You Only Live Once (United Artists). With a smuggled automatic in his hand and the prison doctor as hostage, Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is on his way out of the death house when his pardon arrives. Prison officials shriek the news at him. Eddie Taylor thinks their statement is a trick for his recapture. Too vivid in his mind is the manner in which he, innocent, was railroaded into his present plight. When the chaplain comes toward him in the fog, anxious to convince him that the pardon is authentic, Eddie shoots him. The chaplain stays on his feet long enough to call, "I'm not hit. Open the gates." Thus is the structure-laid for a crescendo seldom excelled in hoodlum stories since Public Enemy. Within its tighter limits You Only Live Once has a signature of realism no less stark and confident than the famed Warner Bros, story. It presents in addition its own modest problem in sociology: has the State a right to punish a man for a crime committed due to pressure put upon him through a miscarriage of justice? Producer Walter Wanger leaves the conclusion to the audience, having arranged as a tacit persuader Eddie's doomed and breath-taking flight toward the Canadian border with his wife, Joan (Sylvia Sidney). Justice works out a satisfactory answer, even though the trooper who marks Eddie with the cross hairs of his telescope sight, never pulls the trigger.
Proving that cinematic realism is an international language, Director Fritz Lang, an Austrian, gets an extraordinary authenticity of color into his quick episodic treatment of the life and love of Eddie Taylor. Many scenes, momentary on the screen, are hard to forget: the assault of a bank truck on a rainy day by a bandit with tear-gas bombs; the warped, animal hatred of the crowd watching Eddie being taken from the courtroom; the bullfrogs croaking in the pond outside the little inn from which, upon his wedding night, he is tossed out for being an ex-convict; a demonstration of the "electric eye" which detects metal objects upon prison visitors; Eddie and Joan talking through the visitors' grill in the death house; the preparations for a transfusion to save Eddie's life so that he can be electrocuted. For such things and the craftsmanship of Screen Writers Gene Towne and Graham Baker, Yon Only Live Once sets a pace which 1937 cops-&-robbers sagas may find hard to beat.