Sure, They Live By Night (which I watched as part of the Nicholas Ray retrospective at TIFF) looks like just a quaint movie. Two outcast kids (the boy recently escaped from prison, the girl who hides him and his gang) fall in love at first sight and go on the run from the authorities. Made in 1949, you'd be hard-pressed to find an earlier American-made, couple-on-the-run noir. We’ve seen this all before, more violent and more sexual. Faye Dunaway stroking Warren Beatty's revolver. Christian Slater shooting a Gary Oldman-played Jamaican pimp in the dick. Sissy Spacek standing with Martin Sheen as they watch her childhood house burn to the ground, her father's dead body somewhere in the basement.
The couple in They Live By Night, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) seem so ordinary in comparison. They're a set of circumstances from being prom king and queen. "Granger especially," David Thomson writes, "looks too pretty for it these days." Bowie is 24-years-old and has served 7 years of a murder-conviction before breaking out. There’s never, though, any on-screen hint of his capacity for violence. Not in the way that Slater, in True Romance, can so quickly switch from mild-mannered comic-book store clerk to Frank Castle. Keechie is even more normal. She has even less an inclination to crime and hates that Bowie has to rob banks. She’s not really complicit and shares nothing more with Bowie than matrimonial desire.
This movie can feel bare, antiquated even, something that belongs on Turner Movie Classics, not HBO. At one point, Keechie and Bowie talk about what would happen if he were arrested during one of his bank robberies. She says she'd wait for him and never even consider another man. Like a dog who only has one master. Obviously, this movie is still very much a part of the mid-20th century and has all those nuclear family hang-ups. In another sense, the movie's quaintness recalls the quaintness of all first-love. "I don't know much about kissing," Keechie says as they drive cross-country after they elope. After Bowie replies that he doesn't either, she says, "We'll learn together."
However, there are heavy moments that keep They Live By Night from being just old-fashioned. There are moments that feel timeless and a priori to all love. It's a lot more sober a film, in some ways, than its Tony Scott- and Malick- directed descendents. Bowie and Keechie keep saying that all they want to do is dress-up and go out like regular people. It's harder for them than for most since Bowie has a reputation in the news for being the leader of a gang of bank robbers. Still, for them and for many marginalized people (both of them comes from broken families that lack a mother), any given Sunday could look normal. Payday cash could buy a night out and a couple bowls of lobster bisque.
So one night, when they think they've driven far enough, Keechie, in her flannel suit, and Bowie, in his double breasted, have dinner. There's an extended sequence where a black jazz songstress goes from table-to-table singing to each couple. "Your Red Wagon". Like everyone else, Bowie tips her a buck before she moves to the next table. Bowie's money is as good as everyone else's. Minutes later, though, a fat man stumbles, drunk, on to Keechie. The Maitre d’ has to hold Bowie back from punching the man. Their night is over and so is the illusion that they're guaranteed a calm love. All this even before Bowie goes to the restaurant bathroom and runs into a local gangster who recognizes Bowie from the news. "We do good business here," the man says as he points a gun at Bowie, "and we don't want trigger-happy hillbillies ruining it." A friendly warning, cosmically from the fat man and criminally from the gangster.
Young love, especially that of misfits, often meets doom. Although here doom manifests in the conventions of gunshots and bank robberies, there's a sadness that feels genuine and transcends just-genre. There's the shyster wedding-minister who won't plan an escape to Mexico for our couple, who won't take their money. "I won't sell hope when there is none." There's Bowie walking across the motel quad to see Keechie one last time before leaving her and taking the heat with him. Bowie and Keechie learn a lot about youth and family in one year of marriage on the lam. And, so does Nicholas Ray. He does, after all, have Rebel Without a Cause still to make.
