by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I finally had the chance to watch a movie together, and having
just received my order from TCM Home Video of the boxed set Dark
Crimes, volume 2 (oddly I was unable to
find a listing on their Web site for Dark Crimes, volume 1) I opened it to extract one of the most elusive
1930’s movies of all time, one that’s almost never been shown since its 1938
release: Fritz Lang’s third U.S. film (and his third in a row starring Sylvia
Sidney), You and Me. I’ve heard
conflicting reports on the production; in his interview with Charles Higham and
Joel Greenberg for the 1969 book The Celluloid Muse Lang made it sound like a personal project from the
get-go, but some of the “Trivia” items on imdb.com suggest it was first
developed by Paramount as a vehicle for Carole Lombard and George Raft based on
an original story by Norman Krasna (who’d already written the story for Lang’s
first U.S. film, Fury). Only
Krasna wanted to direct as well as write the film, and George Raft refused to
work for a director who’d never directed a film before (an attitude that three
years later would cost him the lead in the classic 1941 version of The
Maltese Falcon). So Paramount reassigned
the film to Richard Wallace as director and, when Lombard dropped out of the
project, replaced her with Sidney — who immediately suggested Lang as director
since they’d worked so well together in Fury and Lang’s second American film, You Only
Live Once. Lang grabbed the project and
decided to make it a Brechtian morality play — he and Brecht had been friends
in Germany and Lang later worked with Brecht on the 1943 film Hangmen
Also Die — with the moral that “crime does
not pay” (“which is a lie, because crime pays very well,” Lang told Higham and
Greenberg).
He hired Brecht’s musical collaborator from Germany, Kurt Weill, to
write a full set of songs that would have turned You and Me into an all-out musical — but after writing just
three songs Weill quit the project to return to Broadway and write the songs
for the stage musical Knickerbocker Holiday. Phil Boutelje, whose only other credit of note is
the 1922 song “China Boy” (which despite its offensively racist lyrics became a
jazz standard, though traditional jazz bands usually play it as an
instrumental; I have 24 versions of “China Boy” on my iTunes list but only one,
Louis Prima’s, contains a vocal), finished one song Weill had left incomplete
but neither he nor anyone else wrote any new ones. As a result You
and Me is a movie that seems to go off in
several different directions at once, particularly since Lang (who never made a
full-length sound musical, though the cabaret sequences in his German silents Dr.
Mabuse and the restored Metropolis indicate he’d have been more than qualified to do
so) shoots the three numbers Weill did write (with Paramount regular Sam Coslow as his lyricist) — the
opening “Song of the Cash Register” (even the title sounds Brechtian!), a paean
to the glories of consumerism with the warning that they can be yours but only if you pay for them; a torch song called “The Right
Guy for Me” (sung by Carol Paige as part of the floor show at a dance hall the
Raft and Sidney characters go to on a date) that’s a pretty obvious Weill
self-plagiarism from “Surabaya Johnny” in his 1929 German flop Happy
End; and a rhythmical chant sung by a group
of mobsters who’ve united to plan a new job while expressing their nostalgia
for prison (“which is, of course, stupid,” Lang told Higham and Greenberg) for
which Lang wanted “not music but only sound effects — people hitting the table,
or one glass against another, etc.” It wasn’t exactly a new idea — Rouben
Mamoulian had done the combination of voices with sound effects in his stage
production of DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy (basis for George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess) in 1928 and his film Love Me Tonight in 1932 — but it still comes off surprisingly
effectively.
The plot of You and Me
concerns department-store owner Jerome Morris (Harry Carey), who has decided as
a matter of social conscience to offer jobs in his store to ex-convicts on
parole. Among the people he’s hired that way are sporting-goods salesman Joe
Dennis (George Raft) and clerk Helen Roberts (Sylvia Sidney, top-billed) —
there’s a humorous introduction of Raft’s character when he snarls in close-up,
“This is the best racket I’ve ever had, and I’ve tried them all,” and then the
camera pulls back to reveal what he’s talking about is a tennis racket he’s
showing a customer (a woman who’s openly cruising him in a scene that seems
more like one from 1932, before the strict enforcement of the Production Code
began, than 1938). She knows he’s an ex-con but he doesn’t know that about her.
They’ve fallen in love with each other (demonstrated by the jealous look she
shoots that woman customer who wanted more from Raft than a tennis racket) but
one of the rules of parole in those days was that you weren’t allowed to get
married. Joe has completed his parole but Helen still has three months to go on
hers, and as their relationship progresses into a whirlwind marriage at an
all-night “Lightning” chapel, the suspense from our end is what will happen
when Joe finds out that Helen is also an ex-con and what will be the legal
repercussions, if any, that she’s violated her parole by marrying him. There’s
also a sympathetic Jewish couple, the Levines (Egon Brecher and Vera Gordon),
who own the boarding house where Helen lives (Joe moves in when they wed, then
takes a separate room next door after the Levines throw out a deadbeat boarder
we never see) and seem to have been Lang’s spit-in-the-eye response to the
Nazis he had fled in the dead of night five years earlier. Helen gets the
Levines —the only people besides her boss who know she’s an ex-con — to conceal
her marriage if her “friend” J. Dayton (Willard Robertson), actually her parole
officer, drops by unexpectedly.
Oddly, despite its experimentalism (including
Lang’s music-video style filming of all three Weill songs, two of which have
elaborate dramatic sequences similar to the way James Whale filmed “Ol’ Man
River” in the 1936 Show Boat), You
and Me works best when it’s at its
simplest, a tale of the apparently happy but actually troubled relationship
between the leads reminiscent of such so-called “pre-Code” films as Columbia’s Three
Wise Girls and Virtue (both directed by hacks but written by Robert
Riskin, later Frank Capra’s collaborator on most of his major films).
Throughout the first half of this film Joe is constantly being approached by
his former gangland associates, including the guy who set him up to take the
fall for the armed robbery they did together that sent Joe to prison in the
first place, who want him to be the “inside man” for a robbery of Morris’s
store — indeed, virtually all the “crew” recruited for this job are Morris’s
ex-con employees — and Joe refuses to go along until he finally finds out Helen
is an ex-con. He’s so hurt that she lied to him he agrees to join the crime,
and the plotting and the actual break-in are staged by Lang and cinematographer
Charles Lang (presumably no relation) as all-out film noir reminiscent of the sinister studio-built cityscapes
of Lang’s German masterpiece M.
There are several surprise twists at the end — Helen catches on to the robbery,
reports it to Morris but persuades him not to turn in the would-be robbers to the police; instead she gives them
an explicit lecture, using the blackboard in the store’s toy department, that
the $30,000 robbery would have netted them a little more than $100 each once
all their costs were factored in and therefore crime really doesn’t pay, at least for the lower-level crooks. “The big
shots aren’t little crooks like you. They’re politicians,” she explains, in a
line Lang probably came up with himself (instead of Krasna and screenwriter
Virginia Van Upp, who turned his story into a screenplay) since it’s awfully
close to Brecht’s even more acid comment, “What’s robbing a bank compared to
founding a bank?,” originally written for Happy End and then incorporated into later revisions of the
big Brecht-Weill hit The
Threepenny Opera.
Only there’s more; Joe is
determined to walk out on Helen and leave for another state where he won’t be
known as an ex-con (which he was actually on his way to do at the start when he
agreed to stay and marry Helen himself — he takes a Greyhound bus to California,
a surprise given that real brand names were almost never used in 1938 movies,
but gets off almost immediately once Helen agrees to marry him) when he finds
out from Mrs. Levine that Helen is pregnant (given all we’ve seen them doing,
when would they have had the time — or the opportunity — to have sex?), and he
enlists all eight of the would-be robbers on Morris’s staff to find her. When
they locate the hospital where she’s about to give birth, there’s another
comedy scene (You and Me has a
surprising number of laughs, especially given that Lang was never known for his
sense of humor) in which all of
them are in the waiting room going through the nervous reactions one
anticipates from expectant fathers in that predicament. You and Me is a marvelous movie (though Lang wasn’t proud of it
in later years; he told Higham and Greenberg, “It was — I think deservedly — my
first real flop”), one of those quirky entries in major directors’ canons (like
Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett — a film
that’s grown on me the more I’ve seen it — Hitchcock’s Under
Capricorn and Marnie, Welles’ The Trial and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate) that doesn’t quite “work” as a whole but still
ventures so much farther than ordinary movies it’s worth classic status. And You
and Me also passes — with flying colors —
one of my tests of a classic-era movie: can you imagine it being remade today?
Yes, I can, especially if the protagonists were Black and you could tweak the
script to incorporate the perpetual fear African-American men who aren’t in prison live under in this society that at any
time, for any reason, a white cop could blow them away and not even be put on
trial, much less convicted!
