YOU AND ME (1938)

Writer Norman Krasna came up with the story for this genre mash-up where a Department Store acts as common ground for Criminal Proletariat to meet Benevolent Capitalism. An audacious, possibly intractable idea that mixes mobsters, romance, class conflict & social commentary to the musical beat of 3-PENNY OPERA’s Kurt Weill under director Fritz Lang, both Weimar Germany ex-pats. Interesting in concept, if only it worked better. Harry Carey plays a big city department store owner known for hiring ex-cons on his staff, including lovebird parolees George Raft & Sylvia Sidney. But there’s double-trouble: Sidney hasn’t told Raft about her past or that she legally can’t marry before finishing parole. Worse, Raft’s old mob pal Barton MacLane is getting his gang back together for an inside job at Carey’s shop. The first half of the pic, largely courting action for Sidney & Raft, hangs fire. (Though listen for a nightclub song - ‘The Right Guy for Me’ - that’s a bit like Weill’s great ballad ‘Surabaya Johnny.’) But the film only shows a pulse midway thru with a clever montage ‘beat’ number for the ex-cons, ‘Knocking Song,’ which leads into the robbery, and then into Sidney’s little Mob/Marxist Econ 101 blackboard lecture. A big improvement from the opening half, this last act is also uneven, but does let you see what they must have been aiming at. Shot-by-shot, Lang does some fine things, but the project refuses to come together.

DOUBLE-BILL: Kurt Weill had rotten Hollywood luck. At Paramount, after tossing out most of the music he wrote for this, they did much the same on his great B’way hit LADY IN THE DARK/’44, then botched the release on the delightful original WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?/’45, still the best of the bunch. OR: Just as the Nazis were taking over, a mob masterpiece from Lang before he left Germany: THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE/’33.