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You Only Live Once Details

1937 DVD Certificate 12.gif
  • Rated:
  • 60
  • from 320 members

Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney play ill-fated lovers in Fritz Lang's fatalistic psychological thriller, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE. The film opens as Joan (Sidney), a secretary in the public defender's office, excitedly awaits the release of her thrice-convicted criminal lover Eddie (Fonda). The two try to build a life together, despite .. Read more

Starring Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney, Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon
Director Fritz Lang
Genres Drama

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You Only Live Once cover art

You Only Live Once

Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney play ill-fated lovers in Fritz Lang's fatalistic psychological thriller, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE. The film opens as Joan (Sidney), a secretary in the public defender's office, excitedly awaits the release of her thrice-convicted criminal lover Eddie (Fonda). The two try to build a life together, despite the scepticism of Joan's sister and boss, and succeed for a while until destiny seems to take control. Eddie butts up against a society that refuses to give ex-cons a second chance and tumbles back into contact with old gang connections. When he winds up back in jail--this time with a death sentence--he once again escapes only to commit a murder in the process and take Joan and their new baby with him as he wildly flees. The images are stark, as Lang darkly portrays the doomed couple's headlong descent through a cold society and the inescapable forces of fate. The suspense runs high and the cinematography is sweeping as the camera follows the couple from their ramshackle honeymoon to their desperate getaway and ultimately to their tragically climactic demise. Fritz Lang's obsession with fate and the moral dualism of society and its criminal underground as depicted in his earlier films, DESTINY, M, and FURY, is precisely expressed anew in this brutal and uncompromising film that paved the way for BONNIE AND CLYDE and NATURAL BORN KILLERS.

Starring Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney, Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon, William Gargan, Jerome Cowan, Margaret Hamilton, Warren Hymer
Director Fritz Lang
Studio CINEMA CLUB
Run time DVD: 1 hr 33 mins
Certificate DVD Certificate 12.gif
Genres Drama
Language English
Released DVD: 09 Aug 2004
Production year: 1937
Format DVD

  • Critics' reviews (3) of You Only Live Once

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  • 5 stars out of 5

    This ironic masterpiece set in the Depression era borrows from the real-life Bonnie and Clyde saga, as Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda play small-timers caught up in an escalation of violence. Fonda has never been better, his punk hood Eddie a Tom Joad (The Grapes of Wrath) shorn of optimism. Sidney is just wonderful: tender, poignant, vulnerable, scared. Director Fritz Lang creates a bleak half-world of sheer greyness, and, apparently, during the 46-day shoot, forced his actors and production team to stay awake so they'd look and be suitably tired. It's a brilliant, stunning classic you'll remember for ever.

    • Radio Times
    • Posted 29 Jan 2006

  • Looking back to the boldly-stated fatalism of his German films, and - in the on-the-run figures of Sidney and Fonda -... read more on Time Out

    • Time Out
    • Posted 04 Nov 2008

  • Most helpful member's review of You Only Live Once

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  • 3 out of 3 people found this review helpful

    Rated - 1 star

    American

    Not what you'd expect from this director. He obviously had to please his American employers, so this is tosh compared to what he'd done in Germany before.

      • A customer from London
      • Posted 11 Nov 2007 16:23

  • Most recent members' review of You Only Live Once

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  • 1 out of 1 person found this review helpful

    Rated - 3 stars

    Open The Gates!

    Fritz Lang's classic film of 3-time loser Eddie Taylor, his escape from jail and becoming a fugitive with his wife has influenced all subsequent films like Bonnie and Clyde. The major flaw is making Fonda and Sydney seem like a middle class couple down on their luck rather than working-class victims of the depression era. Lang's telling of the story by set-piece scenes like the armoured car robbery make this a must for all fans of the noir and crime genres.

      • Leon Collins from London
      • Posted 10 Jul 2006 17:59

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      • Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney play ill-fated lovers in Fritz Lang's fatalistic psychological thriller, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE. The film opens as Joan (Sidney), a secretary in the public defender's office,...