold by a hustler at midnight.

That is the film’s method throughout. It never grants its couple a scene of glamour. The robberies happen mostly off screen; John Houseman’s production and Ray’s instinct both push the camera away from the banks and towards the rented rooms afterwards, where the real film is.

Why it works: Ray shoots them as though they are already gone

The craft decision that makes They Live by Night land is the choice to withhold the genre’s pleasures. Look at how Ray stages the getaways. That opening helicopter shot puts the car in a landscape so wide that the people inside it read as insects; the aerial view is the view of the world the title card mentioned, and it is indifferent. Then Ray cuts inside to two faces in a tight two-shot and holds them there for as long as he can. The film oscillates between those two scales — the pitiless map and the warm interior — and every time it pulls back you feel the cabin door open and the cold come in.

Cinematographer George E. Diskant lights the interiors low and close, so the couple’s rooms have a candle-flame quality, a small bubble of warmth with darkness pressed right up against the glass. The compositions keep putting a window or a doorway in frame behind them. There is always a way in, and the film never lets you forget it. Ray came from theatre and from architecture — he had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright — and the spatial sense shows: he thinks about rooms as things that contain people, and about who owns the door.

The helicopter shot is worth pausing on as a production fact rather than a piece of trivia. Aerial work in 1947 meant a fixed-wing aircraft and a long lens, which gives you a distant, drifting view; a helicopter can hold a moving car at low altitude and stay with it, and that ability was so new that RKO had to work out the rig as it went. Ray did not spend it on spectacle. He spends it in the first thirty seconds and then essentially never goes up again, so the shot functions as a thesis statement — this is how the world sees them — and the rest of the film is the rebuttal, shot at kitchen-table height. A director with a new toy usually cannot stop playing with it. Using it once, early, and then withholding it is the choice of someone who already knew what the film was arguing.

He also gets a performance out of the supporting bench that a lesser director would have flattened into menace. Da Silva’s Chickamaw is a genuinely frightening creation, a one-eyed alcoholic whose resentment of Bowie’s youth curdles by the reel, and the film’s most uncomfortable insight is that he is right about one thing: Bowie is one of them, whatever the boy tells himself. Helen Craig’s Mattie, T-Dub’s sister-in-law with a husband inside, is the film’s coldest study — a woman with her own arithmetic to work.

The real ancestor, and the long shadow

The direct forebear is Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), which built the template of the ex-convict, the loyal woman, and the society that will not let go. Ray’s innovation was the temperature. Lang’s couple are crushed by a machine; Ray’s are simply out of their depth, and he shoots their doom as a domestic tragedy rather than a systemic one.

Its exact contemporary and opposite is Gun Crazy, which takes the same premise and runs it on desire and adrenaline. Put them side by side and the range of the lovers-on-the-run film is fully mapped in two pictures made within two years of each other. Ray’s own In a Lonely Place two years later would examine the same wound from the other end — what happens when the man you love is the danger — and it confirms that the tenderness here was a position he held rather than a mood he stumbled into.

The source novel was Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us, and Robert Altman filmed it again under that title in 1974, keeping the book’s flatness where Ray had brought lyricism. Altman’s version is the more truthful; Ray’s is the one people remember, which tells you something about what an audience wants from these two kids. Everything downstream — Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Sugarland Express, half of Wim Wenders — is choosing between the Ray reading and the Altman one.

The honest case against

The film is sentimental about Bowie in a way it is not about anyone else, and it costs it something. Ray tilts the deck: the killing that put Bowie away is kept safely unproven, so the audience never has to decide whether to forgive a murderer, only whether to pity a boy. A tougher film would have made us do the harder sum. Granger’s softness, which is the performance’s great asset in the love scenes, leaves the character slightly weightless in the criminal ones — you never quite believe he could hold up a bank, even for an afternoon.

There is also a structural shapelessness in the middle, a series of rooms and moves that blur together, which is what happens when a director is more interested in the interstitial hours than in the plot that is supposed to be generating them. Ray would learn to make that a strength. Here it occasionally just idles.

Where to find it: it circulates in a good restoration on disc and shows up regularly in noir seasons, usually programmed next to Gun Crazy, which is exactly right.

Spoilers below

The end is a motor court at night, and the light that finds Bowie comes from a car.

The betrayal is Mattie’s, and Ray’s refusal to make her a villain is the finest thing in the picture. She trades Bowie for her husband’s release, because that is the deal available to her, and the film gives her the reasoning without the melodrama. She is not cackling. She is a woman making the only move on the board that gets her what she has wanted since her first scene, and Bowie is the price. He is not undone by a rival or a policeman with a grudge. He is undone by someone else’s entirely comprehensible love.

Keechie is asleep in the cabin when it happens, pregnant, and the note Bowie writes never reaches her in the way he means it to. He goes out into the headlights and is shot down without a chance, and the film does not stage it as an operatic martyrdom — it is quick, procedural, and over. The camera then does the thing that redeems the whole sentimental architecture: it stays with Keechie. The picture is not really about a bank robber’s death. It is about a young woman standing in a car park at dawn learning what she now has to carry.

Bonnie and Clyde would later make the deaths of its couple the point, a slow-motion aria that turns dying into a kind of triumph. Ray’s Bowie gets nothing of the sort — no ballet, no crescendo, just a boy who wanted a lawyer, face down on gravel, exactly as unimportant as the aerial shot in the first minute said he was. The title card was not asking for mercy. It was telling you the verdict in advance.