They Live By Night (1948)

Film: They Live By Night (1948)
Stars: Cathy O'Donnell, Farley Granger, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig
Director: Nicholas Ray
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

While there have been a lot of movies through the years that have given a spin on the noir (the western noir, the epic noir, the boxing noir), I honestly don't know that I'd ever seen a movie before this month's series that focused on the "teenage love story noir."  They Live by Night, a film from Nicholas Ray (who would seven years later make the quintessential "misunderstood youth" picture Rebel Without a Cause) clearly inspired not only Rebel but also future masterpieces like Bonnie & Clyde or Thelma & Louise, and was a universal enough story it was remade in the mid-1970's with Keith Carradine & Shelley Duvall.  But what struck me while watching it, once I got used to an unexpected spin on the genre, was how good (and how sexy) Farley Granger is as Arthur "Bowie" Bowers in the lead.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is relatively simple to follow and goes with a formula that, while somewhat unique at the time, has been borrowed to varying degrees in the years since.  Bowie is a criminal down on his luck after being convicted of a murder he didn't commit.  He's joined by One-Eye Mobley (Da Silva, whose real life acting career was about to be destroyed by the blacklist) and T-Dub (Flippen), and they rob a bank.  While hiding out, Bowie falls in love with Keechie (O'Donnell), and vows to give her an honest life, running away from the criminals, who then find him and make him come back for "one last heist" that goes sour, resulting in T-Dub's death & Chicamaw getting arrested.  Bowie meets a similarly tragic end when he is shot up while trying to rejoin Keechie after being sold out by his landlady Mattie (Craig).

The movie itself is okay.  Ray is clearly working out some of the kinks of teenage love, and while the film is bleak, it's not as richly bleak as your typical film noir, almost entirely due to a miscast O'Donnell as Keechie.  O'Donnell, best known to modern audiences as Homer's girlfriend Wilma in The Best Years of Our Lives or as Tirzah in Ben-Hur, feels out of her element in a role that requires her to be tougher and grittier than most of her best performances would indicate she could pull off.  Keechie is mousy, and it's hard to see why Bowie is so desperate to please her other than perhaps her taking his virginity (sorry to be crass, but it's clearly an unspoken plot point).

But that doesn't mean there isn't something very important to see here-Farley Granger is phenomenal as Bowie, giving a clear prototype for James Dean in the years ahead.  A sensitive thug, he's gorgeous, naive, someone who lets his emotions light his way even when that's a bad thing, but it's also what makes you fall in love with him.  Blessed with expressive eyes and the poutiest mouth you've ever seen, he's a matinee idol in a form I don't know I've ever seen in a picture this early in cinema's history, and a forefront for the kind of roles that Dean & Marlon Brando would turn into legend in the 1950's.

Previous Films in the Series: Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep