You and Me

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.

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.

This is one of the best film starring George Raft. Many character actors also show up at different parts of the films such as Greta Granstedt, Ellen Drew, George E. Stone, Bob Cummings, Barton MacLane, and others. Although the film gets a bit campy at times, this is first class entertainment. And Sylvia Sidney is a real peach !!!

I am a great fan of the late director Fritz Lang. My very favorite film from him is the science fiction classic "Metropolis". A close second is "Frau I'm Monde". Other great films are "M", "Woman in the Window", and "1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse". This film with the music of Kurt Weill and the way the various characters are developed in the context of the modern workplace and the struggle to find happiness and thrive in a fast-paced society makes this one of Fritz Lang's best dramas.

Dan Basinger

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.

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.