Finest hours: Farley Granger in They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray’s tender lovers-on-the-run noir

Few classic Hollywood leading actors could portray abject terror as convincingly as Farley Granger. He was a beautiful man, with big brown eyes, a stately jawline and a luxurious mop of dark wavy hair. During the peak of his career, however, between 1948 and 1955, audiences became accustomed to seeing a wild look in those eyes, a tremble to that jaw. You knew that the smooth stars like Cary Grant, or the tough nuts like Humphrey Bogart, were going to get out of their predicaments. Granger made you doubt it.

In They Live by Night (1948), his first starring role, Granger plays Bowie: a 23-year-old wrongly imprisoned since the age of 16, who’s escaped jail alongside older inmates T-Dub (Jay. C Flippen) and Chicamaw (Howard Da Silva). Lying low in a gas-station hideout after they’ve robbed a bank, Bowie meets Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), Chickamaw’s niece. Keechie doesn’t approve of the criminal lifestyle, but she sees a kindred spirit in Bowie. They start talking, fall in love, and then – after another job goes wrong – go on the run together, alone.  

They Live by Night is a noir, a tragedy and a love story. Bowie and Keechie know there’s a ticking clock on their romance, and so they fill what days they have with all they can. Nicholas Ray (in his directorial debut) shoots the lovers in lush, tender close-ups, drinking in their youth, passion and fragility, as they pretend they have any chance of living a normal life together. 

Granger gives Bowie a wrenching naivety, accompanied by a rising tide of panic. He’s utterly guileless, unable to hide either his desperate love for Keechie or his anxiety at what the future holds. You fear for a person so totally unguarded. Like many of Granger’s characters in the years to come, though, Bowie had one foot in the underworld, he was no hardened criminal.

The movie sat on the shelf for more than a year while RKO struggled to decide how to market it. In the meantime, Alfred Hitchcock saw a private screening and decided to cast Granger in his next production.

While Granger’s character in Rope (1948), Phillip, joins his roommate (and implied lover) Brandon (John Dall) in the murder of their friend, just to see if they can get away with it, he’s not the scheme’s originator. As their professor (James Stewart) gets closer to discovering the body, Brandon remains ice cool, but Granger makes Phillip’s sweaty, tremulous fear increasingly palpable.

In his second Hitchcock collaboration, Strangers on a Train (1951), Granger’s lead, Guy, demurs when he’s invited to join in on a murder plot – yet that doesn’t stop Bruno (Robert Walker) from implicating him anyway. As in Side Street (1949), his second teaming with Cathy O’Donnell, the action revolves around Granger trying to extricate himself from unwarranted homicide charges, becoming ever more frantic as the walls close in around him. Although he actually committed the murder he’s accused of and pursued for in Edge of Doom (1950), his desperation both pre- and post-killing inspires sympathy. Even his lesser films, such as grating farce Behave Yourself! (1951), often hinged on the fertile dramatic potential of Granger’s agitation.

There were exceptions, however. In Luchino Visconti’s period romance Senso (1954), he played an Austrian soldier, Franz, whose perfect face distracts a smitten Italian countess (Alida Valli) from his ugly insides. Franz’s charm is empty, chilly, and cruel – traits shared by Harry Thaw, Granger’s character in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), a psychopath who abuses his wife (Joan Collins) and murders his perceived love rival (Ray Milland). On occasion, the darkness that pursued Granger’s characters would pull them all the way in.

Granger’s later career span off in interesting directions. After The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, he left the movies behind for over a decade to make a go of it on Broadway and television. Then he moved to Italy and started carving out a name for himself in a string of gialli and spaghetti westerns. As an elder statesman, he was an in-demand talking-head on documentaries about classic Hollywood.

But all that was far ahead of him when he made They Live by Night. That film opens with images of the lovers, alongside titles that proclaim: “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” In his aching portrayal of a soft-eyed boy struggling his way through a hard, hard world, They Live by Night proved the perfect introduction to Farley Granger.