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Nicholas Ray arrives: Luminous lyricism (lovers in close-up, twined) promptly invaded by kinetic despair (the aerial camera descends as it rushes along with a trio of fugitives), a continuous dance. The Depression-era setting crystallizes a very American sensitivity to transience, to makeshift sanctuaries scattered amid open spaces filled with shabby chapels, cafes, neon signs, bus stations, and hotel cabins. (When the boy crawls out from under a huge billboard, it's an image to make the very young Godard decide on his aesthetic right there and then.) A jailbird (Farley Granger) and a tomboy (Cathy O'Donnell) comprise the wounded couple at the center, hardened kids tentatively blooming while discovering hope, intimacy, life's numerous grids. The dream of domesticity and the criminal alternate family (Jay C. Flippen and Howard Da Silva, "thieves like us") are dead ends, the dark road is the only option for the reluctant outlaw and his beloved. "Someday I'd like to see some of this country we've been traveling through." "By daylight? That'd be nice." A cinema of anxiety and sensuality, always with a streak of instability (the Christmas bauble that shatters in the delinquent's hand, the crowbar that narrowly misses the juvenile's head but seems to crack the lens itself) and a mysterious blend of the folksy and the Cocteau-abstract (Helen Craig suggests a fleshier, wearier María Casares). A wealth of volatile filmic coups: The camera lies in the backseat during the drive to the bank robbery, a sudden black screen states a car crash, an off-screen gun blast and a puff of smoke sum up the patrolman's shooting. A stray life, a watershed noir tragedy between Lang and Penn, "a heart can take just so much." Reflected laterally by the rest of Ray's work, it's reshaped by Bergman (Summer with Monika) and Malick (Badlands). Cinematography by George Diskant. With Will Wright, William Phipps, and Ian Wolfe. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |