Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A bizarre mixture of crime drama, comedy and social message movie, "You and Me" is another of Frtiz Lang's anti-capitalist experiments. He'd cite Brecht as the film's chief influence, but the film's avant-gardism is mostly played for laughs. The plot? Sylvia Sidney and George Raft play a pair of criminals on parole and working at a luxurious department store. The store owner has hired a band of similar cases - all ex convicts and petty thieves - to manage his business, a decision he may or may not regret. Much commotion ensues."You and Me" was destroyed by critics upon release, but today offers a number of interesting moments: the bustle of department stores, the clatter of cash registers, "You Can't Get Something For Nothing" warbling on the soundtrack like an anti-musical refrain. Elsewhere, clerks and businessmen are all safe-crackers or thieves, criminal heists echo police confiscations, Lang uses a number of distancing effects and the film's plot seems like a perverse reversal of Lang's earlier "Metropolis", Lang's criminals defending workplace exploitation as being more rational than outright theft.Much of Lang's plot follows a pair of clandestine lovers who break parole restrictions by getting married. Lang tries his hand at comedy, but he's best when solemn. Nevertheless, great shots abound – two lovers fleetingly touching hands whilst riding an escalator, the mirror image of gangster's crushing palms – including several musical sequences which blindsided contemporary critics. As is expected, Lang continues to shoot architecture well, most of which is Art Deco or sports modernist trimmings. The film's noir shadows suggest a crime movie, but the comedy and champaign suggest something else. What's going on? Lang called the film his Threepenny Opera.7.5/10 – For Lang fans only.

If you've ever studied film history, you probably know that 1940s Hollywood Noir was influenced by the influx of German directors who immigrated to the US as the Nazis rose to power. These directors brought some stylistic aspects of Wiemar cinema to post-war Noir. What's less well know is that in the 1930s and war years, before the stylistic and political chill of the red scare, already on the rise in the late '40s, the German directors, such as Fritz Lang, were using their Brechtian style- openly political and meta-textual- in much more brazen and less-watered down ways than they were in the post-war Noir years. (Lang would later direct "Hangmen Also Die"- one of the few Hollywood scripts Brecht ever wrote.) "You and Me" is a largely forgotten example of the films of this era. The film is fascinating and entertaining, although perhaps too idiosyncratic to be called "good." For its first two thirds its a genuinely touching and psychologically acute love story between two ex-cons struggling to get by. It would constitute a solid, conventional drama if it were not fragmented by nightmarish musical numbers lecturing the audience that, for instance, its a bad idea to try to break out of prison on your own. Most bizarrely, the last third changes tone completely and becomes a bona-fide screwball comedy revolving around a chalk board lesson mathematically demonstrating why crime, literally, doesn't pay. Although Brecht's influence is felt in almost every scene the politics of the film are in no way radical- as some Hollywood films of the era were in underlining ways. This piece, rather, is merely cynical about American capitalism, without actually questioning it.

You And Me is an interesting experiment which falls way short in execution, but still is an interesting view.The closest American film I could compare it to is Al Jolson's Hallelujah I'm a Bum which utilized that same sing/talk rhythmic technique in many spots. Rodgers&Hart's efforts were not as butchered as Kurt Weill's were, my guess is that Paramount got cold feet and tried to salvage the film as they saw it by making it more of a typical gangster yarn.The story involves Harry Carey who as part of his payback to society hires freshly paroled convicts in his department store. The presumption is that he does screen them for employment. George Raft is one of those ex-convicts hired there and he meets and falls for Sylvia Sidney. She knows about him, but he doesn't know she is also on parole. Other prison pals working for Carey are, George E. Stone, Warren Hymer, Jack Pennick, Robert Cummings and Roscoe Karns.One very unregenerated crook, Barton MacLane, tries to get the whole crew of them to help knock over the store. What happens is the rest of the plot of the film.Perhaps You and Me might have been better done elsewhere. I'm thinking of Warner Brothers who specialized in these working class stories. Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and Warren Hymer certainly all were part of Warner's gangster stable and George Raft moved to Warner Brothers himself a year after You and Me came out. Paramount just didn't go in for stories like these and the results show.Highlight of the film is Sylvia Sidney giving a lecture in economics about how crime doesn't pay. For heist guys like these when you deduct the expenses of a job, it really doesn't pay. Only the folks at the top really make out.By the way you might call what Kurt Weill tried to do musically and Fritz Lang brought to the screen as one long rap music video. You and Me may have been way too soon ahead of its time.Still it's probably worth a look if for no other reason than to see a joint collaborative effort of two expatriates from the Nazi regime, Kurt Weill and Fritz Lang.

That doesn't fit with what most people think about Fritz Lang. He's generally a tragedian at this point in his career. You and Me is very similar in subject to his previous film, You Only Live Once, about an ex-con who can't get a break. Here, George Raft plays an ex-con working at a department store. Sylvia Sidney is his girlfriend. She also works at the store, and she has a secret: she's an ex-con, too. Raft has a bitter double standard and despises female ex-cons, so Sidney can't tell him the truth. Near the beginning, the film seems a bit clunky. The opening is kind of goofy, and, it being a Lang film, you might be confused about how you should take it. His other films aren't completely without comedy. Few films refuse to give us at least a couple of laughs along the way, perhaps close to the beginning. But You and Me just keeps getting sillier. I was finally won over by an extraordinarily stylistic sequence where a mob of criminals recall their days in jail with a musical number. After that enormously entertaining sequence had come and gone, I knew that anything could go. In fact, anything can go and does. The film ends up being one of the most original films ever made. No comedy is like this. You know, I don't want to swear to this, but You and Me is perhaps my favorite Fritz Lang film. I actually haven't seen any masterpiece (i.e., 10/10s) from him, including Metropolis and M. You and Me, like M and Fury, my other two favorites, gets a 9/10.