You Only Live Once

The progenitor of noir’s long streak of “couple on the run” films, Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once is the apotheosis of American proto-noir, featuring many of noir’s visual and thematic tropes orchestrated beautifully by the man who would become one of the cycle’s most prolific directors. Despite lacking femme fatale, detective, or gangster characters, Lang’s prison escape drama possesses all the darkness and despair of noir to come, including a bleak ending, albeit with the promise of Christian redemption, perhaps made even darker by the innocent romance of the two leads throughout (their early courtship is approved by a frog on a lily pad). A young Henry Fonda is exceptional as the bitter, hopeless Eddie Taylor, a young criminal framed for murder and sent to Death Row, while Sylvia Sidney plays Joan Graham, the only light in Eddie’s life who will later become his wife, the mother of his child, and his accomplice in escaping from prison and avoiding capture by the police. The supporting cast includes Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon, and the unmistakable Margaret Hamilton two years before she would gain worldwide acclaim as the Wicked Witch of the West. Visually, Lang is operating at one of his many career peaks here: slick, rainy streets on expansive studio sets; a stunning prison scene in which Eddie’s holding cell radiates with almost cosmic stripes of light in all directions; a final escape through the prison gates, rays of heavenly light leaping from an endless soup of fog. Unusual for Lang’s work, the overt Christian symbolism may seem maudlin to some but must have offered beaten-down 1930’s audiences a necessary buffer from Eddie’s doomed fate.