The Cinematheque

“A remarkable debut as well as an agonizingly pure love story—the most lyrical film of the director’s career … Its emotional power is undiminished.”

J. Hoberman, The New York Times

Of those film noir classics perennially absent from our lineup, They Live by Night, an RKO picture hampered by licensing roadblocks in Canada, has long been among the most needling omissions. No longer. This year, Nicholas Ray’s astonishing debut enters the cycle with enough doomed romanticism and virtuosic noir styling to make up for lost time. Its archetypal portrayal of young love amid ruin, adapted from the Depression-era novel Thieves Like Us, chronicles the flight from the law for a couple unfit for life’s cruelties—a fugitive (Farley Granger), embroiled in a bank robbery with a dead cop, and his Southern sweetheart (Cathy O’Donnell), dreaming an impossible path to forgiveness. Ray paints their predicament in sympathetic shades of grey, framing faces and bodies with a tenderness uncommon to the crime genre. The film’s influence on an entire pedigree of lovers-on-the-lam movies is paramount. Ray’s auteurial credentials start here.

“A key film noir of the ​’40s … The freshness of his expressionist-documentary style is still apparent and gripping … Much of Wim Wenders’s romantic despair can be found here in its original, more extravagant form.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“Passionate, lyrical, and imaginative, it’s a remarkably assured debut.”

Geoff Andrew, Time Out