Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Blistering performances.

Unlike previous commentary here, I thought that both principal actors did a good job (Lana Turner and John Shelton), but even good acting by the principals and the bit players as well, can't rescue a terrible plot. Honestly, I think this had every cliché and/or hackneyed phrase in the book, and almost every plot point followed a tired (and very stupid) formula. Here's an example: The couple learns they are pregnant, but they don't have money for a private doctor to deliver the baby. Wifey says, "I'll happily go to a clinic," but husband, in pure idiocy, claims that "No wife of mine will be going to a clinic!" Which promptly causes him to take out usurious payday loans, which make for terrible troubles that cause them to hit rock bottom for a while. I am SHOCKED that Dalton Trumbo wrote the script! I mean - Jeez - that's the guy who wrote "Spartacus" and "Roman Holiday"! In any case, this is worth watching only if you're in the mood to see a young Lana Turner, an underrated male actor in the lead, and what must have been Dalton Trumbo's C- attempt at a script when he was in Middle School.

I saw this movie on TCM. Black and white, it is just under 90 minutes long. It's just a guess, but I think this movie was made to give young Lana Turner more exposure. She was a teenager during filming, either 18 or 19, and had a little voice with mannerisms similar to what we came to know as Marilyn Monroe a couple of decades later.Lana Turner is Marjorie 'Margy' White and she meets a nice young man, John Shelton as Bill Brooks. They fall in love and get married. Anxious to please his new wife, they buy new furniture for their small apartment. As a sign of the times, the total for several pieces of furniture was just over $200, which was a lot in 1940 and required Bill to get a short term loan.But this also leads to his troubles as Gene Lockhart, his very strict boss Carl B. Beamis, enforces very strict company rules. They don't think employees with debt can be good employees so Bill gets fired with 2 weeks' pay.So the drama heats up when Bill, unemployed and with no savings, finds out that Margy is pregnant.The dialog is often over-dramatic by today's standards, but maybe 70 years ago, just after the great depression and right before WW II, that is how things were. Just an interesting movie, but mostly for seeing the very young Lana Turner.

John Shelton and Lana Turner star are "We Who Are Young," a 1940 film also starring Gene Lockhart. Turner and Shelton are newlyweds who work in the same office; she's fired as soon as the boss (Lockhart) finds out. Married women can't work there; it seems they're taking the jobs away from the more deserving men, and after all, a husband should be able to support his wife. I don't know about the work rule, but it was the prevailing attitude that if your wife worked, you couldn't support her. The couple has trouble meeting their furniture payments, so hubby takes a loan. When he can't make those payments, his salary his attached. His boss fires him for that; you can't be an upstanding citizen if your salary is attached. Meanwhile, his out of work wife becomes pregnant, the furniture is gone, his job is gone, and he can't find another one.On one hand, it shows you how times have changed in the workplace for the better at least as far as employment laws; on the other hand, at least the Lockhart character has qualms of conscience, which no employer in this day and age would have. Firing at Christmas doesn't bother them, nor does firing someone without notice and having security escort them out, lest they steal a paper clip, nor does spending $250,000 to have their offices redecorated, only to tell employees there's no money for even a cost of living raise.John Shelton chews up the scenery as the husband. He's not particularly good, and though she doesn't get to emote like Shelton, MGM decided Lana Turner was going to be a star. She's very sweet, beautiful and fragile appearing here. Shelton I guess went into the service and lost what little grooming the studio was giving him. It looks like he quit show business in 1953.Extremely dated, not great, interesting for Turner and a look at the workplace in the 1939-41 era.

"We Who Are Young" is the odd kind of movie that David Lynch, the Cohen Brothers, and Ed Wood Jr. must have adored as young men. It's an odd, stilted bit of didactic goofiness about how tough it is to get ahead in a stifling capitalistic society. It follows a young couple, a pre-stardom Lana Turner and John Shelton, as they invariably make the wrong financial moves during the pre-WW II Depression era. They both work at the same office-an accounting firm run like a factory, lunch-period buzzers and all-until it is discovered that they are married. No married women are allowed by company policy, and she is fired (but not before receiving lots of stern advice on living within one's means by the robotic department manager). And this happens just after they buy over $200 worth of new furniture on his $25 a week salary, now their only income. Then she gets pregnant. Then HE gets fired (and has an absolutely histrionic girly-fit, yelling at his boss that `if this affects my wife or child in any way, I'll come back here and just kill you! I'll just kill you!'). And it goes on. What makes the film so special, besides the unintentionally hilarious dialogue, is the way the actors will periodically stare into space as we hear their poetic thoughts overdubbed-very, VERY Ed Wood (and not unlike the similarly awkward thought-balloon overdubbing in Lynch's version of `Dune'). But the gooney monologues are certainly not constrained to the characters' inner world; they also take the occasion to look straight into the camera and actually speak their thoughts at length, even though other characters may be right next to them. How to react to this kind of strangeness is left entirely up to you, the viewer, because the film is so ineptly made you can have no idea whether it's trying to be serious or comedic. I don't want to spoil it for you, but let's just say that if you're a fan of the Coen Brothers' `The Hudsucker Proxy', the less violent moments of Lynch films like `Blue Velvet', Wood's `Glen or Glenda' and the like, you will enjoy seeing their genesis in this nutty bit of 1940's agitprop-pop.Look for it on AMC and Turner Classic.