Movie of the Week: “You and Me”

Fritz Lang’s most celebrated German film, “M,” from 1931, is the story of gangsters who beat the police at their own job by catching a serial killer when the police investigation impinges on their usual criminal activities. In Lang’s third Hollywood film, “You and Me,” from 1938 (which I discuss in this clip), which is also a story of the underworld’s place in above-board society, the director went several steps further. First, he added the music of another German émigré, Kurt Weill, to the mix, creating sung and chanted fantasy sequences that evoke both the political context and the subjective energy of the criminal realm. Second, working with a script by Virginia Van Upp based on a story by Norman Krasna, Lang meshes the secret society of convicts with another group of brash independents: entrepreneurs. Here, the convicts at the core of the story aren’t only helping the police (in the traditional “it takes a thief to catch a thief” mode). They’re the employees of a businessman—the sole owner of a department store that bears his name—who runs his business his way and damn the consequences, and their methods bring a certain spice to his enterprise. The imagination and audacity of the convicts he employs seem strangely similar to those of their boss, who, for his part, would rather have them on his side than against him. The very subject of the film is the hidden slip, the one false move, the crossing of the line that puts a person of talent on the other side—and the absolute and tragic otherness to which the inflexibility of that line condemns those who cross it. It’s the story of two worlds—and of the desperate need, for society at large, to bring them together. Third, Lang includes what is doubtless the best gefilte-fish scene ever filmed. It’s a sequence that gets to the very essence of the subject; “gefilte” is Yiddish for “stuffed,” and the movie answers the age-old question: Stuffed into what?