Most of the film involved just two actors, and Schneider held her own with Brando in a stunning confrontation with sex and death. The girl was Maria Schneider, a 20-year-old with an innocent face, a woman's body and an electrifying presence. The man was Marlon Brando, long acknowledged as the finest screen actor of his generation. LOS ANGELES-It was, said the critic Pauline Kael, perhaps the most important artistic event since the first performance of Stravinsky's "The Rites of Spring." She was referring to the 1973 premiere of "Last Tango in Paris," a film by Bernardo Bertolucci which dealt in explicit detail with a brief affair between a middle-aged man and a girl barely out of her teens. Or an imprint of their fugitive state of mind. Or perhaps it's a flash-forward to a memory they'll cling to for the rest of their lives. So, the whole film could be seen as a flashback - a noir convention that emphasizes the forces of fate, since the ending of "their story" (even if we don't know what it is) has already been determined from the opening shot. We soon discover that, at the point the title appears, the boy and the girl have yet to meet. The man who would later direct "Rebel Without a Cause" establishes them as innocents and outsiders, star-crossed lovers who "were never properly introduced to the world we live in." Dissolve to an aerial shot of a truck barreling through a dusty wasteland. The shot seems to exist out of time - perhaps an idealized moment they once shared, or would never have.
#Charles bronson movie#
"They Live By Night" is a prototypical young-couple-on-the-run movie ("You Only Live Once," "Gun Crazy," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Badlands"), and this tabloid-style opening sets it up breathlessly. They smile, they kiss, and then something off-screen (and unheard on the soundtrack, though signaled by an jarring shift in the musical score) causes them to react with fear and alarm. An attractive young couple (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell) are nestling in close-up by the flickering light of a fireplace. Nicholas Ray's directorial debut, "They Live By Night" (1949), begins like a trailer and then slams us right into the opening titles of the feature.