A while back, I was in the mood for a film noir. (Honestly, with my undying fetish for femme fatales, scrappy dialogue, stylish bleakness, and a spirit of pervading doom, I am probably always game for a film noir.) Equipped with my new FilmStruck subscription, I turned to our local preeminent film noir scholar, Eddie Muller, and his list of
25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time. Surely, the good folks at the Criterion Collection would have one of these films in their limited FilmStruck plan—and they did. Described by Muller as “Film noir's version of Romeo and Juliet,”
They Live by Night lived up to its billing.
Best known among cinephiles for directing James Dean in the iconic
Rebel Without a Cause,
They Live by Night was Nicholas Ray’s first film. Released in 1948, the film has gone down as the template for the couples-on-the-run film genre, which has given us treats such as
Bonnie and Clyde,
Thelma and Louise,
Wild at Heart (which gifted the world with Willem Dafoe’s
Bobby Peru), and Terence Malick’s gorgeously shot
Badlands. Unrequited love mixed with lawlessness—yeah, I’m there. That’s my fucking jam.
