Thoughts on You and Me

    On Criterion, I watched You and Me, a 1938 romantic comedy/crime drama directed by Fritz Lang, written by Virginia van Upp and Norman Krasna. It was an odd mix of genres, as part of it is a romantic comedy set in a department store where the owner has hired several ex-cons to work as salespeople, wanting to give them a chance at rehabilitation after prison, and how a robber named Joe (George Raft) falls for his coworker Helen (Sylvia Sidney). They end up getting into a quickie marriage, and while he was honest with her about his past, despite feeling like he didn't deserve a sweet innocent like her, she doesn't tell him that she too is an ex-con, and that she isn't allowed to marry while on parole, jeopardizing them both.

    The other part of the movie is a crime drama where Joe meets up with his old prison buddies, and they sit around reminiscing about their time in prison, like how they only had a good chicken meal once a year on Christmas, and while they can have chicken anytime as free men, it doesn't taste as good as when they had to wait for it. Then, because the film was directed by Lang and featured a score by Kurt Weill, goes into this Brechtian experimental musical number, with the men tapping metal instruments to create atonal sounds, chanting a cappella, coded knocking, and it's this genuinely strange but interesting moment in the film of the men singing about being in prison, then the film moves on from this musical moment and, aside from an opening song over cash registers about how everything costs money and consumerism and capitalism, doesn't do another musical number again.

    Sidney was very cute and charming to watch, and given that I had initially heard of her from her much later films in her senior years like Beetlejuice (1988) and Mars Attacks! (1996), it's fun to compare the adorable 1930s starlet she was with the tiny old woman with the smoker's voice she became later in life. George Raft was decent to watch, and he often starred in 1930s gangster films and had alleged real-life connections with gangsters, too.

    It is an interesting movie, and I liked the odd blend of genres and how it both felt like a typical Hollywood film in the Hayes Code era and an anticapitalistic critique from German experimental artists.