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Hollywood Spectator
Page Eleven
moment I can remember no other which matches this one for its brilliant display of emotional lights and shades. At all times she has her scenes completely under her command, the combination of her intelligence and technical proficiency giving her performance power and appeal that will raise her still higher in the estimation of her admirers. And in no picture has she looked lovelier, being an entrancing figure in the severe costumes women wore in the period of her production. If you have not done it before, watch Claudette’s hands when you see Maid of Salem. They are a picture in themselves.
Fred MacMurray takes another long step in the spectacular progress he is making toward recognition as one of our outstanding leading men. He was given a characterization the picture needed, a devil-may-care, gallant, joyous youth, madly in love with Claudette and ready to fight the whole world if in so doing he could be of service to her. The romance of the two is directed admirably. To millions of people who still hold pleasant memories of her, the presence of Louise Dresser in the cast will be a factor in making the picture agreeable. Always a superb actress, the folly of producers in overlooking her is one of those bewildering stupidities in high places which make Hollywood so engrossingly misunderstandable. There are many other performances in the picture entitled to individual mention, but I never yet have been able to write a long list of such mentions and make them interesting reading.
Too Drab to Entertain
YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, United Artists release of Walter Wanger production. Directed by Fritz Lang. Co-stars Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda. Original and screen play by Gene Towne and Graham Baker; photographed by Leon Shamroy; art director, Alexander Toluboff; musical direction, Alfred Newman; music and lyrics by Louis Alter and Paul Webster; film editor, Daniel Mandell; assistant director, Robert Lee. Supporting cast: Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon, William Gargan, Jerome Cowan, Chic Sale, Margaret Hamilton, Warren Hymer, Guinn Williams, John Wray, Walter De Palma, Jonathan Hale, Ward Bond, Wade Boteler, Henry Taylor, Jean Stoddard, Ben Hall. Running time, 87 minutes.
fJANDSOMELY mounted, gorgeously photographed, II superbly directed, brilliantly acted, You Only Live Once is a technical triumph for Walter Wanger. No more artistically conceived and competently executed production has come to the screen in a long time. The story, however, lacks elements of popularity. It is drab, morbid ; a thing of criminal courts, robbery, murder, penitentiaries, a death cell ; its hero a young man who graduated from the reformatory to serve three terms in major prisons, its heroine a young woman who at the end deserts her baby to flee with her murderer husband, and the husband is low enough to permit her to do it. Both of them are shot down by the law, and the picture fades out on the spirit of the victim of the hero’s murderous bullet informing the two that the gates of Heaven are open to them.
In a cumbersome sort of way, Gene Towne and Graham Baker labor to make their screen play a preachment on behalf of criminals who have served their terms, a give-them-another-chance plea which lacks conviction by virtue of the leading character’s long criminal record making it hard to believe in his reformation. The
elements of the story are developed illogically. Henry Fonda, who plays the lead, is given a job when his third term expires, and is discharged, not because he is a former convict, but because he loiters with his employer’s truck and throws the delivery system off schedule. And the employer is not characterized as an average citizen, which he would have to be to give strength to the persecution theme. He screams into the telephone, and is otherwise so abnormal it suggests the thought that Fonda merely was the victim of fate in having been employed by the wrong kind of individual.
D
iJY the simple expedient of making the employer an average business man who explains quietly his objection to having a former convict in his service, the persecution factor could have been established and some degree of sympathy created for the employe. Fonda later is convicted of murder committed in course of a robbery, the only evidence against him being the finding of his hat at the scene of the crime, a determining influence in his conviction, of course, being his previous record. If Fonda committed the crime, what happened to the truck which figured in it? That question and others as pertinent could have been raised by defense counsel to have secured at least a hung jury. American juries do not send a man to his death merely because he had been in prison.
That our hero is a murderer at heart, however, is established when he kills the prison chaplain as the latter comes to tell Fonda that his innocence has been established. This sequence is morbidly maudlin. Fonda is fighting his way out of prison and regards the announcement of his innocence as a trick to make him surrender. He escapes, joins Sylvia Sidney, his wife; they flee in Barton MacLane’s car; a baby is born to Sylvia in a barn, apparently without medical assistance and without checking the flight more than momentarily, for it is a newly born baby we see when the flight is resumed. The baby is taken to Jean Dixon, Sylvia’s sister, and Fonda and Sylvia set forth again, only to meet the bullets of the police. If the hero of the story had been possessed of one spark of manhood, he would have gone off alone when Sylvia was delivering the baby; leaving his wife and his child together to live their own lives. If the heroine had been possessed of any sense of decency she could not have sustained her love for the kind of man she had married, and certainly would not have abandoned the baby.
Of such stuff as I relate is the story composed for our entertainment. If Fonda, as I suggest, had gone out alone to meet his fate without involving his family in it, there would have been more excuse for all that goes before. He at least would have assumed some proportions as a hero. But he is a snivelling coward to the end — and we are supposed to shed tears over the cruel hand fate had dealt him! If Towne and Baker had left him in the prison in which we first see him, and had written a story about two other people, Walter Wanger would have been able to give us a picture with more entertainment in it.
As it is, Walter’s end of it — the production — is done spendidly. In fact, everything in the picture except the