Not a movie to see if you're feeling depressed. Arguably, this is the darkest entry in the doomed lovers genre, and also one of the most affecting. Three-time loser Eddie (Fonda) and his pregnant wife (Sidney) are on the run after killing a priest, and after Eddie has tried his best to go straight in the face of a hostile, uncaring society. As the fog closes in, the tender couple tries to make their way to the border and freedom. What they get instead is freedom of a different kind.Anyone doubting that cinema is basically a medium of manipulation needs to examine this grim masterpiece of early noir. From an irresistibly tearful Sidney to an unyielding fate to a relentlessly bleak photography, we're caught up in Lang's carefully crafted artistic vision. The parts fit together inexorably, driving the lovers and us toward an inevitable conclusion. The only visual missing is an onrushing train. In my book, the movie's one of the purest examples of how visual artistry can overcome plot contrivance, for there are an unfortunate number of the latter.Too bad the sad-faced Sidney is largely forgotten. It's really her marvelously expressive range that registers the tragedy and moves the audience. Far from glamorous, her talent remains nonetheless unusually poignant. All in all, the movie's in the same league as the transcendent They Live By Night (1947), and stands as possibly the polar opposite of the giddy Bonnie And Clyde (1967). In my little book, it's Lang's most compelling American film, despite the relative obscurity.

Joan Graham is the secretary for Stephen Witney, an honest and dedicated public defender, who succeeds in doing something he would almost rather not do: get Joan's sweetheart, Eddie Taylor, out of prison. Eddie is a good man, but Joan's sister, Bonnie, and Stephen both agree that he is no good for Joan. Eddie was born trouble. Joan and Eddie get married and set out to prove the naysayers wrong. Eddie gets a good, steady job as a truck driver; but a series of disasters sends his life spiraling out of control and the fiercely loyal Joan's along with it.Fritz Lang directs this hard-hitting melodrama and, as always, fills it with striking images. The shot of Eddie (Henry Fonda) in his cell, with the shadows of the bars reaching out to meet the bored and uninterested guard, stands out. The shots of a wide-eyed and desperate Fonda asking Joan (Sylvia Sidney) for a gun are a triumph for Lang, Fonda and Lang's cinematographer, Leon Shamroy. Lang also gets excellent work out of his editor, Daniel Mandell, who helps Lang to juxtapose images in a suggestive way, e.g. the shots of the frogs with shots of Joan and Eddie.Standing back from the film and looking at is as a whole makes it something of a marvel. We begin with light comedy, proceed to an adorable romance and then follow the characters as their lives - and the film itself - grows steadily darker.

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.

In 1937 they knew how to make good movies, with story, characterization, et cetera. Indeed, 1937 was the start of Hollywood's true Golden Era, circa 1937-1941. In 2007, most movies don't bother much with silly ideas like plots and story. And in 2007 we ain't got no directors like FRITZ LANG.Henry Fonda knew the secret to getting and keeping a pretty girl: Get thrown in the slammer and when you get out take her to a few good bank robberies. She will love you forever. One of the best parts of this crime drama is the absolute lack of liberal political spin about how "society" supposedly mistreats criminals -- the typical spin of 1970 thru 1980. False, stupid and silly, such pictures "justified" crime and contributed to its increase.This picture was produced by Walter Wanger --- one of Hollywood's greatest independent film producers in the 1930's and 1940's. His studio went belly-up following the personal scandal that wrecked the box office of his big budget JOAN OF ARC. His film library was the very first A-list library to be sold to television. The current DVD has his company eradicated from the credits -- suddenly it's Castle Hill Productions --- but they missed his trademark marble eagle, coming on at the very end.Fritz Lang made better pictures, but this one holds up well after 70 years.