Seven of cinema's most memorable outlaw couples

1. You Only Live Once

The film that arguably birthed the genre is one in which the lovers are completely innocent. In 1937's You Only Live Once, Henry Fonda plays an ex-con who's trying to go straight, but he's accused of a crime he didn't commit.

Fearing for his life, he and his wife (Sylvia Sidney) go on the run. The fact the couple are married makes it an unusual entry. Where most couples in the genre are usually in the wild early days of their relationship, these two know each other intimately.

As Christina Newland, chief film critic for The I, says: "It's a very romantic story of two people who've been cast out of society and have no choice but to hit the road."

2. Bonnie and Clyde

You can't talk about romantic outlaws without mentioning Bonnie and Clyde. The devastatingly good-looking Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are the titular couple who journey across America, robbing banks and enjoying their growing infamy. They brought glamour to the genre. You sort of want to look like them, if not behave like them.

Christina Newland says Bonnie and Clyde turned this genre into one about youth and counterculture. After this, most outlaw couples were attractive young things who didn't want to live like regular people. "It's depictions of sex and violence were considered pretty outrageous for 1967," she says.

3. Badlands

Terrence Malick's Badlands really played up the self-created mythology of the young American criminal. Martin Sheen portrays a young man who models himself on James Dean, a star in his own head. That makes him irresistible to teenage Holly (Sissy Spacek), who's charmed into going with him on a crime spree. They're a couple presented in the lovestruck way Holly sees them, but their collective heart couldn't be darker.

"The title Badlands makes it sound like a kind of gritty and aggressive movie," says Mark. "[But] it's got a very fairytale, ethereal, dreamy feel to it, which is what Terrence Malick was aiming for."

4. The Living End

Ellen calls director Gregg Araki "a name which still strikes fear into the heart of the staid, stale critical establishment". He made a memorable foray into outlaw movies with 1992's The Living End, about a gay couple (Mike Dytri and Craig Gilmore) who kill a homophobic policeman. They live by a motto we can’t print here but translates as 'screw everything'. Angry about how the world views them, they face it with the same contempt.

"I used to write papers about these outlaw couple on the run movies when I was in film school," says Araki, who calls this film his reaction to the Aids epidemic. "My thesis was a lot of these movies come about in times of social and cultural stress. There were a lot in the 30s, during the depression, and the 60s, during the unrest in the United States. The 90s, to me, was a time that was similar."

5. True Romance

In the 1990s Quentin Tarantino wrote a pair of outlaw movies with his signature post-modern spin. One was Natural Born Killers, which turned serial killers into media darlings. The other, more beloved, film was True Romance. Film nerd Clarence (Christian Slater) and sex worker Alabama (Patricia Arquette) are wholesome by criminal standards. Sure, they steal from a drug gang and get involved in a blackmail plot, but they just want to walk off into the sunset together. They're easy to love.

"It has a lot of fun with all these tropes," says Christina Newland. "The hooker with a heart of gold, the suitcase full of money. It's doing every cliché from these films and doing it in a really big, fun, OTT way."

6. Sightseers

A rare British foray into this genre, Ben Wheatley's Sightseers, released in 2012, concerns a couple on a rainy caravanning holiday. Tina (Alice Lowe) thinks they're just going to visit some museums and have a few picnics, but Chris (Steve Oram) has deadlier plans. It's darkly hilarious watching Tina try to make the best of their little holiday, keen that a few murders won't spoil her plans.

"There is something sort of fantastically grubby and unromantic about the very black comedy," says Mark. "It's been described as being [Mike Leigh's] Nuts in May with axes, and that's exactly what it is."

7. Queen & Slim

In 2019 director Melina Matsoukas asked audiences to reconsider the lovers on the run genre, by making the central couple Black and suggesting their experience evading the law would be very different to that of a white couple.

While driving back from a disappointing first date, Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) are stopped by a violent racist cop. A scuffle ends with the cop getting shot. Faced with certain imprisonment, this pair – who had no intention of a second date – have to run for their lives. The crime drama and the awkwardness of two strangers forced to rely on each other makes for an interesting mix.

"[It alters] how lawlessness is viewed and brings in a racial element to that," says Christina Newland. "It's the best possible way to update a genre which you could argue is a little bit old hat." It showed there's still plenty of road for the genre to travel, if imaginative filmmakers are at the wheel.

To hear more from Mark and Ellen's roadtrip with some of cinema's most compelling outlaw couples, listen to the full episode here.