You Only Live Once, not twice! (Film review)

Colorful advertising for a film festival where I saw 

a good number of black and white movies :b

 

You Only Live Once (U.S.A., 1937)

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Restored Classics program

- Fritz Lang, director

- Starring: Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda

 

Ask a film fan to complete the line "You only live..." and chances are they'll probably opt for the word "twice" -- thanks to the pop cultural power of the 1967 James Bond movie with that title.  As it so happens though, there have been at least three films out there entitled You Only Live Once, including Fritz Lang's second American feature -- the oldest by a long chalk, seeing as it dates back to 1937.  

 

Considered to be an early film noir classic, this offering revolves around a public defender's secretary who falls for a convict, marries him after he gets out of jail and resolves to stick with him in bad times as well as good.  As essayed by Sylvia Sidney, Joan is perky and apt to be Pollyannaish.  Despite much of the world having concluded that Eddie (played by Henry Fonda) is an unreformable criminal and one of life's losers, she manages to see good in him.

 

Buoyed by her faith in him, Eddie tries to go on the straight and narrow.  But right from their honeymoon (where the owners of the inn where they were due to spend the night turfed them out because they didn't want a (former) jailbird on the premises) on, it's patently clear that much of the world is unwilling to give him the breaks that most other part people get, and he could use.    

 

Although Sylvia Sidney is first billed, Henry Fonda is the beating heart of You Only Live Once.  You really feel for his character, particularly after he gets wrongly accused of murder and gets condemned to death.  The way he rails at the injustice of it all, and his character's bitterness, really bites.  

 

As it so happens, I ended up viewing this movie on the same day as Execution in Autumn, another film whose main male character was a man condemned to death.  It's tempting to ascribe the two works' different character arcs and general stories to cultural differences.  At the very least, it's interesting that I can't imagine that Taiwanese tale having a Hollywood equivalent even while You Only Live Once is just one Hollywood work inspired by the real life story of Bonnie and Clyde.

 

And perhaps it's because I've seen so many "lovers on the run" movies that the latter part of You Only Live Once actually is the less interesting to me than what went before.  My sense too is that this film suffered from having at least 15 minutes cut from the original version due to its unprecedented violence.  Thus, as it stands, even while I do think that this offering has stood the test of time -- so much so that I was actually surprised to realize how old it in fact is! -- I still came away from my viewing less satisfied than I think I could have been (and would have been if Fritz Lang had been allowed to more completely realize his vision for this work).  

 

My rating for this film: 8.0