Which director made his feature-directing debut with They Live by Night?

Nicholas Ray made his feature-directing debut with They Live by Night.

Released in the United States in 1949, the film was Ray’s first feature as a director, although it had been produced and completed earlier. It follows Bowie and Keechie, two young people who fall in love while Bowie is a fugitive involved with older criminals. Their attempt to build a normal life gives the film its distinctive mixture of romance, violence, fatalism, and social desperation.

The film was produced by John Houseman for RKO and adapted from Edward Anderson’s Depression-era novel Thieves Like Us. Ray and screenwriter Charles Schnee shaped the material into an intimate crime romance that emphasized the emotional lives of people trapped by poverty and criminal surroundings.

They Live by Night became especially influential for its sympathetic “couple on the run” perspective. Its production also included an early major-studio use of helicopter filming for an escape sequence. The movie’s release history can cause confusion: it opened in London in 1948 under the title The Twisted Road, then reached American theaters in 1949 as They Live by Night. Robert Altman later adapted the same novel as Thieves Like Us in 1974.