Fritz Lang's second American movie (Lang fled Germany when Hitler came to power, despite an invitation from Goebbels to head the German film industry, made Liliom in France, and the great movie about a lynch mob "Fury" starring Spencer Tracy in 1936), "You Only Live Once" (1937) is also a seminal movie about love on the run with obvious influences on "Bonnie and Clyde," "Badlands," "They Live By Night," "Thieves Like Us", etc. It is also the movie in which Henry Fonda broke through to stardom.

Like many Lang films, vengefulness is central, and ordinary people are pitted against crushing force, but valiantly fight back (see the Lang quotation in my Destiny )review.

Fonda plays an ex-con named Eddie Taylor, whose attempts to "go straight" are repeatedly and viciously thwarted. Released from prison he marries Joan Graham (Sylvia Sidney, who also played the fiancee of the innocent man pursued in Fury, Lang's first American movie). She works as a secretary in the office of the public defender Stephen Whitney (Barton MacLane on the other side of the law from many of his memorable gangster roles). They are forced out of their honeymoon motel in the middle of the night by none other than the Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton, before "The Wizard of Oz").

Eddie has no more luck holding a trucking job. Desperate to establish a home for Joan, Eddie is approached by old confederates planning to rob an armored car. The robbery is one of the great set pieces of early American crime dramas with the robbers wearing gas masks. The heist goes very badly wrong and six guards are killed.

The gas masks make recognition of the robbers difficult (not least for the audience). Eddie tells Joan he was not involved. He is immediately high on the wanted list and she urges him to turn himself in and tell his story. This does not work out very well: Eddie is sentenced to death.

This is only the beginning of a complicated plot in which Eddie cannot win, but desperately attempts to overcome what seems to be an inexorable fate (the leitmotif of Lang's oeuvre and this is his American film most like Destiny.

There is some unsubtle irony (such as the fugitives being recognized buying Lucky Strikes, a sentimentalized priest, and a mawkish final chorus (that was surely added by the studio and not planned by Lang), but "You Only Live Once" is generally a very tough-minded representation of self-fulfilling prophecies. As Whitney comments: "The law condemned him to death. They found out they had made a mistake and the thought that would straighten everything out, just like that." Lives have already been ruined and another is lost trying to convince Eddie to surrender again.

The stupendous images are credited to Leon Shamroy (12 O'clock High). The artiest (most expressionist) one has the shadows of the condemned man's cells radiating out, though Fonda peering out of the window of a very wet car is the iconic image from the film. Given the lack of anything comparable in Shamroy's work and the striking visual compositions in other Lang movies, I'd credit the meticulous and visionary director.

In a lean 'n mean, I cannot go into the echoes of Les Miserables in the compulsion to believe Eddie guilty or of the end of Faust in the end of the movie (or the ending of the later "Grapes of Wrath" with Fonda fleeing). For its visual greatness and outstanding performances (especially Fonda's and Sidney's: both run considerable gamuts of emotions), I am comfortable rounding up from a 4.5 to a 5-star rating despite a certain amount of plot contrivance, especially having rated "Fury" 3-star.

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This a belated contribution to part of Lean 'n Mean III. Reviews of more Lang movies are on the way...



Recommended:
Yes