You Only Live Once

It was total heaven to see Henry Fonda practically as a teenager and to realize that he was the total actor even in his early days. I loved the movie and really got involved with it. Fritz Lang was the total package: a great visualist, a great director, and a man who could bring out the best in his actors even though he was a tyrant and anyone who worked for him hated him.There was that 30's innocence about the movie which I see in other 30's movies. It wasn't afraid to plumb the emotions of a story and visually tried to capture the beauty and sensitivity of the emotions involved in the story-line.While I loved Sylvia Sidney, there was that dated over-acting which she does in most of her movies.

A Bonnie & Clyde sort of story only this couple didn't start out guilty; life turns went totally awry for them leading them deeper and deeper into darkness. They had those who believed in them & wanted their best..... but those good things came too late.Henry Fonda has always been a favorite of mine so watching him so early in his career was a treat; so handsome, young, and clean cut. Sylvia Sidney was such a pure soul, loved her guy, believed in him no matter what. They were such a lovely young couple with their lives before them.... but the cards were stacked wrong. I wish things had been different.....

Fritz Lang's best films were already behind him when he arrived in Hollywood. He would not surpass the films he made in Germany, but his American films are almost always worth seeing and sometimes approach greatness. You Only Live Once is one such film. The story concerns sympathetic criminal Eddie (Henry Fonda) trying to go straight and the woman who has stayed by him, legal secretary Joan (Sylvia Sidney). Lang makes the audience root for Eddie, who is not a typical snarling thirties gangster, but a basically decent man who through bad luck and bad choices has found himself in a desperate situation. Fonda is perfect for this role, and gives a fine performance. Sidney is equally good as a woman fighting against friends, family and circumstances to stay with the man she loves. It is her performance which makes the film a terrific romance as well as a fine thriller.The print on the Image DVD is fairly good. It shows quite a lot of wear and tear, but seems complete. There may be many scratches, but the black and white photography still looks stunning with good detail and clarity. The soundtrack unfortunately has a great deal of hiss and crackle. Occasionally this makes the dialogue quite hard to hear. Nevertheless the film is still perfectly watchable and the flaws present in the print and soundtrack did not spoil my enjoyment of what remains an excellent film. The DVD has no extras.

I bought this because it was screen written by my great uncle Gene Towne but found it extremely depressing. I'd never watch it again.

Well, saying this isn't good is kind of an understatement. It's like a play for an amateur troupe written by someone who doesn't know how it should go; totally unrealistic plot line, bathetic acting, no real character development. The whole thing looks like it was shot on sets and backlots. Treacly, soppy sentimentality. Most unbelievable criminals ever. Plus, it rains like Manilla and the last scene takes place in what looks like Sherwood Forest. I guess this was what passed for popular drama in the '30s? I can't believe I watched the whole thing...but...the camerawork and lighting were good. Pass on this one. Not a classic.

This 1930s film moves with a lot of speed and kept me guessing until the end. I'm not a huge fan of Henry Fonda but I enjoyed his performance here. The plot gets to going early and the pacing is excellent. I definitely recommend this one.

Probably the best home-video release of this classic thriller, it's reasonably clear and the image is at least legible. (In previous editions, the image was too dark, with many scenes barely visible, and there was significant wobbling so that some scenes were out-of-focus.) YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE is one of several movies produced by Walter Wanger which seems to have become ensnared in copyright problems, and there has been no attempt to restore these films. (Another example is HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT, also from 1937, directed by Frank Borzage.) YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE benefits from superb performances by Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney, and this may be one of the best directing jobs Fritz Lang ever did in the US: in this BluRay release, you can at least see some of the imaginative visual effects which Lang brought off to highlight both the romanticism and the fatalism of this prototype of the outlaw-couple-on-the-run story. ClassicFlix is to be commended for bringing this great film to an acceptable BluRay release; now if only this movie could get a major restoration....

This is classic film noir - before there WAS film noir! Director Fritz Lang and the entire cast and crew hit all the right notes in this beautiful and tragic movie. I just finished watching it for the first time and I then asked myself: What took me so long to finally see it?!? Unforgettable!!!

You Only Live Once is a gritty black and white classic set during the Depression era and directed by the great Fritz Lang. It is a film that creates an air of such despair that one cannot help but have the ominous feeling that the two lovers in this film, Sylvia Sidney as Joan and Henry Fonda as Eddie, will meet an inevitable doom.The Henry Fonda character is somewhat maddening in this film. He is not an evil man, though his moral compass may be somewhat out of whack, but more an intelligent man making incredibly stupid choices. The choices he makes are so stupid that he simply digs himself deeper and deeper into a quagmire of doom, and he brings his wife with him. Joan's love for Eddie, which borders almost on obsession, blinds her totally as to what this all leads to and consequently to its tragic end.In fairness to Eddie, the film attempts to lead us to the conclusion that the economic despair and dead end future of the Depression leads people to make poor choices and affects their perspective of reality. Yet, Eddie is an intelligent man, and so is his wife Joan, but they cannot seem to get off the road to hell that they are on. Why? They are not vicious criminals or gangsters, yet they end up being hunted as such. Probably it is because Eddie ultimately could not accept the reality of his existence and the future that awaited him.By modern standards this film could come across as melodramatic rather than a love affair meeting a tragic end. However, the acting of the two principals, Sydney and Fonda, is very good and the film tells its story in an effective manner. It also gives us a fleeting feeling of the hard times of the Depression, especially if one found themselves at the lower end of the economic strata.

"You only live once" is here presented in a crisp, sharply contrasted print with an excellent audio level - quite simply, you could never see any black and white film of the 1930's in better quality than this. It makes the photography look stunning.I hadn't seen this in a long while, and I'd forgotten how good it is - it's usually "sold" as a crime melodrama, but it's equally one of classic cinema's great love stories. There is real chemistry between Henry Fonda and waif-like Sylvia Sydney and their tragic love story should move even the hardest of hearts. It's a story set against the background of depression America, and of one man's struggle, eventually lost, to go straight and throw off his criminal past. Henry Fonda is particularly effective and his defeat by a particularly cruel sequence of events mainly outside of his control is harrowing to watch.This is definitely a film which deserves better recognition and it's rarity now - it's not been on TV for many years - is quite a scandal really.I thoroughly enjoyed this - if you like 1930's drama you are in for a treat!

et dire qu'on considère ce film comme mineur ,dans la période mineure de Lang aux USA !.un film majeur avec des scènes inoubliables et un suspense terrible et l'émouvante Sylvia Sidney en ange rédemptrice .Une façon efficace de faire passer des idées tout en passionant ,Costa Gavras retiendra la leçon en moins subtil.cerise sur le gâteau le commentaire de Claude Chabrol plein de pertinence et d'humour mêm si il nous assène qu'on ne peut pas parler de cinéma sans avoir vu et revu "l'aurore "("sunrise " ) de Murnau de ...1927 que je vais , donc ,me dépécher de connaître !.

Une très bonne surprise. Superbes interprétation des acteurs et cinématographie de Fritz Lang. Intrigue à rebondissements multiples.Quelques griefs : uniquement en version originale. Cela n'a-t-il vraiment jamais été doublé en français ? C'est peu crédible puisque le film a un titre en français et que les films sont doublés depuis longtemps en France. Ou serait-ce que Studiocanal est fainéant ou snob (la v.o. y a que cela de vrai pour le bobo).Aussi, je ne sais pas si c'est mon DVD, mais j'ai beau essayé avec trois lecteurs différents je ne parviens pas à visionner le bonus annoncé !

Fritz Lang gelingt es in seiner frühen " Bonnie & Clyde" Version einen guten Spannungsbogen zu erschaffen, obwohl die Story ihn eigentlich nicht hergibt. Die tragische Wendung gegen Ende des Films verkommt bei Lang nicht zu einer Schmalzorgie, sondern wird sogar zur Stärke des Films! Fonda spielt die Wesensänderung der Hauptfigur auch sehr gut. Die Qualität der DVD ist ziemlich gut, bedenkt man das Alter des Films!