They Live by Night (1949)
Directed by Nicholas Ray
An escaped convict, injured during a robbery, falls in love with the woman who nurses him back to health, but their relationship seems doomed from the beginning.
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What critics compared They Live by Night to
Guadagnino’s darkly dreamy film, which opens in select theaters Friday, has some of the spirit of iconic love-on-the-run films like Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Nicholas Ray’s “They Live By Night” — movies that as open-road odysseys double as portraits of America.
Maren and Lee aren’t Edward and Bella; they’re Bowie and Keechie from They Live By Night, Bart and Annie from Gun Crazy, Kit and Holly from Badlands, Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers.
I'm misquoting They Live By Night, the much-imitated Nicholas Ray film about the lower-depths life.
The outlaw-lovers-on-the-run flick became an instant cult classic – an energetic, gruesome and gleefully amoral prototypical road movie that recycles a number of elements of films from the past as far back as Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night .
Essentially, Badlands, like They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray,1949), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), is a film preoccupied with the fate of its doomed couple.
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In his Hollywood Reporter review, Todd McCarthy describes the movie’s plot as “They Live by Night with 12-year-olds.”
Information comes at us in a fashion formal yet berserk: the cast includes a welter of stylish performers from all manner of styles, and they mesh beautifully.The two dutiful, beautiful newcomers, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, fully inhabit the story of Sam and Suzy, who, like the lovers of Nick Ray’s “They Live By Night,” “this boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.”
On one level, this is They Live by Night with 12-year-olds: No one understands Suzy at home, and Sam suddenly has been disowned by foster parents, leaving him facing the severe ministrations of Social Services (Tilda Swinton) -- that's her name, not a bureaucracy.
Ray’s first marvelous effort, They Live by Night, sets moments of unforgiving documentary technique alongside the fresh and painfully sensitive faces of Cathy O’Donnell and a young Farley Granger, who, like Belmondo, is gunned down in the final scene.
Like their counterparts in Nick Ray’s They Live by Night, Sailor and Lula “were never properly introduced to the world we live in.”
This is a 21st century version of American outlaw cinema that first took root during the depression and blossomed in films like They Live by Night and Bonnie and Clyde, reframed by the mortgage crisis, predatory lending, and cold corporate greed.