Wed 30 Dec 2015
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: YOU AND ME (1938).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[7] Comments
YOU AND ME. Paramount Pictures, 1938. Sylvia Sidney, George Raft, Robert Cummings, Barton MacLane, Roscoe Karns, Harry Carey. Director: Fritz Lang.
“Genuinely odd but likable film.†That’s how Leonard Maltin described Fritz Lang’s decidedly uneven, but eminently watchable, gangster film/romantic comedy mash-up starring George Raft and Sylvia Sidney as two former jailbirds turned lovebirds. Both work in a department store run by a man who wants nothing more than to give parolees a second chance at building an upstanding life.
Sounds typical enough, right?
The thing is: Maltin’s correct.
You and Me is nothing if not “genuinely odd.†With an Old World comedic sensibility with more than a dash of Yiddishkeit, an armed standoff in the children’s section of an Art Deco department store, and some captivating dreamlike montage sequences, this relatively obscure crime melodrama didn’t fare well at the box office.
That’s not surprising, given how much of the movie feels as if it were almost an experimental film, a cult classic before there were cult classics.
When looked at as a whole, the final product actually seems like a thought experiment in which Lang, either consciously or subconsciously, explored the possibilities of bringing both the aesthetic and thematic elements of German expressionism into the American crime film genre.
Skillful use of light and shadow to convey meaning (check); a prominent spiral staircase (check); a subterranean meeting of criminals operating according to their own code with camera shots that look straight out of M (check).
Some scenes, such as when a group of gangsters remember their time in the slammer, work extraordinarily well; others, such as when Sidney’s character instructs a coterie of criminals in basic math to demonstrate why crime (literally) doesn’t pay, fall flat. Yet, it’s difficult not to find some things to genuinely admire in this quirky film, one that surely left most audiences slightly baffled when first released in the late 1930s.
December 31st, 2015 at 9:27 am
Thank you for a very good review!
Fritz Lang was one of the greatest of all filmmakers. His works show stunning originality, imagination and gripping visual style.
Even an oddball offshoot of his talent like YOU AND ME is full of original approaches. It doesn’t always work. But it is far from ordinary, routine or conformist.
It is good to see his work getting an appreciation here.
Happy New Year!
December 31st, 2015 at 12:40 pm
The “two ex-cons get a job in a department store” plot also crops up in Inside Job, a 1946 film with Preston Foster and Ann Rutherford. The Internet Movie Database reviews make it sound like an inferior version of this film with some plot changes. Hard to picture Ann Rutherford as one of the couple.
December 31st, 2015 at 2:31 pm
It sounds as though there are some similarities, but there doesn’t seem to be any direct relationship between the two films. According to AFI, for example:
“This film [INSIDE JOB], which featured Tod Browning’s last onscreen credit, was a remake of two earlier Universal films, both entitled Outside the Law and directed by Browning. The first version, released in 1920, starred Priscilla Dean and Wheeler Oakman, and the second version, released in 1930, starred Mary Nolan and Edward G. Robinson.”
December 31st, 2015 at 5:40 pm
The 1920 silent “Outside the Law” is a very good movie.
Doesn’t much resemble “You and Me”, though, IIRC.
December 31st, 2015 at 11:38 pm
Didn’t Leslie Charteris work on this one at some point as well.
It’s a decidedly odd film, very much along the lines of German Expressionist film strained through a musical comedy.
January 1st, 2016 at 12:08 am
I think a possible connection between Charteris and this film has come up for discussion before on this blog, but I don’t think anything concrete has developed from it, so far.
January 1st, 2016 at 12:50 am
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced this one needs to be watched at least twice to be fully appreciated. I’m making a mental note of it and will watch it again sometime this year and then go back and see what I wrote!