I am charmed that TCM has Fritz Lang's You and Me (1938) classified by genre as "undefined." I can't blame them. It's proto-noir, it's romantic comedy, it's satire in the key of social justice—oh, and it's a quasi-musical collaboration with Kurt Weill. Whatever that adds up to, I love it to pieces. Lang always said it was a Lehrstück.
The plot is not complicated, which aids the sense that it could be played onstage in chalk circles if the cinematography by Charles Lang weren't so invaluable to its tough-chinned poetry. In FDR's America, in La Guardia's New York City, the progressive-minded Mr. Morris (Harry Carey) runs his department store like a halfway house for recent parolees, straight jobs and second chances with no strings attached, and if sometimes a sales clerk shows off a Swiss army can opener with the flair of his safecracking days: "Now who but an ex-safecracker could handle one of those newfangled kitchen gadgets?" In this wholesomely illicit environment, ex-cons and current coworkers Joe Dennis (George Raft) and Helen Roberts (Sylvia Sidney) have already met cute by the time we meet them: crossing paths on opposing escalators, their hands cling briefly in a clasp as strong as a kiss. "I never believed a fellow and a girl could be friends like us," Joe marvels as they share what's supposed to be his last night on the town. Instead it ends in a mutual proposal through the window of a Greyhound bus and a wedding night as joyful and disorderly as screwball comedy, complete with romantically entering a darkened room only to produce a cascade of foley worthy of Fibber McGee's closet: "I found the lamp." It's an even fresher start than he hoped to find in California, but the third in their marriage bed is the past—despite his admirable honesty about his own criminal record, Joe's double standards about the "kind of girls an ex-con usually meets" have made Helen reluctant to disclose her own, which creates something of a problem when their marriage violates the terms of her parole. For a little while it's farce as she tries to hide her husband from her parole officer and vice versa, then things slide noirward faster than a husband can mistake a packet of letters hiding a parole card for the evidence of an affair. An embittered Joe gets drawn back into a heist with his old gang, Helen knows sentiment won't change his mind because it never worked on her, the audience wants a happy ending and there's not exactly a mounted messenger in sight. If the premise is the unforgiving hypocrisy of the law-abiding world which pays lip service to rehabilitation while providing as few true avenues to it as possible, then maybe the lesson is that the criminal world is no better. What's the difference between the two, anyway, until you get caught?
Like so many movies of its decade, You and Me shines with a cynicism so fresh-scrubbed, it's invigorating even when it's a little bit of a ride. The film opens with a dazzling montage of consumer goods, luxuries and necessities alike, over which the camera runs its market-pricing eye while a declamatory baritone cautions like a choir of capitalist angels, "You cannot get something for nothing / And only a chump would try it / Whatever you see that you really want / You may have—provided you buy it." Eventually the camera itself is seen for sale in this catalogue which shrewdly encompasses not just the obvious commodities of furs and groceries but more intangible advantages like health, education, and travel; this last receives a sweet, sharp callback when Joe and Helen celebrate their honeymoon with a round-the-world tour of local ethnic restaurants, each corresponding to an international brochure. In the spoken-word showstopper of the "Knocking Song," a Christmas gathering of Joe's workmates—and former cellmates—recedes expressionistically into a spooky, fatalistic ode to the solidarity of the criminal underworld over the fragile ties of respectability; the stark angles of the montage isolate them all behind bars again, listening down the prison grapevine for the cautionary tale of the "big shot" who tried to "go it alone . . . Stick with the mob and the mob will stick with you." After all, they owe their present security on the outside only to the eccentricity of a benevolent businessman, not to any real welcome on society's part. Helen's climactic speech starts with reform-school rhetoric for the purpose of tossing it pointedly out the window: "Crime doesn't pay! I don't mean because you get caught by the law and punished, because sometimes you're not. I don't mean because it kills something decent inside of you, because a lot of you wouldn't care about that. What I mean is, it doesn't add up in dollars and cents. You can't make any real money stealing!" In a perfectly Brechtian touch, she uses a blackboard and simple arithmetic to demonstrate that the heist wouldn't be worth its expenses: bribes, fences, drivers, lawyers, the boss who takes the biggest cut of the profits; the big shots get rich, yes, but "the big shots aren't little crooks like you—they're politicians." Would the 1930's quit it with the enduring relevance already? The art's nice, but the economics are killing me. I should note that Bertolt Brecht was not actually part of the creative team of You and Me, which got its lyrics from Sam Coslaw and its script from Norman Krasna and Virginia Van Upp—he wouldn't reach the U.S. until 1941 or work with Lang until their sole collaboration of Hangmen Also Die! (1943)—but he is the film's obvious muse, meaning there's not a little of Elisabeth Hauptmann in it, too. Was ist ein Dietrich gegen eine Aktie? Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank? Was ist die Ermordung eines Mannes gegen die Anstellung eines Mannes? Beautifully scornful, Helen shrugs her shoulders at her would-be inside jobbers, all rapt and embarrassed sitting on the children's desks and toy cars of the department she cornered them in: "There's always a boss on any job." America gonif!
Along with the bookending scenes of The Blue Gardenia (1953), You and Me also proves almost incidentally that Lang could have directed romantic comedies if he had felt like it. The courtship of Joe and Helen is artless and adorable, full of suitcases that spill their contents like they're on the witness stand and kisses so passionate they almost put someone's eye out on the brim of a snappy hat. Before this movie, I had never seen Raft play anyone other than a heavy, but he can glow as shyly as Jimmy Stewart and untangle himself from an extension cord as gawkily as Cary Grant; he even gets to dance a little, cheek to cheek with Sidney in the nightclub where Carol Paige performs "The Right Guy for Me," the torch song whose fantasia of a low-down lover gone out with the tide recalls Weill's "Barbara-Song" and "Surabaya-Johnny," although it's a nice touch that both of the protagonists identify wistfully with the "good for nothing . . . right guy." I suspect the film was not my introduction to Sidney, since I did see some of Mars Attacks! (1996) despite my best efforts, but it's an instantly enchanting showcase for her blend of gravity and bravado that it would undersell to call spunkiness and her eyes that can narrow like a cat's or widen as coolly and unimpressed as any kingpin's. I love her best with her chalk in her hand, but the gesture with the remains of the lamp is a close second. The rest of the ex-cons are all character faces like Warren Hymer, George E. Stone, and Roscoe Karns, plausible no-goods who can turn on a dime from Dreigroschenoper to Damon Runyon. When they rally to reunite the separated lovers, they pledge manfully, "We'll turn copper as much as it hurts!" Look, it worked in M (1931). I regret only that the film's production hell deleted at least two of its planned songs, since the three that remain are so weird and so effective: they feel more like theater than other Hollywood musicals of the decade, which I realize is a heck of a claim to make for a decade that contained Busby Berkeley, but I probably mean something about the extra-diegetic address of the "Song of the Cash Register" or the way cellblock shadows fall across Karns' face at the Christmas table during the "Knocking Song." Anyway, I would have loved to hear Sylvia Sidney sing.
I saw this movie for the first time as part of a Fritz Lang retrospective at the HFA in 2014, where I fell for it as hard as George Raft over a lamp; I am mildly confused that it exists on DVD instead of haunting the arthouse circuit and once in a blue moon playing TCM, but it makes my life as a person who likes to recommend films as well as watch them easier. It's just such a singularity. There's nothing else like it in the filmography of its director, its composer, really anyone involved. It couldn't exist onstage, but it pulls the stage onscreen with it. It sneaks a technically out-of-wedlock baby under the nose of the PCA and signals its hero's reform when he conscientiously calculates the sales tax on a shoplifted bottle of perfume. It features gefilte fish. In conclusion, if you're going to commit a crime, at least make sure it pays better than working retail. This gadget brought to you by my priceless backers at Patreon.
The plot is not complicated, which aids the sense that it could be played onstage in chalk circles if the cinematography by Charles Lang weren't so invaluable to its tough-chinned poetry. In FDR's America, in La Guardia's New York City, the progressive-minded Mr. Morris (Harry Carey) runs his department store like a halfway house for recent parolees, straight jobs and second chances with no strings attached, and if sometimes a sales clerk shows off a Swiss army can opener with the flair of his safecracking days: "Now who but an ex-safecracker could handle one of those newfangled kitchen gadgets?" In this wholesomely illicit environment, ex-cons and current coworkers Joe Dennis (George Raft) and Helen Roberts (Sylvia Sidney) have already met cute by the time we meet them: crossing paths on opposing escalators, their hands cling briefly in a clasp as strong as a kiss. "I never believed a fellow and a girl could be friends like us," Joe marvels as they share what's supposed to be his last night on the town. Instead it ends in a mutual proposal through the window of a Greyhound bus and a wedding night as joyful and disorderly as screwball comedy, complete with romantically entering a darkened room only to produce a cascade of foley worthy of Fibber McGee's closet: "I found the lamp." It's an even fresher start than he hoped to find in California, but the third in their marriage bed is the past—despite his admirable honesty about his own criminal record, Joe's double standards about the "kind of girls an ex-con usually meets" have made Helen reluctant to disclose her own, which creates something of a problem when their marriage violates the terms of her parole. For a little while it's farce as she tries to hide her husband from her parole officer and vice versa, then things slide noirward faster than a husband can mistake a packet of letters hiding a parole card for the evidence of an affair. An embittered Joe gets drawn back into a heist with his old gang, Helen knows sentiment won't change his mind because it never worked on her, the audience wants a happy ending and there's not exactly a mounted messenger in sight. If the premise is the unforgiving hypocrisy of the law-abiding world which pays lip service to rehabilitation while providing as few true avenues to it as possible, then maybe the lesson is that the criminal world is no better. What's the difference between the two, anyway, until you get caught?
Like so many movies of its decade, You and Me shines with a cynicism so fresh-scrubbed, it's invigorating even when it's a little bit of a ride. The film opens with a dazzling montage of consumer goods, luxuries and necessities alike, over which the camera runs its market-pricing eye while a declamatory baritone cautions like a choir of capitalist angels, "You cannot get something for nothing / And only a chump would try it / Whatever you see that you really want / You may have—provided you buy it." Eventually the camera itself is seen for sale in this catalogue which shrewdly encompasses not just the obvious commodities of furs and groceries but more intangible advantages like health, education, and travel; this last receives a sweet, sharp callback when Joe and Helen celebrate their honeymoon with a round-the-world tour of local ethnic restaurants, each corresponding to an international brochure. In the spoken-word showstopper of the "Knocking Song," a Christmas gathering of Joe's workmates—and former cellmates—recedes expressionistically into a spooky, fatalistic ode to the solidarity of the criminal underworld over the fragile ties of respectability; the stark angles of the montage isolate them all behind bars again, listening down the prison grapevine for the cautionary tale of the "big shot" who tried to "go it alone . . . Stick with the mob and the mob will stick with you." After all, they owe their present security on the outside only to the eccentricity of a benevolent businessman, not to any real welcome on society's part. Helen's climactic speech starts with reform-school rhetoric for the purpose of tossing it pointedly out the window: "Crime doesn't pay! I don't mean because you get caught by the law and punished, because sometimes you're not. I don't mean because it kills something decent inside of you, because a lot of you wouldn't care about that. What I mean is, it doesn't add up in dollars and cents. You can't make any real money stealing!" In a perfectly Brechtian touch, she uses a blackboard and simple arithmetic to demonstrate that the heist wouldn't be worth its expenses: bribes, fences, drivers, lawyers, the boss who takes the biggest cut of the profits; the big shots get rich, yes, but "the big shots aren't little crooks like you—they're politicians." Would the 1930's quit it with the enduring relevance already? The art's nice, but the economics are killing me. I should note that Bertolt Brecht was not actually part of the creative team of You and Me, which got its lyrics from Sam Coslaw and its script from Norman Krasna and Virginia Van Upp—he wouldn't reach the U.S. until 1941 or work with Lang until their sole collaboration of Hangmen Also Die! (1943)—but he is the film's obvious muse, meaning there's not a little of Elisabeth Hauptmann in it, too. Was ist ein Dietrich gegen eine Aktie? Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank? Was ist die Ermordung eines Mannes gegen die Anstellung eines Mannes? Beautifully scornful, Helen shrugs her shoulders at her would-be inside jobbers, all rapt and embarrassed sitting on the children's desks and toy cars of the department she cornered them in: "There's always a boss on any job." America gonif!
Along with the bookending scenes of The Blue Gardenia (1953), You and Me also proves almost incidentally that Lang could have directed romantic comedies if he had felt like it. The courtship of Joe and Helen is artless and adorable, full of suitcases that spill their contents like they're on the witness stand and kisses so passionate they almost put someone's eye out on the brim of a snappy hat. Before this movie, I had never seen Raft play anyone other than a heavy, but he can glow as shyly as Jimmy Stewart and untangle himself from an extension cord as gawkily as Cary Grant; he even gets to dance a little, cheek to cheek with Sidney in the nightclub where Carol Paige performs "The Right Guy for Me," the torch song whose fantasia of a low-down lover gone out with the tide recalls Weill's "Barbara-Song" and "Surabaya-Johnny," although it's a nice touch that both of the protagonists identify wistfully with the "good for nothing . . . right guy." I suspect the film was not my introduction to Sidney, since I did see some of Mars Attacks! (1996) despite my best efforts, but it's an instantly enchanting showcase for her blend of gravity and bravado that it would undersell to call spunkiness and her eyes that can narrow like a cat's or widen as coolly and unimpressed as any kingpin's. I love her best with her chalk in her hand, but the gesture with the remains of the lamp is a close second. The rest of the ex-cons are all character faces like Warren Hymer, George E. Stone, and Roscoe Karns, plausible no-goods who can turn on a dime from Dreigroschenoper to Damon Runyon. When they rally to reunite the separated lovers, they pledge manfully, "We'll turn copper as much as it hurts!" Look, it worked in M (1931). I regret only that the film's production hell deleted at least two of its planned songs, since the three that remain are so weird and so effective: they feel more like theater than other Hollywood musicals of the decade, which I realize is a heck of a claim to make for a decade that contained Busby Berkeley, but I probably mean something about the extra-diegetic address of the "Song of the Cash Register" or the way cellblock shadows fall across Karns' face at the Christmas table during the "Knocking Song." Anyway, I would have loved to hear Sylvia Sidney sing.
I saw this movie for the first time as part of a Fritz Lang retrospective at the HFA in 2014, where I fell for it as hard as George Raft over a lamp; I am mildly confused that it exists on DVD instead of haunting the arthouse circuit and once in a blue moon playing TCM, but it makes my life as a person who likes to recommend films as well as watch them easier. It's just such a singularity. There's nothing else like it in the filmography of its director, its composer, really anyone involved. It couldn't exist onstage, but it pulls the stage onscreen with it. It sneaks a technically out-of-wedlock baby under the nose of the PCA and signals its hero's reform when he conscientiously calculates the sales tax on a shoplifted bottle of perfume. It features gefilte fish. In conclusion, if you're going to commit a crime, at least make sure it pays better than working retail. This gadget brought to you by my priceless backers at Patreon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}