You and Me

This collaboration by Fritz Lang and Kurt Weill is one of the oddest films ever made. It's part gangster story, part comedy, part soap opera, part leftist propaganda...and part musical! Perhaps Weill was trying to find the cinematic equivalent of what he did in the theater with Bertolt Brecht. In any event, the experiment is a failure but a noble failure and in parts quite interesting. It's definitely worthy seeing for two montages set to rhythmic voiceover narration, for Sylvia Sidney's sympathetic performance and for the fact that you'll never see anything else quite like it.

Joe and Helen (George Raft and Sylvia Sidney) both work at the same department store. The owner (Harry Carey) is a swell guy and hired them and a few other ex-cons in order to give them a second chance. As for Joe, his parole is now over and he plans on traveling out west. But instead, on the night he's leaving, he impulsively asks Helen to marry him and they do so. But there are two problems. First, while he told her he was on parole, she never did the same and as far as he knows, she's never had a past. Second, she's STILL on parole and one of the conditions of this is that she not marry....and she's just violated parole. Surely, bad things are going to come of this. See the film and see where it all goes next.

This film was directed by German director Fritz Lang. His record of films in the States was spotty...with a few big successes (I adore his film "Fury" and "The Big Heat") and a few failures. Apparently, "You and Me" was a box office loser. But is it a bad film? Not at all. Apart from a terrible opening tune ("You Can't Get Money for Nothing"...which was FAR from subtle) it's quite good and I have a hard time imagining it being a box office loser...but stranger things have happened.

The gang of directors that came across to Hollywood from Germany fleeing nazi persecution were a very mixed bunch, but they all had one thing in common. They were all used to a higher degree of artistic licence and stylisation than was the given in tinsel town. Once in a while though, and especially in those early days, one of them would turn out something a little truer to the old form. Fritz Lang was among the most distinctive and also unfairly maligned of these refugee directors, but You and Me was one of a small number of American pictures which he produced as well as directed and thus was able to imbue it with his own particular brand of art deco comic book oddity.

Lang's late silent pictures tended to be very rhythmic, and You and Me is a good demonstration of where he was able to take that strand in the sound era. While certainly no typical musical, it has a number of songs and abstract interludes which lift us out of reality whilst still commenting on it, all illustrated with Lang's most baroque shot compositions, and scored by no less a personage than Kurt Weill (he wrote Mack the Knife, you know). "Operatic" is an overused term in cinema, but with its emphatic staging and numbers that dip in and out of regular dialogue, You and Me is certainly reminiscent of the opera at many points. The screenplay is by Virginia van Upp from a story by Norman Krasna, in which an unlikely tale of love among ex-convicts is surrounded by a deliberate distillation of gangster movie clichés, in rather blunt caricatures such as a mob boss known only as "big shot". All this itself feeds into the picture's surreal and, yes, operatic setting.

In this light, lead man George Raft can be viewed as simply another part of standard gangster movie furniture. You certainly wouldn't hire Raft for his acting abilities, since while his name would require an additional two letters to become "rafter", his lack of talent already renders him a wooden beam. It is also very much like Lang the producer to take on players who had strange and distinctive faces, which is why we get supporting acts from people like Warren Hymer and Jack Pennick, certainly worthy comic performers but appearing here mainly for effect. There are some great dramatic performances though. Sylvia Sidney is a likable leading lady, and her dewy-eyed adoration for Raft seems very real, as does her shrewdness in the final showdown. There are also smaller parts for the delightful Vera Gordon and the stern and steady Harry Carey, perhaps the most prestigious name on the cast list.

But Lang's style as a director was not really centred upon actors. It was however a functional one and not purely stylisation as is sometimes supposed. Lang's fascination with stark angles and geometric arrangements in his shot compositions are only really exaggerated examples of the visual tricks all competent directors use. In Raft and Sidney's proposal scene at the bus depot, he frames them with a set of lines converging at their head. It creates an optical illusion that makes us feel they should move towards each other. Lang forms unrecognisably bizarre patterns out of everyday objects, for example making rows of boxes in a storeroom look like some art deco wall panel, and while undoubtedly a bit of stylistic indulgence it also helps to highlight an important moment between two characters.

Many of Lang's little baroque touches, such as those shadowy close-ups of characters staring straight into the lens, would be frankly a bit of a distraction in a regular drama. But that is why they make sense here, in this stereotyped world of hammy gangsters and booming voices singing songs about stealing. It's a kind of overt form of cinema that allows the corniest of stories to be dressed up and brought to life, and surreal as it is it works surprisingly well as entertainment. However, genres were rigid and incorruptible things then, and you weren't supposed to merge gritty realism with musical flights of fancy. Besides, the semi-musical format would have been regarded as an awkward leftover from the early talkie days. As such, You and Me remains very much a one-off curio.

Sylvia Sidney and George Raft star in "You and Me," a 1938 film.

The owner of a large department store believes in second chances, so some of his staff are ex-cons, Joe Dennis (Raft) being one. His parole is almost over, and he's determined to keep his nose clean, despite former gang members trying to get him back in with them.

Joe has a friendly relationship with a woman who works at the store, Helen Roberts (Sidney). When he's about to leave town to get away from bad influences, he realizes he loves Helen, gets off the bus, and the two marry and move into Helen's apartment house.

Helen tells Joe that the boss at their store does not want his employees married to one another, so they have to keep quiet about it. The truth is that Helen is an ex-con as well, on parole, and forbidden to marry, although she does not admit this to Joe and continues to hide it.

When Joe learns she has been lying to him, he leaves her and returns to his old friends, who want to rob the store.

Interesting movie, due to a "cell block tango" that the criminals do - where they speak in unison, in hushed voices, using a sing/talk rhythmic technique, by Kurt Weill.

Sidney and Raft are terrific, and you are really pulling for them. The denoument is wonderful and the ending is sweet.

Fritz Lang was brought in late to this project after it had languished for a few years for a few reasons, invited to the project by his female star of his last couple of movies, Sylvia Sidney. I wonder if he had had more time with the material beforehand he could have ironed out some of the disconnect between different sections of the film. Knowing his work, he probably would have pushed it further into a straight drama instead of the combination drama/comedy that is the end result. That's not supposed to be a big hit against the movie, though. The discordant nature of the storytelling is actually a source of fun with the comedy keeping things light without quite losing the commitment to the actual emotional throughline that runs through the film. It's just kind of odd when the light comedy/drama film ends with, essentially, a slapstick routine.

Mr. Morris (Harry Carey) runs a department store where he offers job opportunities to ex-convicts to help them get their lives back on track. He tries to keep their employment and past as much a secret as possible, not even revealing their past incarcerations to any of the other employees, and it's working out for him. There's been no backsliding so far, and they're doing good jobs. One such employee is Joe (George Raft), a former member of the mob who has developed a nice little relationship with Helen (Sidney), another employee of the department store. He's dedicated to moving across the country to California since his parole is over, though, and on his last night in town, the two go dancing. She realizes the depth of her feelings for him and, as the bus is pulling away, she proclaims it and says that she'll marry him if he wants. He immediately jumps out, and they get married that night.

The problem is that Helen has a secret. She's also an ex-con (for a crime that never gets explained), and she's still on parole that includes the rule that she cannot marry. She keeps this a secret from Joe. This seems thin, but there is an established reason for it. Joe talks about wanting his girl pure in the context of having never loved another man. Going to jail is impure, so she hides it from him. He ends up reacting badly to the later reveal, but it still feels thin. I think it would have worked in a more purely comedic context (like in a Leo McCarey movie, for instance), but the dramatic tone of the material isn't really matched by the actual weight of it.

Still, they have to put up a fiction that they are not married. She gives the excuse that Mr. Morris doesn't want his employees marrying each other, a lie that Joe eventually uncovers and helps seed his nascent distrust of her. At the same time, the old mob, led by his fellow Morris employee Cuffy (Roscoe Karns), is trying to get Joe to join them on a big job to rip off the Morris Department Store, and after the reveal of Helen's past, Joe is finally ready to give in.

Now, the introduction of the gang happens at about the halfway point, and it's something of a showstopper. The introduction is necessary dramatically and structurally to happen at some point (though a more polished script would have had it after about fifteen minutes instead of forty-five), but that's not the showstopper part of it. The sequence is an outright German Expressionistic and Soviet-style edited marvel as the group of men gather around a table and reminisce about their time in the clink. It becomes rhythmic auditorily and visually as they chant their story back and forth. It's really something else and doesn't fit in the movie stylistically at all. I'm glad it's there, though. It's good.

The plan goes through but gets stopped in what is the oddest way possible. Helen presents to the gang how little money they'll make from the robbery, proving with math that crime doesn't pay. It's so ridiculous that it has to be intentionally funny (it might not be), but I was giggling through the whole thing nonetheless. And then there's a slapstick bit where the guys all work together to ensure that Joe and Helen get back together.

Yeah, it's a hodgepodge of a film, but I actually quite enjoyed it. It feels like Lang taking lighter material and pushing it his own, more serious-minded, direction while the charm of Sidney and Raft create the balance between the lighter and darker parts of the story. It's funnier more than moving, making me feel like it would have been better as an outright screwball comedy rather than being somewhere in between.