Nicholas Ray's first feature film is the prototype for the lovers on the lam genre, generally suggested to foreshadow Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. I enjoy it for different reasons that for the more contemporary ones. It may not be as intense as those, nor as intense as some of Ray's later efforts such as the unadorned masterpiece In a Lonely Place, but we sympathize on a much purer level with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell's young lovers here than we do with Bonnie and Clyde or the violent lovers of Gun Crazy or much more extreme and shocking variations on that assembly line like Natural Born Killers, Criminal Lovers or Baise Moi. Granger and O'Donnell, two young specimens whose beautiful faces radiate with solemn innocence, find the seeds of love in their first incidental meetings with one another in spite of their cataclysmic circumstances and dangerous dynamics. Indeed, the film is in no small part owing to the argument of heredity vs. environment, which one bears in mind throughout as we not only follow the external plot but also the emotional process of the chemistry between the two leads.
Perhaps the movie doesn't take enough chances with Granger's circumstances. He escapes from prison with two hardened down-home bank robbers Chicamaw and T-Dub, but rather than being a part of their underworld economy, though he does find himself planning a heist with them to, in a strange, roundabout way, bring justice to his initial imprisonment, he is fleeing the condemnation of an unjust murder charge. This flaw cannot be argued as a bedrock but if he were a young, budding career thief himself, the audience's sense of morality and justice would be given more vigorous exercise. It would make O'Donnell's love for him ironically more ennobled by not only siding with him against the way the world has treated him, but also by seeing through the way he has treated the world.
I was enthralled by the physicality of the two lovers, stressed by Ray in unusual ways. We first see the angelic Cathy O'Donnell in a baggy, oil-stained jumpsuit. She is the daughter of a gas station owner. Her beauty either radiates through the adventitious scuzziness, inherits a raw carnal edge by it, or both. Granger is a swarthy young boy, his anger perpetuated by his submissiveness in his situations, against which he gradually begins to recklessly rebel. Much in the same way we can see Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart baring their most guileless identities, almost too painfully, in the great film Ray made the next year, In a Lonely Place, Granger and O'Donnell are a younger and more socially subversive precursor. Though the story itself may not sizzle with more tension, we feel very deeply for the two lovers based on the sheer presence of their actors.
Perhaps the movie doesn't take enough chances with Granger's circumstances. He escapes from prison with two hardened down-home bank robbers Chicamaw and T-Dub, but rather than being a part of their underworld economy, though he does find himself planning a heist with them to, in a strange, roundabout way, bring justice to his initial imprisonment, he is fleeing the condemnation of an unjust murder charge. This flaw cannot be argued as a bedrock but if he were a young, budding career thief himself, the audience's sense of morality and justice would be given more vigorous exercise. It would make O'Donnell's love for him ironically more ennobled by not only siding with him against the way the world has treated him, but also by seeing through the way he has treated the world.
I was enthralled by the physicality of the two lovers, stressed by Ray in unusual ways. We first see the angelic Cathy O'Donnell in a baggy, oil-stained jumpsuit. She is the daughter of a gas station owner. Her beauty either radiates through the adventitious scuzziness, inherits a raw carnal edge by it, or both. Granger is a swarthy young boy, his anger perpetuated by his submissiveness in his situations, against which he gradually begins to recklessly rebel. Much in the same way we can see Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart baring their most guileless identities, almost too painfully, in the great film Ray made the next year, In a Lonely Place, Granger and O'Donnell are a younger and more socially subversive precursor. Though the story itself may not sizzle with more tension, we feel very deeply for the two lovers based on the sheer presence of their actors.