Skip to main content

Film Friday: "You Only Live Once" (1937)

When I saw this film a couple of days ago, I found out that it was released on January 29, 1937. So naturally, this week on "Film Friday" I had to tell you a little bit about it.

Original release poster
Directed by Fritz Lang, You Only Live Once (1937) concerns Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda), a three-time convict who has just received an early release due to the influence of public defender Stephen Whitney (Barton MacLane) and the prison chaplain, Father Dolan (William Gargan). Eddie then marries his longtime sweetheart Joan Graham (Sylvia Sidney), Whitney's secretary, and vows to go straight and work hard. His aspirations at normal life are soon thwarted, however, when he and Joan are asked to leave their honeymoon room after the proprietors, Ethan (Charles "Chic" Sale) and Hester (Margaret Hamilton), learn that Eddie is an ex-con. Eddie gets a job at a truck company, but his boss, Mr. Williams (William Pawley), fires him for being late after he meets Jo to show her a house they plan to buy.

Sometime later, Monk Mendall (Walter de Palma), a member of the gang to which Eddie formerly belonged, stages a bank robbery and frames Eddie for the crime. He leaves behind Eddie's hat, which Monk had stolen from him, and which has Eddie's initials stamped on it. When Monk is killed after his getaway truck skids off the road and into a gorge, Eddie is convicted of both the robbery and the murder of a guard on circumstantial evidence and given the death penalty. On the eve of his execution, a gun smuggled into the isolation ward enables Eddie to escape. As he makes his way to the truck gate of the prison, Father Dolan comes forward to tell him that Monk's corpse and getaway vehicle with the stolen money have just been found at the bottom of a gorge, meaning that Eddie has been pardoned. Eddie does not believe Dolan and, in his confused state of mind, accidentally kills the chaplain. Eddie and the now pregnant Joan go on the lam and are blamed for every robbery throughout the country. After the baby is born, Joan leaves the child with Whitney and her sister Bonnie (Jean Dixon) and then heads for Canada with Eddie. As they are about to cross the border, Eddie and Joan are ambushed by state troopers, who wound both of them. They drive off the road and Eddie carries Joan toward the border. After she dies in his arms, Eddie is fatally shot. He kisses Joan and then hears Father Dolan say, "You're free, Eddie; the gates are open," before he dies.

Eddie Taylor: Go ahead! Take a good look, you monkeys! Have a good time! Get a big kick out of me! It's fun to see an innocent man die, isn't it? If you think I'm going to the chair, you're crazy! They're never gonna kill me for a job I didn't do!

After being discharged from the military in 1918, Vienna-born Fritz Lang moved to Berlin to work as a director at the German film studio UFA and later at Nero-Film. Combining popular genres with emerging Expressionist techniques, Lang directed some of the most iconic European pictures of the time, including the epic science-fiction drama Metropolis (1927) and the disturbing thriller M (1931), considered by many film scholars to be his masterpiece. When Adolf Hitler rose to power in early 1933, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels banned Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) due to its underlying paralells between its title character and the Nazi leader. Worried about the advent of Nazism, partly because of his Jewish heritage, Lang fled Germany and moved to Paris, where he filmed Liliom (1934) with Charles Boyer. A few months later, he went to Hollywood under contract to MGM to direct his first American feature, Fury (1936), a grim tale of lynch law starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. 

Meanwhile, in mid-1936, Sidney attended a dinner with independent producer Walter Wanger and autor Theodore Dreiser, who had written the novel on which the actress's An American Tragedy (1931) was based. In discussing ideas for Sidney's next picture, Dreiser suggested she and Wanger do a story on Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the notorious Texas bank robbers who cut a swathe through six states before dying under machine guns in a Louisiana field two years earlier. Wanger liked the idea and immediately hired Gene Towne and C. Graham Baker to develop a treatment. Known as "two of the most colorful screenwriters in Hollywood," Towne and Baker had previously worked for Wanger in Shangai (1935) and Mary Burns, Fugitive (1935), which starred Sidney. By mid-August, they had turned out a first rough draft entitled "Three Times Loser," the story of an ex-con and a receptionist who dream of home and happiness, but end up running for their lives. Soon afterwards, on Sidney's recommendation, Wanger assigned Fritz Lang to the director's chair and agreed to let him have control over the final cut of the film, a privilege that he was not granted at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda
Although a screenplay already existed when Lang was hired, he began to influence the project as soon as he arrived. Working with Towne and Baker, Lang "tried to get into [the story] what he called social implications that were ultimately overruled, showing how the boy drifted into crime because of bad influences and unfortunate environment instead the picture opens as the boy emerges from the prison, a stranger to the audience." Once the script was the way he wanted, Lang refused to allow the writers to alter it further. A generally favourable response from the Hays Office led to a full screenplay being produced in September, along with a title change to You Only Live Once.

As the script evolved, Lang made sure You Only Live Once would be devoid of "convential Hollywood moralizing." For instance, he eliminated the depiction of Bonnie as a failed career woman and reduced the romance between Joan and Whitney, so as to not detract from her love for Eddie. Eddie's initial appearance as a bad-tempered, arrogant inmate who refuses to shake the governor's hand when he is released from prison was also altered to make him a more sympathetic character. The most important change from the earlier screenplay, however, was the ending. Instead of having Eddie offer a negative assessement of his worth, the eventual resolution provides a greater sense of affirmation between the couple, "bestow[ing] on the pair an endorsement of their tragedy." The "mystical summons" of Father Dolan reinforced the sense of despair and offered "a jaded commentary on the hopelessness of their lives in the material world."

Henry Fonda in a publicity still
Filming of You Only Live Once was accomplished between late September and mid-November 1936, with additional scenes and inserts shot in early January 1937. An enterprising producer, Wanger obtained the services of film editor Daniel Mandell and composer Alfred Newman, who also collaborated on the Best Picture nominee Dead End (1937), as did Sidney. The cinematographer, Leon Shamroy, had done extensive work on documentaries in the early 1930s, the sort of experience that would enable him to give a social protest film like You Only Live Once a natural look, "a fidelity to reality."

According to Sidney, Fonda "cordially hated" Lang, who used to deliberately manipulate the actor to get the desired results in terms of performance. Said Sidney, "What [Lang] would do was take me across the set where Fonda was sitting, and would whisper in my ear. He had a thermos with homemade soup in it and he would pour some for me, all the time speaking softly. Well, Fonda knew that Fritz and I had worked together before, and he assumed that Fritz was giving me preferential treatment; giving me extra coaching, you know, that sort of thing. Well, Fonda would fume and mutter, 'That son of a bitch' [...] while all Fritz was doing was telling me how he had made the soup. And Fonda sort of said, 'The hell with him. I'll show him,' and he gave one hell of a performance." Despite Fonda's dislike for Lang, the two worked together again in The Return of Frank James (1940). In sharp contrast, Sidney loved working with Lang "because I loved the fact that he was so meticulous. He knew more about [the] camera, he knew more about cutting, and when he said he wanted just a close-up, [it was] very much like Hitchcock, it's what we used to call cutting in the camera." Later, she would boast about being the only actor to survive three of Lang's films, the third being You and Me (1938).

Distributed by United Artists, You Only Live Once opened at the Rivoli Theatre in New York on January 29, 1937 to generally positive reviews from critics. Although Frank Nugent of The New York Times felt that You Only Live Once was not as "dynamic and powerful" as Fury, he did praise Lang's direction, which he described as "his usual brilliant compound of suspense and swift action, heightened always by his complete command of lights and cameras in pointing and counterpointing his scenes. The dismal rain at the bank holdup, the swirling fog during the prison break, the black-and-white contrast of the death-house, the photographic crescendo of Taylor's flight — these are ready and perfect illustrations of directorial imagination." The reviewer for Newsweek called the film "the finest of its type since [The] Public Enemy [1931]", adding: "Given a stirring screen play by Gene Towne and Graham Baker, [Lang] directs it with the power and realism that characterized his work in M and Fury." Similarly, TIME magazine said that "You Only Live Once sets a pace which 1937 cops-&-robbers sagas may find hard to beat." 

Despite the enthusiastic response from the press, You Only Live Once was not a box-office success during its initial run. One reviewer summed up the difficulty of finding an audience for it in Depression-torn America: "To those who enjoy having their emotions wracked with the sufferings of a man in the toils of a merciless tale the picture will have deeply moving appeal." The film's reputation has since grown, however, most film experts agree that it one of the best films of Fonda's earlier career, as well as one of the finest pictures directed by Lang.


_____________________________
SOURCES:
A Divided World: Hollywood Cinema and Emigré Directors in the Era of Roosevelt and Hitler, 1933-1948 by Nick Smedley (2011) | Gangsters and G-Men on Screen: Crime Cinema Then and Now by Gene D. Phillips (2014) | Henry Fonda: A Bio-Bibliography by Kevin Sweeney (1992) | The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney (2012) | TCMDb (Articles) | TCMDb (Notes) | The New York Times review

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Golden Couples: Gary Cooper & Patricia Neal

It was April 1948 when director King Vidor spotted 22-year-old Patricia Neal on the Warner Bros. studio lot. A drama graduate from Northwestern University, she had just arrived in Hollywood following a Tony Award-winning performance in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest . Impressed by Patricia's looks, Vidor approached the young actress and asked if she would be interested in doing a screen test for the female lead in his newest film, The Fountainhead (1949). Gary Cooper had already signed as the male protagonist, and the studio was then considering Lauren Bacall and Barbara Stanwyck to play his love interest.          Neal liked the script and about two months later, she met with the director for sound and photographic tests. Vidor was enthusiastic about Patricia, but her first audition was a complete disaster. Cooper was apparently watching her from off the set and he was so unimpressed by her performance that he commented, « What's that!? » He tried to con

Golden Couples: Henry Fonda & Barbara Stanwyck

In the mid- and late 1930s, screwball comedy was in vogue and practically every actress in Hollywood tried her hand at it. Barbara Stanwyck never considered herself a naturally funny person or a comedienne per se , but after delivering a heart-wrenching performance in King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937), she decided she needed a « vacation » from emotional dramas. In her search for a role, she stumbled upon a « champagne comedy » called The Mad Miss Manton (1938), originally intended as a Katharine Hepburn vehicle. Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda as Melsa and Peter in The Mad Miss Manton .   Directed by Leigh Jason from a script by Philip G. Epstein, The Mad Miss Manton begins when vivacious Park Avenue socialite Melsa Manton finds a corpse while walking her dogs in the early hours of the morning. She calls the police, but they dismiss the incident — not only because Melsa is a notorious prankster, but also because the body disappears in the meantime. Sarcastic newspaper editor

Film Friday: «Who Was That Lady?» (1960)

Theatrical release poster Directed by George Sidney , Who Was That Lady? (19 60 ) begins when che mistry p rofessor David Wilson (Tony Curtis) is caught by his wife Ann (Janet Leigh) kissing one of his female st u de nts. To stop her from divo rcing him , he a sk s for hel p from his good friend, television writer Michael Haney (Dean Mart in), who invents a crazy story that Davi d is working undercover with the FBI and kissed the student — a foreign agent — in the line of du ty. To convince Ann, Mi ke tricks Schult z (William Newel l), a prop man at the T V studio, into fabricating an FBI identification card for David and s up plying him with a g un. Ann is so t hrilled by the idea of being married to a secret agent t hat she forgives David. Meanwhile, Mike sets up a date wi th the Coogle sisters, Gloria (Barbara N ichols) and Florence ( Joi Lan sing), and takes David along , telling Ann that the girls are foreign agents. Just as Ann realizes that her h usband ha s

Golden Couples: Clark Gable & Jean Harlow

  At the 3rd Academy Awards ceremony, MGM's hugely successful prison drama The Big House (1930) earned writer Frances Marion an Oscar for Best Writing. Hoping that she would be inspired to repeat that accomplishment, Irving Thalberg, head of production at Metro, sent Marion to Chicago, Illinois to research story ideas. While flicking through the pages of The Saturday Evening Post , she found an article revealing that, in a city where people distrusted the police, a small group of leading citizens met in secret to arrange their own justice for criminals. Marion took inspiration from that story and wrote The Secret Six (1931), in which Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone, stars of The Big House , play two mobsters prosecuted by a half a dozen vigilantes. Thalberg was pleased with the leading roles Marion wrote for Beery and Stone, but asked if she could also fill out one of the minor leads for Clark Gable , a tall, dark and handsome 30-year-old actor whom Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recen

Christmas in Old Hollywood

The beautiful Elizabeth Taylor with an extremely cute little friend. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall with their son Stephen (early 1950s). Here they are again. What an adorable picture! Paulette Goddard looking rather uncomfortable next to her Christmas tree. Boris Karloff and Ginger Rogers at a Hollywood Christmas party in 1932. The adorable Shirley Temple chatting with Santa. Here she is again with a dolly friend. Look how cute she looks here, modeling a new Christmas dress (1935). The fur-tastic Joan Crawford. Doris Day asking us to "do not disturb until Christmas." Don't worry, Doris, we shall not. Though it's past Christmas now, so I'm sure Doris won't mind if we disturb just a little bit. Priscilla Lane looking sparkling drapped in her garlands. A VERY young Carole Lombard sitting next to her tree (1920s). Jean Harlow looking stunning as always. Janet Leigh looking extra cute unde

Films I Saw in 2020

For the past four years, I have shared with you a list of all the films I saw throughout 2016 , 2017 , 2018 and 2019 , so I thought I would continue the «tradition» and do it again in 2020. This list includes both classic and «modern» films, which make up a total of 161 titles. About three or four of these were re-watches, but I decided to include them anyway. Let me know how many from these you have seen. As always, films marked with a heart ( ❤ ) are my favorites. Sherlock Jr. (1924) | Starring Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire and Joe Keaton The Crowd (1928) | Starring James Murray, Eleanor Boardman and Bert Roach Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) | Starring Henry Fonda, Alice Brady and Marjorie Weaver Brief Encounter (1945) | Starring Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard and Stanley Holloway The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) | Starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman The Girl He Left Behind (1956) | Starring Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood Gidget (1959) | Starring Sandra Dee, Cliff Robertson an

Wings of Change: The Story of the First Ever Best Picture Winner

Wings was the first ever film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since then, it has become one of the most influential war dramas, noted for its technical realism and spectacular air-combat sequences. This is the story of how it came to be made.   A man and his story The concept for Wings originated from a writer trying to sell one of his stories. In September 1924, Byron Morgan approached Jesse L. Lasky, vice-president of Famous Players-Lasky, a component of Paramount Pictures, proposing that the studio do an aviation film. Morgan suggested an «incident and plot» focused on the failure of the American aerial effort in World War I and the effect that the country's «aviation unpreparedness» would have in upcoming conflicts. Lasky liked the idea, and approved the project under the working title «The Menace.»   LEFT: Byron Morgan (1889-1963). RIGHT: Jesse L. Lasky (1880-1958).   During his development of the scenario with William Shepherd, a former war correspondent, Morga

80 Reasons Why I Love Classic Films (Part II)

I started this blog six years ago as a way to share my passion for classic films and Old Hollywood. I used to watch dozens of classic films every month, and every time I discovered a new star I liked I would go and watch their entire filmography. But somewhere along the way, that passion dimmed down. For instance, I watched 73 classic films in 2016, and only 10 in 2020. The other day, I found this film with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. that I had never heard of — the film is Mimi (1935), by the way — and for some reason it made me really excited about Old Hollywood again. It made me really miss the magic of that era and all the wonderful actors and actresses. And it also made me think of all the reasons why I fell in love with classic films in the first place. I came up with 80 reasons, which I thought would be fun to share with you. Most of them are just random little scenes or quirky little quotes, but put them together and they spell Old Hollywood to me. Yesterday I posted part one ; her

Top 10 Favourite Christmas Films

Christmas has always been a source of inspiration to many artists and writers. Over the years, filmmakers have adapted various Christmas stories into both movies and TV specials, which have become staples during the holiday season all around the world. Even though Christmas is my favourite holiday, I haven't watched a lot of Christmas films. Still, I thought it would be fun to rank my top 10 favourites, based on the ones that I have indeed seen. Here they are.  10. Holiday Affair (1949) Directed by Don Hartman, Holiday Affair tells the story of a young widow (Janet Leigh) torn between a boring attorney (Wendell Corey) and a romantic drifter (Robert Mitchum). She's engaged to marry the boring attorney, but her son (Gordon Gebert) likes the romantic drifter better. Who will she choose? Well, we all know who she will choose.   Holiday Affair is not by any means the greatest Christmas film of all time, but it's still a very enjoyable Yule-tide comedy to watch over the holi

The Sinatra Centennial Blogathon: Frank Sinatra & Gene Kelly

  In January 1944, MGM chief Louis B. Mayer happened to see a young crooner by the name of Frank Sinatra perform at a benefit concert for The Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. According to Nancy Sinatra, Frank's eldest daughter, Mayer was so moved by her father's soulful rendition of « Ol' Man River » that he made the decision right then and there to sign Frank to his studio. Sinatra had been on the MGM payroll once before, singing with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in the Eleanor Powell vehicle Ship Ahoy (1942), although it is very likely that Mayer never bothered to see that film. Now that Frank was «hot,» however, Metro made arrangements to buy half of his contract from RKO, with the final deal being signed in February of that year. Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in  Anchors Aweigh Being a contract player at the studio that boasted «more stars than there are in the heavens» gave Frank a sudden perspective regarding his own talents as a film performer. The «g