You Only Live Once (1937)

Man is released from prison, marries his sweetheart, gets a job, and buys a house. He is then fired, and framed for a crime he didn't commit.

Melodrama which is ridiculous and entertaining in equal proportions. I guess in those post-depression years it was kind of normal to fantasize about criminals with a golden heart -- the protagonist here had a special fondness for frogs -- and this film really goes all the way in making the Law, and much of law-abiding society, look bad, and outlaws look good. But what makes this piece of shitheaded propaganda so entertaining is that everything in it is absolutely top quality: its shrewdly concocted -- and wildly implausible! -- script, its amazing expressionistic shots, its two superb main performances, etc, etc. Needless to say, the people involved in making this film were reasonably well-off -- some of them very well-off -- and so were never really affected by things like poverty on one side, and street crime on the other. Audiences at the time probably were wary of this kind of discourse, and the film lost money, though over the years it undoubtedly recovered from that initial loss.

Rating: 52