They Live By Night (RKO, 1947, released 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, July 1) I successfully enticed my husband Charles out of the bedroom, where he’d been avoiding the news, to watch a film on Turner Classic Movies that we’d seen together ages ago on a VHS dub from another TCM showing: They Live by Night, filmed in 1947 and released in 1948 in Britain and 1949 in the U.S. It started out as a 1937 novel by Edward Anderson (it was the last of two novels he published even though he lived until 1969) called Thieves Like Us. It was about a young man named Albert “Bowie” Bowers (Farley Granger), who was imprisoned for murder at age 16. Seven years later he and two other convicts, Chickamaw “One-Eye” Mobley (Howard Da Silva) and Henry “T-Dub” Mansfield (Jay C. Flippen), escape from prison and head for the home of Chickamaw’s older brother Robert (Wil Wright, reuniting him and Da Silva from the cast of The Blue Dahlia, Raymond Chandler’s only original screenplay that was actually filmed, which like They Live by Night was produced by former Orson Welles associate John Houseman) to hide out. They successfully rob a local bank and split the money. Bowie falls in love with Chickamaw’s niece Catherine “Keechie” Mobley (Cathy O’Donnell) and the two escape together, first on a bus and then in a car a corrupt justice of the peace named Hawkins (a charming performance by Ian Wolfe) brokers for them after they impulsively visit his chapel, where he offers weddings for $20 ($10 additional if you want an audio record of the service) with a ring thrown in for an extra $5. Bowie and Keechie have a conversation with Hawkins about where they can flee to, and Hawkins recommends Mexico. They end up in a mountain resort and set up housekeeping when their idyll, such as it is, is interrupted by Chickamaw, who crashes their place and demands that Bowie join him and T-Dub for another bank robbery. Bowie reluctantly agrees to join them for one last caper, but (though we don’t see any of it) that “one last caper” ends badly, with T-Dub killed in a shoot-out with police and Chickamaw jealous of the media attention Bowie is getting as the supposed mastermind of the robbery.

Desperate for a place to hide out, Bowie and Keechie end up in a motel owned by Mattie Mobley (Helen Craig), wife of a third Mobley brother who’s in prison on an allegedly unjust charge. Alas, Mattie decides to rat them out to the police in exchange for freedom for her brother, and the film ends with a shoot-out in which Bowie goes out with a revolver, the police open fire with high-powered rifles, and Bowie ends up dying in Keechie’s arms. After he expires, she reads the farewell note he’d written her. As I noted in previous viewings of the movie, there’s an ambiguous ending that can be read as a “life goes on” statement, since Keechie is pregnant with Bowie’s child when Bowie is killed and they’re both convinced he will be a boy even though there was no way to tell in advance in 1948. It can also be read considerably more pessimistically, given that earlier Bowie had told Keechie that his father, too, had been a criminal and had been killed by police before Bowie was born. There’s at least a hint that the boy will meet as nasty a fate as his father, drifting into crime and later being killed by police. RKO had bought the book in 1941; according to Edward Anderson’s Wikipedia page he got just $500 for the rights, but according to the Wikipedia page on the film the cost to the studio was $10,000. (Both could be right; it’s possible that during the four years between 1937 and 1941 Anderson might have sold the movie rights to someone else and RKO may have paid a lot more to the someone else than Anderson himself got.)

Several writers attempted to adapt Anderson’s novel for film, but the project got stalled until after World War II, when Dore Schary was hired as production chief at RKO. He came with a brief to make RKO the most adventurous major Hollywood studio, and he signed the young Nicholas Ray, who’d just got out of the service and written the script for the Monogram musical Swing Parade of 1946, on the basis of his treatment for Thieves Like Us. Schary hired Ray to both write and direct the film, and assigned John Houseman to produce, though in the end he put on a more experienced screenwriter, Charles Schnee, to help Ray flesh out his concept into a filmable screenplay. Ray insisted on hiring two of Samuel Goldwyn’s contract players, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, to play Bowie and Keechie, and Granger later wrote in his autobiography (actually ghost-written by his partner, Robert Patrick; when he came out to San Diego to promote the book it was pretty obvious that Granger’s memory was mostly gone and obviously Patrick had written the book based on his recollections of the stories Granger had told him about his career over the years), “Ray and John Houseman were among the few people who fought for me in my career. They said no, we will not make the film without him. When Nick believed in you, he was very loyal.” (I noticed both the Wikipedia page on the film and Alicia Malone’s introduction on TCM carefully cherry-picked Granger’s quotes about Ray; later in his book he said Ray was a monumentally overrated director and They Live by Night and Rebel Without a Cause were his only truly great films.)

Malone also said that Robert Mitchum had been considered for the film, but as good as he was he couldn’t have captured Bowie’s wide-eyed innocence and naïveté about the world. According to the Wikipedia page Mitchum had actually wanted to play the supporting role of Chickamaw, but either Houseman, Schary, or some of the other RKO executives felt that was too small a part for an actor they were working to build up into a major star and who’d already been nominated for an Academy Award for 1945’s The Story of G.I. Joe. Schary and Houseman both encouraged Ray to experiment with unusual filmmaking techniques, including shooting the opening scene of the three convicts driving away from prison in a stolen car and several other key scenes from a helicopter. This posed a problem because Howard Da Silva kept losing his hairpiece from the backwash of the helicopter blades, but the effect is a quite striking one that reinforces the sense that these characters are alienated from society at large. That sense is also communicated by the odd shot before the opening credits, which show Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell making love (or as close to it as the Production Code would allow) as we read the words, “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” (That does sound like Dore Schary, whose penchant for shoe-horning social comment into his films got so bad that later, when he was head of production at MGM, there was a joke around Hollywood that Schary had “sold MGM’s birthright for a pot of message.”)

They Live by Night was cited in Pauline Kael’s famous extended review of the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde as among the precursors to that classic crooks-on-the-run tale, along with two movies I think are even better: Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1949). But They Live by Night (a title change Howard Hughes insisted on when he bought RKO in 1948) still holds up surprisingly well for its doomed romanticism and the perfection of Farley Granger’s performance: he really does make us believe that despite having almost literally grown up in prison, he’s somehow retained a belief in the basic decency and goodness of the human race even as it gets sorely tested, and ultimately fails him, by the later events of the story. Mention should also be made of the traditional blues song, “Your Red Wagon,” sung brilliantly in a nightclub scene by Marie Bryant. Bryant was a singer who worked with Duke Ellington on his musicals Jump for Joy and Beggar’s Holiday, and sang “On the Sunny Side of the Street” hauntingly in the Lester Young/Gjon Mili 10-minute short Jammin’ the Blues (1944). “Your Red Wagon” is credited here to Richard M. Jones, Don Raye, and Gene de Paul, but it’s actually an old folk blues that got reworked into white hits like Hank Willliams’s “Move It On Over” and Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”