LOVE ON THE RUN

LOVE, BULLETS, AND THE OPEN ROAD. CRIMINAL COUPLES ON THE RUN ARE A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE STAPLE—AND IT’S ALL DUE TO A PAIR OF DEPRESSION-ERA HELLRAISERS.

- Pat H. Broeske

It was 90 years ago that Bonnie Parker chanced to meet Clyde Barrow at a family gathering. As a result of that

January 1930 encounter and what followed as they crisscrossed the central US, filmmakers have rolled out the metaphorical red carpet for gun-toting lovers, real and fictional.

Why? “Criminal couples provide a level of entertainment lacking in men committing crimes on their own,” says Jeff Guinn, author of the authoritative Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (2009). Adds Guinn, “The added element of romance (and also the very titillating possibility of a good-girl-gone-bad subplot) elevates our voyeurism from enjoying crime stories to a sense of more multi-dimensional drama.”

Add to this the notion of being on the move, and the drama amps up.

We’ve rounded up 10 of the screen’s greatest outlaw couples (while acknowledging a few escapees, due to constraints of time and spac).

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937)

We begin with the film that defined the genre: In this indictment of societal injustice, repeat offender Eddie Taylor (a young Henry Fonda) is trying to go straight—but the odds are against him and his sweet-faced wife, Joan (Sylvia Sidney).

Linked to a deadly bank robbery, Eddie is sentenced to be executed. When he gets hold of a gun smuggled into the prison, he kills a priest—the only man who believed in him. “They made me a murderer. I can’t beat this rap,” he tells Joan.

She won’t let him flee without her. “We’re going on together. We have a right to live.”