They Live By Night

Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger are sweet but not saccharine as the naive young lovers on the lam in Nicholas Ray’s first film. (She was equally sweet as the girlfriend of the armless veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives.) From the novel Thieves Like Us, and later remade under that title by Robert Altman, this is a sentimental version of the Bonnie and Clyde genre. Granger may be a convicted and escaped murderer, but he is essentially an innocent, fallen in with rough men, and fallen for by the even more innocent O’Donnell. Ray’s direction is energetic and suspenseful, but the violent action cedes the screen to a doomed romanticism. If you ask me, this is noir like it. (1948, TCM/T, n.) *7*