Although the tag line for They Live by Night reads rather dramatically—“Cops or no cops, I’m going through!”—making the film sound like some Okie-gangster opera, the opening narration is far more appropriate: “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” And so unfolds the love story of Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell, fresh from her triumph as Wilma in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives [1946]), set in the backcountry of Mississippi in the early 1930s.

This black-and-white film, based upon Edward Anderson’s novel Thieves Like Us, is a noir-realistic study of three prisoners who escape from a state prison farm—Bowie, T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen), and Chicamaw (Howard DaSilva); Bowie spent seven years of his life there, and wants to prove his innocence. T-Dub and Chicamaw are confirmed criminals, older men who use Bowie to rob banks and manipulate the press into thinking that “Bowie the Kid” is their leader. Along the way, Bowie meets Keechie at a country hideout. They fall in love and marry, and Keechie becomes pregnant. Bowie wants to leave with Keechie and rid himself of his crime pals. But he is inveigled into another bank robbery, and is wounded. At the end of the film, T-Dub’s wife (robustly played by Helen Craig) makes a deal with the cops for reward money and her husband’s freedom when she reveals Bowie’s whereabouts. The police shoot Bowie dead, and Keechie is left forlorn with her unborn child.

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