One of the treats of the festival, They Live By Night literally crackled in black and white, its heat fuelled considerably by the rare opportunity of seeing it on the big screen (well, Our Place). A pocket noir that skittles the gutter locale for the unbridled expanses of Americana, it’s a film that has all you could ever want: a boy and a girl; crime versus the law; characters with names like Keechie and Chicamaw.

Nicholas Ray cooks his film with a rhythmic friction peppered with flourishes that he’d make all his own (the fly-by helicopter shots look invigoratingly out of place), and yet it isn’t quite the hard-boiled rendition you might expect. Softer-to-the-touch, what he’s really concerned with is the arc of desperation, the fallibility of youth, the fatalism of romance. And it is a romance. For the film’s two lovers, the opening titles carve out their impending endpoints like an epitaph set in stone; we know they’re prematurely doomed, and that their time together will be as swift as a 20-buck marriage. But it just doesn’t matter. As Ray’s debut effort, it’s a film introduced on an ominous bad omen; as Ray’s jumpstart to a great career, it’s a film that's really a good omen after all. And as the first of seven in a retrospective, it’s a definite must see.—TW