Steffi_P 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.

dbdumonteil "You and me" begins a bit like "You only live once".It's the problem of reintegration of ex-cons .The first scene when Sylvia Sydney refuses to become an informer speaks volumes about her own past -which anyway would remain rather vague-.George Raft (miscast ;he is better in true films noirs) is California dreamin' but he chooses to stay to marry Sydney -who is not allowed to,cause she's still on parole,but he does not know it.Coming after "You only live once" and "fury" this is a rather disappointing work by highly talented Fritz Lang.There are only,IMHO,two good moments in the whole movie: the sequence when the ex-cons remember their time in jail,an unusually inventive way of introducing a flashback;then Sydney,in the department store,proving arithmetically (you read well) that crime does not pay.It doesn't for sure.

PaulineDorchester As a fan of both Sylvia Sidney and Kurt Weill, I have wanted to see this film ever since I read Leonard Maltin's description of it. It is apparently not available for home viewing, so Heaven bless the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which screened 'You and Me' a couple of weeks ago as part of its Kurt Weill centennial celebration (which continues as I write this).According to an edition of Stagebill that was made available to audiences at the screening, Weill composed 23 music cues for 'You and Me,' but the Paramount brass did not care for his work and used only nine of them. (This was typical of Weill's experience in Hollywood.) That's a genuine tragedy, and there's no question that it does diminish the film. 'You and Me' still rates a 10 in my book, however, for the outstanding performances from the entire cast and its anti-naturalistic approach to gritty, "realist" subject matter.The line between anti-naturalism and implausibility is a fine one, and the film crosses that line during its last 15 minutes or so. Still, I wonder if audiences in 1938 didn't understand that ending as a joke. They may have been more sophisticated than we are today.In any case, if you get a chance to see this film, grab it.

Joel I 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.