THEY LIVE BY NIGHT
A-
USA (95 mi) 1948
d: Nicholas Ray
Take it easy, but take
it.
—Chicamaw (Howard da Silva), becoming Chicagoan Studs
Terkel’s famous radio sign off line
Despite his legendary auterist status, embraced and idolized
by the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd in the
50’s and 60’s, including Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, Ray remained a
director at the margins of the American studio system, a quintessential film
maverick offering a return to poetic lyricism through much more personalized
films, despite working within various genres, becoming a master at conveying
loneliness through alienated characters draped in a sense of melancholy, providing
an alternative vision in their continuing quest for a better world. While this is ostensibly a lovers on the run
film, with morally ambiguous film noir shadings, what distinguishes it are the
idiosyncratic touches that basically reconfigure what we are seeing, signaling
a shift in the noir genre by introducing rural outlaws instead of urban
criminals or private eyes, using the road movie as an American symbol of that
elusive freedom, while offering prophetic revelations. Adapted by Ray from the 1937 Edward Anderson
Depression novel Thieves Like Us,
filmed again by Robert Altman in THIEVES LIKE US (1974), this film debut has a
distinctly spare look about it with a drawn-out sense of fatalism, using
naturalistic performances, shot by George E. Diskant, who also shot Ray’s On
Dangerous Ground (1952), becoming one of the better doomed lover stories
about a couple of innocents who never had a chance at life, framed in a black
and white world of criminality, where consequences await those who pursue a
life of crime. The film is also noted
for displaying an equally unusual sound design, including train whistles and
brief snippets of blues or folk songs representative of Southern traditions,
even Christmas songs. In the 1930’s, Ray
had worked with John and Alan Lomax traveling through the South while recording
folk songs for the Library of Congress, so he brought this familiarity to his
first picture. Farley Granger is Bowie,
a handsome young kid on the run with a couple of seasoned bank robbers, where
all three break out of prison together, headed by T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) and his
psychopathic partner Chicamaw (Howard da Silva). While temporarily holed up, Bowie meets
Chicamaw’s niece Keechie, Cathy O’Donnell, the girl next door in William
Wyler’s THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946), initially dressed in overalls and
cap, looking plain and ordinary, boyish even, without an ounce of feminine
allure, which becomes markedly different over time. But the awkward interest they take in one
another develops quickly through an intense yearning expressed through an unpretentious
series of personal questions for each other, where their closely guarded selves
open up ever so slightly. Both Granger
and O’Donnell teamed up again in Anthony Mann’s crime thriller Side
Street (1950). Despite warnings from
Keechie that nothing good can come from robbing banks, Bowie feels he owes
these guys his help, like some sort of apprentice, and basically does what they
ask, but after a successful heist, he screws up with a car crash afterwards,
leaving his gun and traceable fingerprints behind, where the newspapers start
calling him the ringleader, which aggravates his veteran partners, a kid
getting top billing, but also brings the cops down upon them in greater force. In an interesting move, they each split up,
where the camera only follows Bowie and Keechie, where a hardened crime story
turns into a tender youth romance on the run, featuring close-up shots of the
couple gazing into each other’s eyes, filled with heart rendering moments and
melodramatic twists.
Described in his memoir Front
and Center by John Houseman, who produced this early work:
From his year’s apprenticeship with
Frank Lloyd Wright, Nick had acquired a perfectionism and a sense of commitment
to his work which were rare in the theater and even more rare in the film
business. But in his personal life he
was the victim of irresistible impulses that, finally, left his career and
personal relationships in ruins. Brought
up in the Depression, one of a generation with a strong anti-Establishment
bias, he had been taught to regard hardship and poverty as a virtue and wealth
and power as evil. When success came to
him in its sudden, overwhelmingly Hollywood way and he found himself, almost
overnight, living among the rich and powerful with a six-figure income of his
own, he was torn by deep feelings of guilt, for which his compulsive, idiotic
gambling ($30,000 lost in one night in Las Vegas) might have been a neurotic
form of atonement.
A bisexual director whose affairs and addictions were
reflected in existential films about outsiders and rebels, Truffaut indicated Ray’s
films brought a “European sensibility” and an uncommon degree of realism to
classic Hollywood fare, describing Ray as “the poet of nightfall,” suggesting
his films are “about people whom society was opposing and whom society was
crushing, and who were almost doomed to be defeated by society.” The film introduction is telling, expressed
in a prelude sequence, showing romantic images of the couple in love kissing
onscreen while alerting viewers that “This boy... and this girl... were never
properly introduced to the world we live in...” What immediately follows is an aerial view of
an action shot, certainly atypical of the times, capturing a speeding car
cutting across a barren rural landscape, revealing an outlaw gang making their
escape, placing the film in a noirish crime setting, making this is the first
scene Nicholas Ray ever directed. The
film radically reconceptualizes what it means to operate as a romantic couple
within a film noir universe, where all attempts to leave a life of crime behind
ends in a failure to recapture their lost innocence. Yet the strength of the film lies in the
creation of a passionate yearning for a better life, beautifully captured by a
depth of emotion in their shared closeness, where it’s easily the first time
something this good has happened in their young, undeveloped lives. The stark economic poverty of the Depression
mirrors their starving emotional centers that crave love and all it entails,
offering a hopeful alternative to a life of crime. Cathy O’Donnell is not your typical lead
actress, lacking star power beauty, but she has a gentle kindness and human
warmth, where fragility is her femininity, something inexpressible while living
in the company of outlaws, where everyone is hardened and rightly suspicious of
others. Farley Granger, who went on to
star in Hitchcock’s ROPE (1948) and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), has matinee
idol good looks, yet he’s a sympathetic figure, initially imprisoned at the
tender age of 16 for a murder he didn’t commit, now only 23 and still a kid,
where he seemingly has his whole life in front of him. Once they separate from the others, their
innocence is reflected in their behavior, a bit giddy to be in each other’s
company, like a drunken revelry, treasuring those small moments of
intimacy. 1946 marked a postwar turning
point, entering a golden era in Hollywood history, no longer interested in
escapist fantasies, developing a taste for problem pictures and film noir
settings, reflecting the frustrations of those returning from war, where so
many of the film noir protagonists are war veterans. Filmed in 1947, the film was not released
until two years later, released a year earlier in England, as it was postponed
while Howard Hughes was in the process of buying the RKO Studios, wary of the
projects already in production as they didn’t reflect his own personal stamp of
approval, showing little interest in the film, finally released after two
subsequent Ray films had already played in theaters.
What’s memorable about this film is the moody tone, which
shifts from the criminal milieu of hardened cynicism to romantic adolescents
dreaming about their place in the world, where the two couldn’t be more
opposite. But they give it a try in a
beautifully developed interlude sequence, getting married on a whim and leading
a short life of domestic tranquility, living in some idyllic remote mountainside
cabin in the woods that may as well be a million miles from anywhere. But Chicamaw interrupts their marital bliss,
claiming they made an “investment” in choosing Bowie to break out of jail with
them, refusing his request for freedom, pressuring him back into criminality,
which is all they really know. In an
interesting twist, they don’t show the subsequent robbery itself, just the
downbeat aftereffects, as the tone of doom and gloom is everpresent as the
radio announces the updated news reports.
By the time Bowie gets back to Keechie, his face is plastered all over
the newspapers, even in the isolated mountain regions, where they quickly make
an escape, sleeping by day, traveling only by night, where they soon learn they
can’t trust anyone. Their dialogue comes
in short bursts, as neither one talks much, or reveals much, seemingly banal
exchanges, yet they’re so tuned into each other’s wavelength where they have a
certain timeless charm about them, beautifully expressed by an exchange of
watches that are never actually set to any real time, operating in a world all
their own where they set their own rules.
When they go out for a night on the town, “just like other people,” it’s
curious how they separate themselves from the conventional world, showing a
distinct disinterest in people walking in the park, riding horses, or playing
golf, revealing how they’ve cultivated their own path living as outsiders,
existing in their own world, where freedom is largely a figment of their
imagination, always dreaming of escaping to Mexico, including a dreamy
nightclub sequence that includes black jazz singer Marie Bryant singing “Your
Red Wagon,” your red
wagon - YouTube (3:59), “where you get burned when you play with fire,” all
of which feels completely outside the time and place where they happen to be,
yet psychologically the world is closing in on them as they know of no place
left to go, a predecessor to GUN CRAZY (1950), Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), and BADLANDS (1973).
The betrayal at the end is a bleak reminder of the anti-Communist purges
of the Hollywood blacklist during the Red Scare, filmed just as HUAC was reopening its
hearings, foreshadowing circumstances where Ray himself, a devout leftist and
former Communist party member in the late 30’s, would name names before the
committee in the early 1950’s, yet surprisingly he was not hounded and remained
free to continue working uninterrupted, largely protected by a close friendship
with RKO movie mogul Howard Hughes. What’s
interesting are the familiar themes expressed in Ray’s later work REBEL WITHOUT
A CAUSE (1955), like doomed romance, the rhapsodic intimacy of young love,
adolescent flights of fantasy, a safe place protected from the outside world,
the ineffectual family structure, or having no reliable friends to turn to,
where the depths of alienation are so deep that all these kids ever talk about
is being just like other people, just like real people. All they want is to have a chance in this
world. But by the end, the framing of
the two lovers is like a practice run-through of the final scene in REBEL WITHOUT
A CAUSE, as the scenes of haunting emotional devastation have an eerie
familiarity about them.
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