"Could be...:" a queer reading of They Live By Night
At the start of They Live By Night, a trio of lifers have escaped prison and high-tailed it into the countryside. Running from their getaway car, the youngest of the lot, Bowie (played by Farley Granger) is slowed by a foot injury. His friends encourage him to wait behind a billboard on the side of the road, vowing to come back for him under the cover of night.
Darkness falls, and Bowie crouches behind the tall sign. His lovely, hollow face is graven with fear. He’s swathed in romantic shadow. Streaks of light touch his temples, warm his brow, and illuminate the tips of his hair until it resembles a crown.
Eventually a car does show, and the young convict is delivered to his conspirators. But from the moment that director Nicholas Ray and cinematographer George E. Diskant orient attention to their leading man, details of plot go out the window.
We are now watching this movie for him.
One of my longstanding regrets as a gay moviegoer is just how little American movies acknowledge men as yielding recipients of sexual desire. Patriarchal codes of masculinity require all males to be “dominant,” or assaultive, at least socially; they are to be aggressors who take what they want, not “submissives” who allow themselves to be wanted.
Part of what makes They Live By Night such a satisfying movie is the fact that its director is smart enough to comprehend and respond to his male star’s beauty.
There are counterparts to prove its singularity. Neither of the great films that Farley Granger made with Alfred Hitchcock at this time – Rope and Strangers on a Train – appreciates or cares to prioritize his unusual prettiness. Of course, to a certain extent, the fact is inevitable: those lush features and distinguished profile are always evident, even when the master of suspense is busily moving his subject in and out of frame.
But Nicholas Ray’s camera lingers over Granger’s lips, his bright eyes, his glowing skin. He is the desired presence in They Live By Night; it is Cathy O’Donnell’s Keechie, the teenage daughter of one of the criminals, who gazes at him, not he at her.
(You could also say that one of Bowie’s fellow jailbirds, T-Dub, played by Jay C. Flippen, gives him eyes early in the film — eagerly promising, while the injured younger man waits beneath the billboard: “Don’t you worry, kid! We’ll come back for ya soon as we can.”)
It is very uncommon for women to display any kind of sexual agency or aspiration in old movies, yet Keechie does so. The back rub she gives Bowie while he is recuperating after a car accident may be the most frankly erotic presentation of a male body that I’ve ever seen in a Code-era Hollywood film: Granger lies on a bed, and glances over his shoulder as the young woman runs her hands over his skin. He is lit from behind, his features at once dramatic and graphic. He asks if she has a boyfriend, and she blushes.
Keechie’s preoccupation with his attractiveness even breaches their conversation: “I’ve always been the black sheep,” Bowie muses, talking about his family.
“The only thing black about you is your eyelashes,” his admirer replies.
Her physical interest in Bowie actually renders Keechie a queer figure, too — a truth that’s echoed in her wearing of a man’s hat when she first appears onscreen, and in Bowie’s passing speculation: “I thought maybe you weren’t interested in boys.” Though the film glamorizes or feminizes her in its later acts, there’s no denying that Keechie is a kind of tomboy. Her gaze alone is enough to render her “masculine.”
By the logic of patriarchy, her desire makes her more than “just” a woman. To a viewer like myself, Ms. O’Donnell serves as a surrogate for gay men.
And indeed, the gap between on- and off-screen queerness is smaller than a more literal reading of this film may admit. One thing that the Hitchcock films do consciously utilize in Granger is his own real-life homosexuality; both Rope and Strangers on a Train position their actor as either a participant in or adjacent to same sex intimacy — in the former, he’s the accomplice in murder to fellow traveler John Dall, and in the latter, he’s the hapless athlete pulled into criminal codependency with an admiring male fan.
Those films are overtly covert in their negotiations of Granger’s sexuality. They’re at once more hidden, and easier to read. They don’t play like they’re gay, yet all junctures in the organization of characters and motivations lead us discerning viewers toward the sly recognition that something, ahem, “queer” is afoot.
They Live By Night lacks this thematic infrastructure – it doesn’t count on audience acumen to deduce what is, or what could be going on. It doesn’t allude, it doesn’t euphemize.
Instead, it makes homosexuality visceral.
By enlarging Farley Granger’s glamorous face via closeup, by making his eyes glittering wells of feeling, by turning his fluttering lashes into beating raven wings, by allowing his lower lip to hang slightly apart from his open mouth, Mr. Ray encourages us to notice that this man is as breathtaking, as magnetic, as Ingrid Bergman or Ava Gardner.
Every person who watches They Live By Night participates in this rhapsody instigated by its makers, whether they want to or not. If movies shape our desires, or at the very least activate them, then this movie is unmistakably gay.
One can only imagine how many people sitting in theaters seventy-five years ago, watching this movie, felt a discomfiting responsiveness to the face of Farley Granger.
