You Only Live Once (1937)
Vienna-born Fritz Lang was working in the film industry in Berlin when Hitler came to power. He fled to Hollywood in 1934, where he made his first American movie, Fury, a grim tale of lynch law, in 1936. Sylvia Sidney played the waiflike, vulnerable heroine of Fury and would also be the heroine of his next film. Independent producer Walter Wanger asked Lang to direct another social protest film, You Only Live Once, a fictionalized version of the criminal career of Bonnie and Clyde.1 Hollywood gangster movies of the period like The Public Enemy emphasize that a gangster’s lawless life often began in his misspent youth, and such is the case with You Only Live Once. As Lotte Eisner, the foremost Lang scholar, writes, “At sixteen, Eddie Taylor, the male lead, beat up a boy because he sadistically pulled off frogs’ legs and was sent to a reformatory. Then, through bad influence of others, and resentment, he began on the downward path.”2
Wanger brought in Gene Towne and Graham Baker, two witty and intelligent screenwriters, to compose the script. They were known as “two of the most colorful screenwriters in Hollywood.”3 United Artists would distribute the film.
As the screenplay begins, Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda), a three-time loser, marries Joan Graham (Sylvia Sidney) shortly after serving his third stretch in prison for some petty crimes. Eddie, with Joan’s staunch support, is determined to go straight. Father Dolan, played by William Gargan (The Story of Temple Drake), says to Eddie on the day he leaves prison, “You don’t seem happy for a man that the gates are going to open for.” Eddie is sullen because the convicts who bid him good-bye fully expect him to return to jail. The script is suggesting that, while many Americans affirm that a man is innocent until proven guilty, most of the ordinary citizens that Eddie encounters after his release do not believe that at all. But Joan is convinced that the world has a place for them.
Filming was accomplished during November and December 1936. Wanger, an enterprising producer, obtained the services of film editor Daniel Mandell and composer Alfred Newman, who also collaborated on Dead End, as did Sylvia Sidney. It was yet another social protest film, as we know. The cinematographer, Leon Shamroy, had done extensive work on documentaries, just the sort of experience that would enable him to give this film a natural look, a fidelity to reality.
On Sylvia Sidney’s testimony, Fonda cordially hated Lang. Said Sidney, “Well, Fonda knew that Fritz and I had worked together before” on Fury, and “he assumed that Fritz was giving me preferential treatment, giving me extra coaching.” Fonda mumbled, “The hell with him! I’ll show him!” Sidney concludes, “He gave one hell of a performance.”4
Fonda resented the number of takes Lang would do before he was satisfied with a scene. As a matter of fact, Lang’s meticulous attention to detail earned him the reputation of being a Prussian bully. Hilda Rolfe, his secretary during the 1940s, writes that he responded to such criticism that he was a perfectionist by saying, “and nobody likes a perfectionist.”5 Withal, the picture came in slightly under its budget of $589,403, and Lang delivered the finished film to Wanger in time for its “planned release in late January 1937.”6
Fritz Lang going on location for You Only Live Once (1937), his first big gangster movie in Hollywood.
“Of all of Lang’s films,” Tom Gunning declares in his magisterial biography of the director, “You Only Live Once deals most directly with the power of romantic love.”7 Eddie and Joan choose the Valley Tavern Inn for their honeymoon. In the garden of the inn, amid the croaking of frogs, Eddie explains to Joan that “frogs mate for life; if one of them dies, the other dies.” They cannot live without one another. Joan adds, “Like Romeo and Juliet.” But the inn is not as idyllic a place for lovers as it seems. The newlyweds are routed out of bed in the middle of the night by the husband and wife who run the honeymoon haven. The middle-aged couple informs them that they have learned that Eddie is an ex-convict, so he and Joan must vacate the premises immediately. Kate Stables writes in a recent essay on the movie that Eddie is “cast out of society symbolically both by being chased from the honeymoon hotel and by being fired from his job with a trucking firm by his boss who knows of his past.”8
Sometime later, Monk Mendall, a member of the gang to which Eddie formerly belonged, stages a bank robbery. Monk wears a gas mask during the robbery; he kills a guard while making his getaway in an armored truck through the clouds of smoke from exploding tear-gas bombs. Monk frames Eddie for the armed robbery by leaving behind Eddie’s hat, which Monk had stolen from him, and which has Eddie’s initials stamped in it. Monk, however, is killed when the truck skids off the road and into a gorge in the middle of a downpour, but Eddie is ultimately convicted of both the robbery and the murder of the guard on circumstantial evidence and given the death penalty.
Joan visits Eddie on Death Row as he waits for his sentence to be carried out. Lang photographs Eddie through the bars of the death cell as he prowls around like a caged animal. When an interviewer told Lang that the weblike shadows of the death cell made it look artificial, Lang countered that the death cell he saw at San Quentin was “reproduced exactly in the film, even with the exact lighting,” by Leon Shamroy.9 Still, Eisner notes that the “dark, heavy bars form a broad, fan-like pattern of shadows.”10
A lifer with nothing to lose secretly supplies Eddie with a gun with which Eddie can make a break. Gun in hand, Eddie makes his way into the prison courtyard. A thick fog envelops the yard and serves as an apt metaphor for Eddie’s foggy state of mind, which renders his perception of the situation hazy. Father Dolan, the prison chaplain, comes forward and attempts to tell Eddie that Monk’s corpse has been found in the armored truck at the bottom of a gorge, and so Eddie himself has been pardoned. Dolan instructs the warden, who is standing by, to open the prison gates for Eddie. In his confused state of mind, Eddie does not grasp what is happening; he fires blindly into the fog and accidentally kills Dolan.
Commenting on the unvarnished realism of the film, as exemplified in the way that he staged Eddie’s prison break, Lang said, “I think every serious picture [that] depicts people today should be a kind of documentary of its time. Only then, in my opinion, can you get the quality of truth into a picture.” He added, “I like to think all of my so-called crime pictures are documentaries.”11
Joan does not yet know of Eddie’s prison break. She is planning to drink poison at the moment of Eddie’s execution so that her suicide will coincide with his death, thereby recalling the parable of the frog, whereby when one frog dies, the other will die, too. Eddie phones Joan to tell her of his escape just in time to ward off her suicide.
The film now takes on the resonance of the Bonnie and Clyde saga, as Eddie and Joan take it on the lam together, with a view to crossing the frontier into Canada (not Mexico, as some commentators state). They attain something of the status of legend, as they are assumed to have committed nearly every recent crime in the United States. When they hold up a gas station, just to obtain some gasoline, the two attendants empty the cash register and blame the fugitives.
Joan gives birth to their infant son in a backwoods cabin, but when they leave the nameless baby with her sister, they are recognized and reported by the alert manager of the motel where they are staying. State troopers inevitably catch up with them in the forest just this side of the Mexican border. “The screenplay hits hard,” write James Parrish and Michael Pitts, the authors of The Great Gangster Pictures, “giving dimension to the story of two hounded . . . souls.”12 One of Shamroy’s finest shots shows Eddie and Joan “framed in the cross-hairs of a policeman’s gun sight.” First Joan is shot, and she dies as Eddie carries her in his arms; then Eddie is mortally wounded.
As Eddie lies dying in the shadowy woods, he sees a vision of heaven and hears the voice of Father Dolan saying, “Eddie, you’re free; the gates are open.” (This line of dialogue was added by Lang, because it is not in the shooting script.) The huge re-creation of the forest on a studio set, illuminated by dazzling sunbeams miraculously streaming through the branches of the trees, is breathtaking. This image of liberation, epitomized by the priest’s saying that the gates are open, represents an ironic contrast to the prison gates that had kept Eddie confined for so long. What’s more, we recall Father Dolan saying to Eddie when he was freed from prison at the beginning of the picture that he was a man that the “gates are going to open for”—a line that most commentators overlook.
Stables asks whether the “gates are open,” coupled with whether the final shot “is hallucinatory rather than redemptive.”13 Indeed, some critics have wondered if the film’s ending is not mere sentimentality. Referring to the strong religious implications of the ending of You Only Live Once, Lang noted, “I was born a Catholic—perhaps I’m not a good Catholic according to the Church—but a Catholic education . . . never leaves you.”14
There has been a persistent rumor throughout the years that the studio prevailed on Lang to shoot an alternate ending for You Only Live Once, lest the overtly religious ending that Lang had provided for the movie did not go down well with the mass audience. According to Sylvia Sidney, “There was never an alternate ending shot for that film. I ought to know; I was there.”15
Furthermore, Eddie’s dying with the promise of eternal life in heaven at film’s end recalls Lang’s frequent theme: that one who wages a battle against his Fate may lose the struggle, but he may not necessarily be defeated in the long run. Thus, the hero of the present film ultimately conquers Fate by entering the pearly gates with the promise of being united with his beloved beyond the grave. In this context it is worth remembering how Eddie indicated to Joan earlier in the movie that they should not fear death, since they would find one another in the next world, “like Romeo and Juliet.”
You Only Live Once is a fairly violent film with a high body count. Nevertheless, Lang thought that the violence he portrayed in films like this one was justified. “I do not use violence for violence’s sake,” he told me, “but always to illustrate a point or to draw a moral conclusion.”16
You Only Live Once has maintained a high critical reputation since it was made. Pauline Kael writes, “This early version of the Bonnie and Clyde story, starring Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney (neither has ever been better) is certainly one of finest American melodramas of the 1930s.”17 In addition, the film inspired a spate of gangster pictures, so the industry censor, Joseph Breen, sent a warning to the studios that such films are “certain to meet with objections” from church groups and women’s clubs.18
Hollywood continued to turn out gangster movies for the balance of the 1930s. The Depression ended, and fear of Adolf Hitler replaced fear of Al Capone; so too war pictures replaced gangster movies during World War II. Bogart was no longer playing such gangsters as Baby Face Martin in Dead End, but rather heroes the likes of Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942), “enabling him to shed his menacing gangster mantle and become the reluctant hero.”19
With the end of World War II, war pictures were out and gangster movies were back. Fritz Lang, who made his share of war movies during World War II, for instance, Hangmen Also Die! (1943), returned to making gangster films like The Big Heat. The gangster pictures of the 1930s depicted policemen fighting criminals; in the postwar era, the “cop rights himself, and cops fight each other,” as in The Big Heat.20
The Big Heat (1953)
Harry Cohn, the chief executive at Columbia Pictures who was so disappointed in Orson Welles’s film for Columbia, The Lady from Shanghai, welcomed Fritz Lang to the studio to direct The Big Heat. The story is based on a serial in the Saturday Evening Post by an “excellent crime writer, William McGivern,” Lang remembered. He said, “It appealed to me because it combined another struggle against the forces of Fate with a certain social criticism,” the exposé of corrupt law enforcement officers and officials.21 Lang accomplished a “straightforward telling of Sidney Boehm’s tightly constructed screenplay.”22 Boehm was a former crime reporter and an experienced screenwriter.
Mike Lagana, the mob boss in The Big Heat, tries to avoid stirring up public opinion against organized crime, which has come into the ascendency in postwar America. He does not wish to “wind up in the same ditch with the Lucky Lucianos,” as he says in the screenplay. Luciano was a reckless gangster who was deported to Cuba after World War I, and he was a model for Johnny Rocco in Key Largo, as we know. Rocco, a holdover from the gangs of the 1930s, could not fit in with the world of organized crime after the war.
The Breen Office, we remember, took a dim view of portraying suicide in a movie, as we know from Breen’s complaint about the suicide of Emmerich, as outlined in the script for The Asphalt Jungle. After producer Robert Arthur had submitted Sidney Boehm’s screenplay for The Big Heat to the censor board, he received a letter from Breen’s chief consulter, Geoffrey Shurlock, who would replace Breen in a few months, concerning the suicide at the outset of The Big Heat. Arthur then sent a memo to Lang in April 1953, stating that the censor’s office felt that directly portraying a suicide in the first scene of the script would be too gruesome, and recommending that Lang should not depict the suicide in detail. Lang complied.23 He spent a month collaborating with Boehm on revisions in the screenplay. In the end, the Mystery Writers of America conferred an Edgar (named for Edgar Allan Poe) on Boehm for the best screenplay of a crime film for 1953.
Lang was also involved in the casting of the major roles. Glenn Ford, Columbia’s top leading man since he costarred with Rita Hayworth in Gilda in 1946, was selected to play police detective Dave Bannion. Lang chose Gloria Grahame as Ford’s costar he said because she “represents today’s femme fatale.” He continued, “[T]he femme fatale’s power over men always comes from a combination of a calculating nature and a glamorous body.”24 Grahame had won an Academy Award for playing a tainted lady in The Bad and the Beautiful the previous year. She was a temperamental actress who had several disagreements with Lang on the set, yet her character, a doomed gun moll named Debbie Marsh, gave the film its moral center. Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister, plays Dave Bannion’s wife Kate.
Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), in the role she is most remembered for, gun moll Debbie Marsh.
The director of photography for The Big Heat was Charles Lang (A Foreign Affair), no relation to the director. Lang gave the movie a documentary-like quality with his spare cinematography, a mastering of darkness and light. Shooting commenced on March 11, 1953, and ran for a mere twenty-eight days. Lang finished in record time because of his careful craftsmanship. Thus, he chose the camera angles in advance and marked them in the margin of his script.
The Breen Office, which thought the original opening shot for the film too gory, should be thanked for influencing Lang to devise an impressive opening shot for the picture. The opening image of the film is that of a .38 revolver lying on a desk. A hand comes into the frame and picks it up. We hear a single shot fired offscreen; then a body slumps forward on the desk. Colin McArthur singles out the film’s opening shot as “among the starkest in the cinema,” and as a “most appropriate overture” for the violent gangster film to follow.25
A sealed letter addressed to the district attorney also lies on the desk, with a police sergeant’s badge next to it. The letter, we soon learn, contains Sergeant Tom Duncan’s confession of being in the pay of Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby), a master criminal who dominates the city of Chandlertown. Tom’s widow, Bertha (Jeanette Nolan), intends to employ the letter to blackmail Lagana, so she does not turn it over to the police when she finds it, but locks it in a safe instead.
Police sergeant Dave Bannion, in investigating Duncan’s suicide, finds out that the dead policeman was involved with Lagana. When Dave goes to Lagana’s lavish mansion to question him, the racketeer is outraged that a lowly cop would invade his home to discuss police business. Kim Newman observes that the production designer, Robert Peterson, created sets that fit the personalities of the characters who live there, thus the “tasteless wealth” of Lagana’s mansion, with the “jiving teenage party” that his daughter is having for her high school friends when Bannion makes his unwelcome appearance to question her father.26
The following night, Bannion’s wife Kate is killed when she steps on the starter of the family car and it explodes. The bomb was obviously planted in the family automobile by Lagana’s minions and meant for Dave. “Lang achieved one of his most gut-wrenching effects here with a quick, off-camera blast,” writes Patrick McGilligan, “focusing instead on Dave’s anguished reaction” to his wife’s murder.27 Lang pointed out to me that while The Big Heat is a violent film, much of the violence takes place offscreen. That is the case with Tom Duncan’s suicide and Kate Bannion’s death. Also offscreen is the torture and murder of Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green), a barfly-cum-hooker who testifies to Dave Bannion that Tom Duncan was on the take from Lagana and had had an affair with her. Lucy’s lifeless body is found lying near a county highway. Her death, Bannion notes, was an “old-fashioned, Prohibition-style killing,” right out of The Public Enemy.
Police Commissioner Higgins orders Dave to terminate the Duncan investigation, since he does not want Duncan’s disgraceful association with Lagana to become public knowledge. Dave adamantly refuses to do so and is summarily suspended from the force. The embittered Dave turns in his badge, but not his gun, saying, “the gun is mine, bought and paid for.” Dave Bannion is now determined to investigate his wife’s death on his own, since he can no longer do so as a law enforcement officer. Gus Burke (Robert Burton), another cop who was Dave’s partner, advises him to seek counseling from a priest: “You are on a hate binge.” Dave shrugs off Burke’s advice; he has become a ruthless avenger, indistinguishable from the gangsters he is pursuing, a theme that resurfaces in Gangster Squad (see the afterword).
As the plot unwinds, Dave earns the confidence of Debbie Marsh, the gun moll of Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), Lagana’s right-hand man. One of Lagana’s henchmen informs Vince that he has seen Debbie conferring with Dave in a bar. Vince later angrily accuses Debbie of two-timing him with Dave. The sadistic brute then throws a pot of scalding coffee in her face, which leaves one side of her face hideously disfigured. Andy Klein singles out this scene as “one of the most shocking scenes in the history of cinema.”28 But, as noted earlier, Lang maintains that he uses violence only to make a point.
In this instance, Lang employs Debbie’s disfigured face to symbolize the duality of human nature, that is, an individual’s inclination to both good and evil. Debbie’s face—one side beautiful, the other side scarred—graphically signifies her capacity for both good and evil. Thus, Debbie, McArthur observes, has become a “two-faced woman,” both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, she is good, because she perceives that Bannion is an honorable man, worthy of her help in crusading against Lagana and his mob. On the other hand, “she is nevertheless morally tarnished . . . by her previous association with Vince Stone and Lagana.”29
Lang offered an interesting footnote to the filming of the scene just described when he recalled it: “I knew perfectly well that you can throw coffee at someone and not leave a scar at all,” because the skin will heal. “So . . . to make the episode more credible, I inserted a shot of the coffee boiling on a hot plate before Vince picked up the pot. That made what happened to Debbie more credible.” Novelist William McGivern comments, “It is not the spectacle of scalded, ruined beauty, but the evil of Marvin’s face and lips glistening and quivering in Lang’s close-up of him, that gives realistic horror to the scene.”30
Bannion receives word that Commissioner Higgins, who regularly plays poker with Lagana’s gang, has called off police protection for Bannion’s little daughter Joyce, who is staying in the apartment of Dave’s brother-in-law, Al. Dave rushes to Al’s apartment building and is accosted by an unidentified stranger stepping out of the shadows on the first-floor staircase. Dave assumes, as does the viewer, that the sinister figure is one of Lagana’s gang. In fact, he is one of a group of Al’s former army buddies, whom Al has commandeered to protect the child. Out on the street, Dave meets Burke, his erstwhile partner, and his former boss, Lieutenant Ted Wilkes, two policemen who have come to guard the apartment. Dave realizes that he is no longer without friends, as he had thought.
Dave subsequently confesses to Debbie that he nearly strangled Bertha Duncan when he attempted to force her to confess that she had withheld her dead husband’s suicide note to blackmail Lagana. Debbie answers, “You couldn’t have done it; if you could have, there wouldn’t be much difference between you and Vince Stone.” The point is that Dave Bannion is not a heartless hoodlum like Vince Stone. He is still a fundamentally decent person and has not degenerated into the kind of cruel, hard-boiled individual that Vince Stone is as a result of seeking revenge for Kate’s death. In Dave’s case, the capacity for good in his character is still stronger than his capacity for evil.
In an effort to get even with Vince for his cruelty to her, Debbie betrays him and his boss, Lagana, by taking matters into her own hands. Debbie is aware that Bertha Duncan has arranged to have her deceased husband’s letter, which contains incriminating evidence about Lagana’s crime syndicate, delivered to the district attorney in the event of her death. Consequently, Debbie shoots Bertha dead so that Tom Duncan’s letter will automatically come into the hands of the district attorney. Then “the big heat” will be on Lagana and his gang. “The big heat” refers to the “pressure that will finally descend upon the corrupt city and purify it,” according to Lang scholar Tom Gunning, with whom I discussed this film.31
Debbie then proceeds to Vince’s apartment and exacts her personal vengeance on him by hurling scalding coffee in his face. She informs him with maniacal glee that she has murdered Bertha Duncan, exulting, “The lid is off the garbage can!” Vince slays her in retaliation for what she has done—just as Dave, who has had Vince’s apartment under surveillance, breaks in. Instead of killing Vince on the spot, Dave declines to take the law into his own hands and turns Vince over to the police.
In the final scene, which serves as an epilogue, Dave is back on the force as a policeman in good standing. Once Dave is “reunited with the police force,” writes McArthur in his exemplary monograph on The Big Heat, “Bannion’s reintegration into society is complete,” and he is once more in control of his life.32 Dave is once again the decent, humane man he was at the beginning of the film. In harmony with the pervasive theme of Lang’s films, Dave has been wounded by the hostile forces of Fate, but he eventually emerges from the struggle undefeated. The Big Heat was the biggest critical and commercial success of Lang’s late career. In addition to the fine acting of Ford and Grahame, the performances of Lee Marvin as the sadistic Vince Stone and Jeanette Nolan as Tom Duncan’s wily widow were acknowledged as superior by the critics.
What is unusual about Lang, declares Nick Pinkerton, is the “single-mindedness with which he would continue to impress his unmistakable worldview” on his films throughout his long career, from his early German movies to The Big Heat, one of the best of all American gangster pictures.33