They Live by Night · reception & legacy

1949 · Nicholas Ray

How They Live by Night has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

RKO shelved it for nearly two years after Howard Hughes took over the studio, and it slipped out in the US in 1949 with little fanfare — but British critics had already championed it after its 1948 London opening, and the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd later made Nicholas Ray a cause. Godard's line 'Nicholas Ray is cinema' sealed the reappraisal, and it's now a Criterion-canonized debut.

What's debated

Film fans still tussle over whether it's really a noir at all or a doomed romantic melodrama wearing noir's clothes — and whether it outdoes the entire lovers-on-the-run genre it spawned.

Its footprint

It's the template for lovers-on-the-run cinema — Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Altman's Thieves Like Us (adapting the same novel) all live in its shadow — and its opening title card, 'This boy... and this girl... were never properly introduced to the world we live in,' is endlessly quoted.

Where it stands

A canon climber turned cinephile touchstone: the 'greatest debut films' list staple that Ray devotees hold up as proof he arrived fully formed.

★ Did you know? Ray opened his very first film with a helicopter-mounted chase shot — a startlingly early use of the technique in a Hollywood fiction feature — before Howard Hughes's takeover of RKO left the finished film sitting on the shelf until British audiences saw it first in 1948.