Monday | March 18, 2002 9:00 pm

You Only Live Once

Screening on Film

Directed by Fritz Lang.
With Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Barton MacLane.
US, 1937, 35mm, black & white, 86 min.

This visual masterpiece follows a pair of ill-fated young fugitives across America as it creates a portrait of justice and brutality 1930s-style. Fonda plays an ex-convict wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death who flees with the aid of his adoring wife (Sidney). The prototype for Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, the movie also stands out as an early example of film noir. Its dark world bears an expressionist aspect in which Lang uses light neither decoratively nor atmospherically but psychologically: as a reflection of emotional interiors. The film’s dense visual texture thickens ever more densely as the fleeing protagonists run out of space.