Monday, October 26, 2020

Crime does not pay, but not MGM-style

I've mentioned the MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts on a couple of occasions. Recently, I watched an odd little movie that shares the message of those shorts, but does it in an entirely different way: You and Me.

The movie starts off with a song about how you need money to get whatever you want, before we wind up in Morris' department store. Helen (Sylvia Sidney) is one of the shop clerks, and she's just found a woman trying to shoplift a satin blouse. The woman begs Helen not to be turned over to the authorities. When another clerk, Joe (George Raft), shows up to ask Helen if there's a problem, she lets the shoplifter off the hook by claiming there's a flaw in the blouse and the department store shouldn't be putting out gods like this.

Joe actually loves Helen, but there's a problem. He's an ex-convict, finishing up his parole. Mr. Morris (Harry Carey), who owns the store, believes in giving ex-cons jobs as a way of rehabilitating them, but the parolees are still under all sorts of restrictions, such as having to report to their parole officer constantly and not being allowed to get married. So Joe hasn't been willing to reveal his love to Helen up until now. Even then, he's decided that he doesn't want to saddle Helen with an ex-con for a wife, he's going to go west to California instead.

Helen is having nothing of it. She loves Joe too, and she decides that she's going to push the issue herself, asking Joe to marry her! Naturally, he accepts, and the two have a quickie wedding before starting off a life of marital bliss in her rooming house run by a very nice older couple who don't know anything about Joe's past.

They, and Joe himself, don't know much about Helen's past. It turns out that she too is a parolee, but her parole isn't up yet. So she's still under the prohibition on marriage, and she'd get in huge trouble if her parole officer or pretty much anybody but her landlords found out about the marriage. So she makes up a lie to Joe about Morris not wanting his employees to get married to each other.

Joe is obviously going to find out about Helen's lie at some point. Meanwhile, he and some of the other parolees working at Morris' (played by, among others, Roscoe Karns, Warren Hymer, and a young Robert Cummings) are getting approached by the big guy, Mickey (Barton MacLane) to do a job stealing from Morris' department store. Joe wasn't certain at first, but once he's learned his wife has been lying to him, he decides to go ahead with the job.

And here is where the story gets really weird. (Naturally, spoilers abound.) Helen decides once she hears about it from Gimpy (Hymer's character) that she's going to inform Morris. Normally, we'd get the police rounding up the bad guys as the Production Code would have retired. In You and Me, however, Morris has his detectives interrupt Joe and the gang in flagrante delicto, and then have Helen give the guys a lecture on the actual financial figures on crime not paying! It's a really bizarre resolution, but since the gang decides not to go ahead with the crime, it must have satisfied the enforcers of the Production Code.

You and Me, despite being a strange film, works and is quite interesting for all its weirdness. The casting is interesting, what with Sidney being an out-and-out con; ditto Karns and even more so Cummings. Nobody stands out as being particularly good or particularly bad, but together and under the direction of Fritz Lang they make a movie that absolutely needs to be seen at least once.

You and Me was released by Paramount; as with almost all of Paramount's talkies from before 1950, the rights were acquired by Universal. Many of these movies have the modern day Universal logo at the beginning, but You and Me had the 1930s vintage logo of a plane flying around the globe! The movie has received a DVD release from Universal's mod scheme, although it might be nicer had it been part of a box set.

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