You and Me

You And Me is an interesting experiment which falls way short in execution, but still is an interesting view.

The closest American film I could compare it to is Al Jolson's Hallelujah I'm a Bum which utilized that same sing/talk rhythmic technique in many spots. Rodgers&Hart's efforts were not as butchered as Kurt Weill's were, my guess is that Paramount got cold feet and tried to salvage the film as they saw it by making it more of a typical gangster yarn.

The story involves Harry Carey who as part of his payback to society hires freshly paroled convicts in his department store. The presumption is that he does screen them for employment.

George Raft is one of those ex-convicts hired there and he meets and falls for Sylvia Sidney. She knows about him, but he doesn't know she is also on parole. Other prison pals working for Carey are, George E. Stone, Warren Hymer, Jack Pennick, Robert Cummings and Roscoe Karns.

One very unregenerated crook, Barton MacLane, tries to get the whole crew of them to help knock over the store. What happens is the rest of the plot of the film.

Perhaps You and Me might have been better done elsewhere. I'm thinking of Warner Brothers who specialized in these working class stories. Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and Warren Hymer certainly all were part of Warner's gangster stable and George Raft moved to Warner Brothers himself a year after You and Me came out. Paramount just didn't go in for stories like these and the results show.

Highlight of the film is Sylvia Sidney giving a lecture in economics about how crime doesn't pay. For heist guys like these when you deduct the expenses of a job, it really doesn't pay. Only the folks at the top really make out.

By the way you might call what Kurt Weill tried to do musically and Fritz Lang brought to the screen as one long rap music video. You and Me may have been way too soon ahead of its time.

Still it's probably worth a look if for no other reason than to see a joint collaborative effort of two expatriates from the Nazi regime, Kurt Weill and Fritz Lang.

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.

It's a musical! It's performance art! It's a romance! It's a melodrama AND a comedy! It's a gangster picture! It's a morality tale AND an economics lesson! And it's about 15 minutes longer than it needs to be.

Mr. Morris (Harry Carey) owns a department store where he employs many men and women recently released from prison. Two such people are Joe Dennis (George Raft) and Helen Roberts (Sylvia Sidney). They meet at the store and fall in love. One night, they make a sudden decision to marry. The problem is that Joe is open about his status of being an ex con, but Helen hides that she is the same, and furthermore she is still on parole and her marrying is a violation of that parole.

Joe begins to wonder about his wife when he catches her in a couple of lies and when she won't let him look at a stack of papers that look like love letters but are in fact her parole cards. What he thinks might be another man is just Helen hiding her status as an ex-con. Meanwhile, baddie Barton McLane has wandered over from Warner Brothers to try and tempt all of the ex-cons working at Morris's Department Store into robbing it.

What makes it odd? The film opens with a half-sung, half-spoken, somewhat metatextual song that seems to be criticizing capitalism - odd for a production code era film. Also, there's a torch song number towards the middle that really has nothing to do with the plot. Then, when some of the ex cons have a reunion on Christmas day, there's another metatextual song that seems to be the ex-cons waxing nostalgic about their time in jail.

What's good about it? Raft and Sidney have great chemistry and it's one of Raft's better performances. Also, Warren Hymer is being well used as the rather dense but true friend of Raft who is having trouble figuring out Raft's moods.

This reminded me at times of a Greek Chorus mixed with an operetta, and a dash of Damon Runyon. Of course the director was the famous ( and quirky) Fritz Lang reviving one of his favorite themes of decent people being persecuted by the law. He made another film the year before with a similar theme starring Spencer Tracy and Silvia Sydney called "Fury". It was interesting to see a young Bob Cummings in one of his first films as one of the ex-cons. I wish they had given him more to do. If you are familiar with and a fan of Fritz Lang's work, you might like this. Or if you'd like to see just about every well-known character actor in Hollywood at the time all in one film, you may be entertained. Otherwise this film is an acquired taste.

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.

That doesn't fit with what most people think about Fritz Lang. He's generally a tragedian at this point in his career. You and Me is very similar in subject to his previous film, You Only Live Once, about an ex-con who can't get a break. Here, George Raft plays an ex-con working at a department store. Sylvia Sidney is his girlfriend. She also works at the store, and she has a secret: she's an ex-con, too. Raft has a bitter double standard and despises female ex-cons, so Sidney can't tell him the truth.

Near the beginning, the film seems a bit clunky. The opening is kind of goofy, and, it being a Lang film, you might be confused about how you should take it. His other films aren't completely without comedy. Few films refuse to give us at least a couple of laughs along the way, perhaps close to the beginning. But You and Me just keeps getting sillier.

I was finally won over by an extraordinarily stylistic sequence where a mob of criminals recall their days in jail with a musical number. After that enormously entertaining sequence had come and gone, I knew that anything could go. In fact, anything can go and does. The film ends up being one of the most original films ever made. No comedy is like this. You know, I don't want to swear to this, but You and Me is perhaps my favorite Fritz Lang film. I actually haven't seen any masterpiece (i.e., 10/10s) from him, including Metropolis and M. You and Me, like M and Fury, my other two favorites, gets a 9/10.