Fritz Lang was arguably the greatest director of his era, but his career was cut in half by the outbreak of the Second World War, and when he fled Nazi Germany – having turned down a job as head of Nazi propaganda his second career began. You Only Live Once was his second American movie. Henry Fonda plays an ex-convict who can’t get a break on the outside’, and marries Sidney, who like her husband is one of life’s losers.
When Fonda’s hat is found at the scene of a robbery gone bad, he is forced to hit the road, with his wife and baby in tow. In trying to avoid capture, Fonda becomes a murderer for real, condemning himself and Sidney to an early demise. Partly based on the legend of Bonnie and Clyde, this remains one of his greatest and earliest forays into the twisted mechanics of guilt vs. innocence and fate vs. free will.
Several stunning set pieces pepper You Only Live Once, with a gas grenade attack at a bank robbery taking top honours. A brief exchange at one point sees a character romanticizing them, saying that Eddie and Joan are “probably hiding somewhere, having a swell time. Lang critiques such glorification of them by immediately cutting to a shot of them driving through an intense rainstorm, still very much on the run.
The director’s usual expressionistic touches are near the height of their intensity. Rain falls, fog swirls, and shadows impose themselves almost as insistently as Lang’s camera does. Though it is probably a lesser work, You Only Live Once is to its genre what M is to the serial killer film.
Overall verdict: It stands as a clear precursor for such revered love-on-the-run films as Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands and They Live By Night, but is perhaps better than any of them.
Special Features:
Introduction by George Wilson
Audio interview with Lang
Production takes
Reviewer: Mike Martin