Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

nomoons11 I'll start off by saying that this film didn't really do a whole lot for me. It wasn't badly made it just was one of those ones that so graced the 30's that was about how bad the system was and no one could get a fair shake...i.e...the little guy can't win...problem is, this guy in this one over reacts to everything and just about gets what he deserves in the end.Sure in a perfect world the judicial system wouldn't be wrong ever. We don't live in that world. We're suppose to feel sorry for this guy who's a 3 time loser who goes through a few breaks after he gets out of prison but consistently makes bad decisions that get him back in prison. Of course he goes back to prison to get a death sentence for a crime he didn't do.To get him the point he gets to at the end of this film he first gets a job and in the first few days he gets out he decides to stop and look for a house for him and his girlfriend. He doesn't even consider that he's 90 minutes late checking in for his truck route. The boss fires him and he can't get a job. He starts to hang around his old cohort but doesn't go back to his life a crime. His cohort robs an armored car and kills 6 people. This friend of his decides to steal his hat before the crime and it's left at the scene to implicate him.From here on out we get "The Wrong Man" and "Bonnie and Clyde". If you were anything like me you won't feel a bit sorry for Eddie and his girlfriend in the end. It seems like they just walked into all of this by bad decisions.Decent film but it wasn't very moving. Try "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang " or "Each Dawn I Die" for a better look into the wrong man imprisoned. This one's just a time piece with Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sydney and Fritz Lang tied to it. Whether you think it's "Crime doesn't Pay" type of film or even a "Wronged Man" film...it won't matter...just an average watch for me.

GManfred Eddie Taylor, one of life's losers, gets released from jail, gets married, gets a job, gets fired .....and his luck goes steadily downhill from there, culminating in the denouement at film's end. In between lies the sad tale of "You Only Live Once", a hyperbolic story of constant misfortune and ending in death.Fritz Lang directed this melodrama and got two of Hollywood's best young actors to relate his story to us and it is both heartbreaking and annoying. The annoying part is that Lang has exaggerated all the human emotion involved and has eschewed nuance, an integral part of human behavior. Situational responses are abrupt and reactionary and there is no verisimilitude to reality among the characters surrounding the principals. All is a downward spiral of hopelessness, despair and over-the-top acrimony.Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney breathe life into the grim developments and represent the film's only shred of humanity. It was one of Fonda's early film credits and he is very good. But it is Miss Sidney who carries the load here and gives a memorable performance, her latest in a long line of memorable acting jobs. Few actresses could run the gamut of emotions the way she routinely did and made a career of playing victims until her looks gave out.A good movie but lacking too much heart for a higher grade.

ALauff In this doomed love story of an ex-con (Henry Fonda) trapped in a world that won't forgive or forget and the woman (Sylvia Sidney) unconditionally bound to him, Lang sees the criminal potential in everyone, from the neighborhood cop who swipes apples from an immigrant fruit-seller, to the station attendants who exploit the couple's gunpoint gasoline theft for a payday of their own, to the guards who leer over Henry Fonda's supine form as it awaits escort to the chair. The whole world is on trial, and found guilty. Heroes and villains are splintered into categories of those who are punished for their crimes unto mortal eternity, and those who persist in petty, under-the-table wrongdoings within society's aegis. In the former category are the protagonists: Eddie, just notified of his exoneration from bogus murder charges, kills the kindly priest in a moment of disbelieving panic; Jo leaves her baby behind to prolong the adventure of a fugitive romance. Prior to these events, Eddie endeavors to go straight and set up a homestead, but his attempts to reform are blocked at every turn by exploiters and busybodies who forbid his dream of a quiet, quotidian existence. His life is reduced to the confines of a spare room, existence an unending rebuke. Lang empathizes with Eddie and Jo not because of their purity—anathema to Lang's worldview—but because of their faith in one another, which transcends the human birthrights of petty malfeasance and self-interest.The film's structure is dauntingly clear yet purposeful, provocatively reenacting one crucial decision in order to illustrate the immutability of Eddie's fate. Following a rain-soaked bank robbery—one of several violent, weather-determined setpieces; here, Lang rhymes a wipe edit with the getaway car's flattening of a cop—all evidence points to Eddie's involvement in the crime, which resulted in six casualties. Innocent but determined to flee the fourth-strike rule and certain death, Eddie equivocates just long enough to be apprehended. His jailbreak on the eve of execution is punctuated by his first murder, necessitating his going on the lam—an initially voluntary choice recast as mandatory destiny. Innocence leads to a death sentence; guilt leads to literal death. A miracle is offered, but it arrives when he's distracted, at his most hopeless. And death becomes all, as an outcome of running and not running—living is the farthest idea from mind.But it's living, Lang finally expresses, even at its most miserably futile, that affords grace. Jo resurrects Eddie from his boxcar tomb with exhortations to live for as far as roads will take them, perhaps all the way to border freedom. Those back roads open up to country vistas, Eddie's predominant mode of physical confinement recedes, and life is simplified to necessities of the moment. This serene spartan outlook radiates through the film's last scenes, as Eddie and Jo suffer their last trial, as Eddie gazes off inscrutably from a hilltop, still trying to elude his pursuers. Piercing through this tragedy is the return of the once-unnoticed miracle: Eddie's moment of grace revealed as deliverance from humanity's mudded reflection into spotless rebirth. At once a relieved affirmation of the film's title—i.e., the Langian notion that in death we will all one day blissfully escape mankind's stark judgments—and stunning evidence of a heretofore unseen Christian sensibility, Eddie's contented exodus from a damned life gives the priest the last word: death is renewal.

RResende This is from a time in which Fritz Lang still wanted (or thought he could) to go on making American films as he was doing them in Germany. We have a theme with social concerns, a useless attack on the morality of the system and prejudice. It's vapid, and it's superficial. Lang was good with manipulating images, with creating powerful scenery that could, by itself, pass a mood, usually an oppressive mood, maybe an advance of what nazism would become and symbolize to western civilization.But here he has to submit to his new environment. In this moment in cinema history the differences Lang might have found were probably in the kind of effective control he lost over the choices in his films. This is an American film, more than an auteur film, and watching this means understanding this fact. The outcome, in this case, is a total mess, i think. There are only a few things worth watching, but even those can be found much better integrated, and thus much more powerful, in other films: one of those things is when we feel Lang was able to create visually. Here we have two particularly interesting moments: one is when Fonda is in a cage waiting for his execution moment to come. The cage is designed for the light to go through and produce the light we see. This is enhanced by the upper position Lang gives to his camera, as he liked to do, in order to give us the sensation of some outer/superior force controlling what's beneath. The other moment is the fog with vultures walking undefined in the prison escape scene. As with the cage, it's a moment of tension and importance in the unimportant plot. I suppose Lang, not being able to cover the whole film with his vision at least tried to hold these moments. These clips are worthwhile, but i've seen them in better contexts.the other thing worth watching is Fonda. Before Marlon Brando, he is one of the few who understood what was necessary for an actor to do in order to make a film work. He is very contained, but he walks, talks, and expresses in a way which is made for the camera, for the film. It's a pleasure to watch him but again, there are better sources for us to understand his qualities My opinion: 1/5 http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com