In commemoration of my schmancy new “owl with a Vertov monocle” logo, I think it only fitting that I inaugurate this WordPress blog with a movie by Fritz Lang. You Only Live Once (1937) was Lang’s second American picture, made before his cache in Hollywood depreciated, and was something of a hit; Variety gushed “Fritz Lang follows up his Fury (1936) with another wallop”. In keeping with Lang’s high-brow pulp brand profile, the movie was a ripped-from-the-tabloids variation of the Bonnie & Clyde theme. Henry Fonda plays an ex-con who tries to flee after committing a murder. Sylvia Sidney plays the devoted wife who sticks by his side all the way to the end, which, natch, involves being shot to death by cops mere steps from the Mexican border.
In retrospect, YOLO is grim little wretch of a movie, as brutal as anything imaginable from pre-noir 1937, a year in which the musical rom-com the Great Ziegfeld took the Oscar for best picture. “You haven’t a Chinaman’s chance” – Sylvia Sidney’s chain-smoking spinster sister’s prognosis of the couple’s future – is memorable not only for its hilariously casual 1930s racism, but also as a kind of irreducible precept governing Lang’s universe. Lotte Eisner, in her famously privileged and infamously compromised Fritz Lang, picks a different YOLO line as “the philosophy which would stand as a motto for all of Lang’s American films”: prison chaplain Father Dolan’s “Every man – at his birth – is endowed with the nobility of a king. But the stain of the world soon makes him forget his birthright,” but no matter. What’s at play is the “world as maze”, what Sarris dubbed Lang’s obsession “with the structure of the trap.”
what’s it gonna be?
surprise, surprise. Welcome to Langland.
The orothodoxy goes like this: Lang is uninterested in psychology, but rather sociology. The characters themselves are more or less hollow, and it is the relentless force of the world on screen that propels the movie. As is typical, YOLO presents the protagonists, outsiders with their petty hopes and dreams, who are vexed and oppressed by the rest of the Langian ecosystem, embodied as usual by the institutions of civil order (not for nothing does Taylor conflate prison with both a “hotel” and a “college”), the claustrophobic architecture of the diegesis itself, with its windshields and jail cells, where encroaching bars are multiplied ad infinitum by sinister shadows, and the mob (note that YOLO‘s two appearances by a proper collective character are both expressions of antagonism: firstly when spectators vocally register their disapproval to the ump’s call during the prison yard baseball game, and other by-standers with no stake in the game look up from their activities to join in the chorus of booing, and secondly after Taylor is found guilty, and is walked out of a court to be greeted by an assembly of heckling citizens). On the whole, the film’s minor characters are sock-puppets of society, self-righteously in line with the status quo, and Lang repeatedly shows us how crass and hypocritical such upstanding citizens are, as with the example of the apple-pilfering policeman in the first scene, or the gas station attendants, who call to report that the fugitive couple has stolen a tank of gas, but add the fabricated detail that they also emptied the register (whose contents presumably disappeared shortly thereafter into the robbery-victims’ own pockets). The landlady who insists, after learning of Taylor’s past, that the newlywed couple be evicted from their honeymoon suite at 4 a.m. is played by the witch from The Wizard of Oz. No doubt about it, in Lang’s world, people just ain’t no good. There are notable exceptions, Father Dolan and Public Defender Whitney, but they are ineffectual dissidents against the tyranny of the majority. YOLO is a classic example of Lang’s deterministic style, where a coalition of fate, society, mise-en-scene and the “collective antagonist” conspire against the protagonist. As a result of this coherence with the established signature contours of Lang’s oeuvre, YOLO is often relegated to mere lists of his works, rather than being given individual attention; as Gavin Lambert’s 1955 Sight & Sound piece on the film epitomizes: “There are again only three characters: the outcast hero, his girlfriend, society.”
What fine-grained analysis YOLO has been afforded has tended to focus on Henry Fonda’s Eddie Taylor, as in the “What is This Thing Called Noir?” chapter of Silver and Ursini’s syllabus-mainstay Film Noir Reader. Therein Silver and Brookover note that YOLO ”is more subjective than other of Lang’s films” and examine at length Taylor’s “residues of hope and idealism” in their section headed “The Innocent.” This strikes me as mistaken. Taylor’s “Innocence” is tenuous at best. The Frog Scene may establish his goodness, but he is a confirmed criminal, and the movie gives us an at best ambiguous impression of him. From the get go, he is a walking, talking shoulder-chip, and while there are flickers and flashes of hope and idealism, these are tempered by his actions. He flies off the handle easily, socking his boss in the face after being fired and, of course, shooting the film’s most untainted Innocent, Father Dolan, on impulse. The robbery for which he is condemned virtually groans with the suggestion that he did it. Two scenes before, after he’s been fired, we see a fade-out with him looking at the gun he keeps under his pillow. The next scene shows him pleading for his job back, saying the only work he has been offered is “foolproof” bank heists with his old gang and then, after Taylor clocks his boss in the jaw, the scene ends with him saying “and I wanted to go straight.” Cut to the robbery, which is perpetrated by a gas-masked grenade-hurler dressed like Taylor.
