Lt. Col. Thursday, Get Your Dopey Mug in a Driving Cap

You Only Live Once (1937)
directed by Fritz Lang
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Fritz makes the most of his Hays Code constraints by letting the actions of two of the film's most desperate characters - Fonda's Eddie Taylor being the third - transpire in contradiction to reason and common sense. Since society's inhumanity is to blame for putting Eddie on defense, Eddie is no agent of his own destiny. Sympathy (ours) and justice (Law and Order's) are dealt to him in turn. But his wife makes a choice to follow him whatever doom awaits, and the man - her boss - who loves the wife ruins his career to let her choose. The women in Lang's films are often put-upon by the single-minded men they love, so I like that Sylvia Sidney's Joan (who looks oddly like a serpent) is alone responsible for the independent streak that so clearly inspired Bonnie and Clyde.

On a side note, Fritz was so much better than the lumbering, inhuman Metropolis he's known for. The director who made Mabuse an unearthly surface-world itinerant in love with the political machinations of mortal men sold cynicism beautifully as the right questions asked by big-picture minds.