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.

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.

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.

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.

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.