SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

OldAle1 After the very intense and downbeat Fury and You Only Live Once, Fritz Lang's third American film seems something of an anomaly for the director: a semi-comic hoodlum farce with musical moments, some of them courtesy of an (uncredited) Kurt Weill, and starring early tough-guy stalwart George Raft and the leading lady of the two previous Hollywood Lang pictures, Sylvia Sidney. An odd combination of elements, with even some Capra-esquire screwball thrown in, and yet on the whole it works. Raft and Sidney are both ex-cons trying to go straight working in a big department store owned by kindhearted Mr. Morris (Harry Carey) who fall in love; but Raft doesn't know that Sidney's a parolee, while Sidney knows his secret. They have to keep their eventual marriage quiet from everyone, and humor ensues with Sidney's efforts to do so; eventually Raft is lured into a plot by some of his ex-con buddies to rob the store that has helped them out so much and Sidney has to come in to save the day.And odd film, as I say, with a proto-feminist very strong female lead by the always wonderful Sylvia Sidney, great photography by Charles Lang, and a noirish downbeat feel pervading an often sunny and humorous plot line, the Langian inevitability of fate and of returning to one's worst impulses never more than a heartbeat away. Unjustly neglected, seen on a decent enough quality rental VHS.

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.

ccthemovieman-1 This is different, I'll say that. It's billed as a film noir but it's really a melodrama.It's a romance story involving the characters played by George Raft and Sylvia Sidney. This was my first look at Sidney and she wasn't all that appealing to me. Since then I have seen her many times in films spanning a number of decades, on film or in guest appearances on television shows. Although hardly a beauty, she always was interesting. So was George Raft, who played a very low-key role in this movie. He was best playing a tougher gangster.A man who received no billing in this movie but was really the third star was Warren Hymer, who played a dumb crook. There were also two musical numbers in this movie, one of them delivered in strange prose by the criminals.As I said, this was kind of a strange piece of entertainment. Director Fritz Lang wanted to make a statement about crime not paying but he wanted to tell it in a different format. Well, I can appreciate that but I think he could have done that in a more entertaining way because the middle of this film dragged way too much and might have lost a lot of viewers. The ending was inventive but a little corny, too.

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.