An early - and not as good - version of Bonnie & Clyde

Post of a week or so ago has led to some suggestions for the list of best American movies in black-and-white, including TB suggestion of "They Live by Night," which I watched last night and - well - you can certainly see the raw material here, and maybe it's hard to gaze back at it through blinding light cast by the later remake, Bonnie and Clyde, but Live by Night is hardly a great movie. Story of 3 guys who break from prison and the youngest of the 3 in particular who hooks up with a young woman and hopes to live with her like "normal people" but is inevitably drawn back into the life of crime, robbing banks. There are some terrific scenes, beautiful shot and conceived by director Nicholas Ray: the opening sequence of the getaway car chase on dusty rural roads (maybe the 40s? but largely unchanged from the 20s I'd say), the terrific scene in the "marriages performed" office, especially the approach to the office as seen through the neon window sign, the hero (Bowie) scouting out the town of Zelton for the next bank robbery, the weirdness of the rustic cabin that Bowie and Keechie (girlfriend) rent and try to fix up "like normal people." What draws the film down, though, are first of all the terrible miscastings or maybe the horrible acting - the gang of thieves looks like a bunch of guys from a method acting class, and Bowie looks like a GQ model - there's nothing here that makes us think even for a second that he could be an ex-con or torn between crime and love. Second, their naivete about being able to break away from the life of crime is totally absurd - it would be obvious tht cops all over Texas would be looking for these 2 and would find them in 5 minutes - it's almost as if the codes or conventions of the era had to make the criminals either totally bad guys or totally good guys and we didn't effectively explore the ambiguities until much later.