Tonight I watched an excellent film noir called "They Live By Night" (1948), which I found through a Criterion search of the library database. It starred Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as a young couple on the run from the law down South, through Mississippi and on to Texas. This film was the debut of director Nicholas Ray (of "Rebel Without A Cause" fame), so in addition to the noir you also get a large dose of melodrama.
As the movie opens, Granger, a handsome young star in the 1950s who appeared in two Alfred Hitchcock films ("Rope" and "Strangers On A Train"), has just escaped from a Mississippi prison with the help of two older cons, both experienced bank robbers. Farley himself had been locked up for seven years, since he was 16, for a murder he says he didn't commit (more likely he did, but it was justifiable). One of the older escapees has arranged for a safe house for the three to hide out in, while they plan their first bank robbery. The house is owned by his older brother, an alcoholic who lives a destitute life with his young adult daughter (O'Donnell).
When the three convicts arrive at the house, Granger and O'Donnell gravitate toward each other because they are the only two young people enclosed in this claustrophobic situation, and moreover they are the only two who want out. O'Donnell, who begins her role as an emotionally stunted waif, can see in Granger a bruised innocence that is not too different from her own. He killed a man who was picking on his ne'er do well father, which landed him in prison; she would not kill her own Dad to escape his dissolute lifestyle, but she can certainly sympathize with Granger. She encourages him to walk away from the two older convicts, to refuse to take part in their bank robbery scheme, but he won't do it. He tells her that he "owes them" because they helped him escape in the first place.
As they begin to fall in love, they come to an agreement : he will participate in this one robbery, which will net him enough money to live on for a while, and then he will tell the older men that he is done.
He does this, but the older cons don't go for it. They force him to participate in a second bank job, but during the course of it, one of the older men is killed. Now Granger sees a chance to get out, but as he is driving with the last remaining convict, that man kills a policeman during a traffic stop. Now he is implicated in a murder, of a cop no less, and this is a parallel to the original crime which landed him in prison in the first place. He was there, he participated, but it really wasn't his fault. He is young and has been the victim of older criminals since the day he was born.
O'Donnell can see this, and tells him she will go anywhere with him if he will just leave the situation.
They tie the knot in a Vegas type "instant marriage" chapel run by a shady man who can arrange for them to escape to Mexico if they so desire. Granger declines, and he takes his new bride up to a hideaway in the mountains, to a cabin that his fellow hoodlums had planned to use after the failed second bank robbery.
It is here that fate catches up with him, in the form of all the negative forces he has tried to escape. His one remaining ex-partner (Da Sliva) shows up, then his sister-in-law who is also involved in the scheme, and finally the police.
By this time, Granger and O'Donnell have become a doomed Romeo and Juliet. They aren't suicidal like R & J but they are backed into a corner they know they can't get out of. Cathy O'Donnell gives a performance of a poverty stricken, uneducated but intuitively intelligent Southern daughter, raised in a patriarchal culture and feeling powerless until her White Knight arrives in the form of prison escapee Granger, that is so reminiscent of Sissy Spacek's 1973 performance in Terrence Malick's "Badlands", that I would be surprised if Spacek was not influenced by O'Donnell's acting a quarter century earlier.
Director Ray raises the love story to it's apex during the tragic crescendo, in what was to become his signature style. He was like Douglas Sirk, except that his stories were about rebels rather than middle class folks with buried emotions.
The movie is beautifully shot in black and white with some early uses of helicopter photography. Standing in for Mississippi and Texas are pre-suburban locations in the Valley, in Canoga Park before it was developed, and also in a long gone RKO movie ranch in Encino. "They Live By Night" gets two Big Thumbs Up just for these reasons alone, but it is also a great "tragic Nicholas Ray story", his debut film, and not to be missed for it's emotional element. You will definitely need a hanky for the ending. ///
Today at Pearl's I had the complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas playing on Youtube, by Claudio Arrau, one of the great pianists of the 20th century. I listened here and there, when I could spare some time from my work, and I was able to hear many great moments and sections from the 32 sonatas. Would you believe that they run over 10 hours, all told? Well anyway, I am renewing my appreciation for this music, and for my tenth pick it's gonna come down to a choice between Beethoven and Alexander Scriabin, who is the "uncoventional" composer I mentioned last night. His piano music sounds as if it comes from an elaborate series of fever dreams, but give it a listen anyway, and if you do, make sure you listen to the interpretations by Vladamir Sofronitsky, the greatest Scriabinist of them all, who also married Scriabin's daughter and besides all of that is one of the Holy Trinity of Piano as you know.
So, listen to some Scriabin by Sofronitsky and some Beethoven sonatas, either by Arrau or Kempff, and then we will be ready to make our pick for the tenth spot on the list.
I am super tired (and staying up too late!) and so I will sign off by sending you much love, and will see you soon in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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