Product Description

Convicted felon Eddie Taylor (Academy Award-winner Henry Fonda) decides to lead the straight life with his devoted girlfriend, Joan (Sylvia Sidney), who arranges for his early parole. She agrees to marry him, but a bank robbert gone bad points accusing fingers at the innocent Eddie. Taking Joan on the lam, Eddie is caught in a cat and mouse chase with the law closing in just a few steps behind them! This haunting and beautifully stylish gem from master director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M) was the first of his remarkable film noir classics including The Big Heat and Clash by Night. Hard-hitting and unforgettable, this exciting tale of crime and revenge inspired countless "criminal lovers on the run" classics like Bonnie and Clyde and The Getaway but remains the final word in searing, tragic and romantic suspense!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41563 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-06-24
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 86 minutes

Amazon.com
Depression-era Hollywood produced a slew of movies about sympathetic criminals victimized by an unfeeling society. No other has the power of Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, the director's second American film and a masterpiece of fatalism. Henry Fonda is the convict released to a new life (encouraged to go straight, he growls, "I will if they let me"--not a hopeful note); Sylvia Sidney is his new bride, convinced of his essential goodness. Their homely dreams are crushed by a hostile world, which Lang's scrupulously controlled direction turns into a series of dead ends. In particular, the last half of the picture--a prison break and cross-country ramble inspired by Bonnie and Clyde--is an exceptionally intense downward spiral, swift with predestined momentum. While Fonda and Sidney are unforgettable in their echt-Thirties forms, Lang is the star, proving the director of M and Metropolis had lost none of his edge. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Interesting early Lang social commentary
Dark and broodingly pessimistic, Fritz Lang's second Hollywood movie is a love story of sorts. Made in 1937 and set in the present day (ie, the Depression), Lang has favorite actress Sylvia Sidney fall for `three-time loser' Henry Fonda. Sidney is, conveniently, the pretty young secretary of the local public defender, while Fonda is a chronic convict who robs, kidnaps, and murders for the gal he loves. Or something like that - tag lines tend to exaggerate things. In any event, the warden reminds Fonda on the verge of his third release that, if convicted and sentenced again, we throw away the key. This being a Lang movie, justice is flawed, the mobs are vicious, and sour-stomached Fate is inevitable.

In Lang's first American movie, FURY, Spencer Tracy played an innocent man falsely accused and `lynched' - not with a rope, but the jail he was being held in was bombed and burned to the ground. Mobs are tough in Lang's movies, and anyone with a rap sheet is going to get the extreme short end of the stick. Fonda, we learn, was more or less corrupted by the system. His initial crime had to do with a fight he got into with someone pulling the legs off a frog. See? He was a good guy, once. All that crime stuff is in the past, though, and with pretty young Sidney at his side his prospects look rosy, indeed.

Such is the set-up, a march to domestic happiness primed to get all gummed up by a society averse to extending a hand to a jailbird. Again like FURY, the first half of this film builds us up to a happy and triumphant conclusion, only to change direction at midpoint and proceed down a darker and more hostile path. Employees don't give jailbirds a second chance, whether or not they have a new bride and mortgage to be paid. What's an ex-con to do?

Like many of Lang's movies, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE pits his hero against society and its flawed engines of justice. Fonda isn't an innocent, but he's recognizably one-of-us, and to that extent you're emotionally involved in his fate. Also like FURY, YOLO is neatly divided into two section after something really bad happens and Sidney and Fonda embark on a Bonnie and Clyde like odyssey.

I had a few minor problems with this picture. I found an arrest of Fonda, and what happened after, implausible. I won't reveal what it was, but I had big problems with what the System did with Fonda after they met him for the fourth time. If you're going to make socially conscious movies you have to portray society accurately and believably. Any deviation calls into question the entire story, and this one, in my opinion, has a deviation you can drive a truck through.

That said, this is an above-average movie. Lang had a terrible reputation with male actors - Tracy loathed him and vowed never to work with him again - but he coaxes a nicely nuanced performance from Fonda, a broad arc that take him from toned-down bashful (his comfort zone stuff) to a couple of scenes where he acts Cagney-tough and looks strikingly like John Dillinger. The ending is a downer, corny and expressionistic. Forgetting the less-than-credible preceding events, Sidney and Fonda's second-half run is exciting and works quite well. Sylvia Sidney, an underrated actress then and pretty much forgotten today, has a bright vulnerability to her that suits the movie.

Moving Depiction of Selfless Love under Bleak Circumstances.
"You Only Live Once" is a fatalistic proto-noir film directed by Fritz Lang and starring Henry Fonda as Eddie Taylor, a "three-time loser", thrice convicted of crimes involving robbery. One more misstep will get him a death sentence. But Eddie is confident that won't happen. His ladylove Joan (Sylvia Sidney) has waited 3 years for Eddie to be released from prison, and when he sees her waiting outside the prison gates, Eddie is committed to starting a new life with Joan at his side. The couple get married; Eddie takes a job driving trucks; and for a while they are blissfully happy. But when Eddie loses his job and someone plants his hat at the scene of a local bank robbery, Eddie is blamed and loses all control of his destiny.

I give "You Only Live Once" such a high rating for its affecting performances. The characters' anguish and frustration are palpable and completely empathetic. Henry Fonda's best moments are after Eddie has lost his job and cannot find another one. His struggle to persevere through financial pressures and temptation to return to a life of crime come through in every gesture and line of dialogue. Even greater is Eddie's crushing feeling that he is failing his wife.

Sylvia Sidney contributes the most moving performance. Joan's values change over the course of the film, as she goes from being an optimistic, affectionate working girl to disillusionment with the institutions and moral certainties she once took for granted. In fact, Joan's change is so radical that she becomes disillusioned with the whole idea of doing the "right thing". "We have a right to live," she says. And she commits herself to do anything it takes. Her love for Eddie is also among the most convincing I've seen in a movie. She loves him with all her being and can hardly live with the idea that Eddie's sacrifice for her may have brought his troubles. The scenes of Eddie and Joan together on the run convey a loving partnership that makes the story tragic. All the while, Joan's boss, Public Defender Stephen Whitney (Burton MacLane), has worked tirelessly to defend Eddie for the crimes he did commit and those he didn't, apparently because he is in love with Joan. So even though the course of "You Only Live Once" is dark, it contains some of the most convincing representations of selfless romantic love I have seen.

The DVD (Image Entertainment 2003 release): This isn't a restored print of the film. The image has white specks on it, although not enough to interfere with the enjoyment of the film. The disc doesn't have any features except for scene selections, which you find by pressing your "menu" button. There is no main menu to speak of.

this may be fritz lang's best film
There may not be a more ironic scene in film than henry fonda's confrontation with the priest at prison's gate...or a more pungent line than his 'they made me a murderer'.....or a more fatalistic ending than you have here...the point is that the best ingredients of film noir are present in a film made 10 years before film noir's peak...that's how far ahead fritz lang's vision was...sure he went on to make 'the big heat' and scarlet street' among others...but 'you only live once' is his starkest glimpse at man's small place in a vast, oppressive society where good intentions are powerless.