“Mixed Up”: Sylvia Sidney’s Bad Desire

| Doug Carmoody |

You Only Live Once plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, February 6th, as part of our collaboration on the 16th Noir Festival. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.


In the years prior to her leading role in Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once, Sylvia Sidney had endured a barrage of difficult on-screen romantic partners. She was impregnated and drowned by her boyfriend in An American Tragedy, bullied into a life of alcoholism and infidelity in the pitch-black Merrily We Go To Hell, and made party to spying and filicide in Sabotage. It was only natural to wonder what was drawing the babyfaced Sidney (or rather, her onscreen characters) to all of these horrible men. 

You Only Live Once uses Sidney’s star persona as a lens for investigating the historical Bonnie and Clyde story, where a seemingly innocent young woman is drawn into a life of crime by a handsome, seemingly evil man. While Henry Fonda would go on to have a storied film career, he’s billed below Sidney here. Sidney had already strung together a number of pre-Code successes by the time Fonda entered the film industry (with late masterclasses in Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks, Sidney’s stardom actually outlasted that of several Fonda scions). So the film’s central couple, Joan and Eddie Taylor, positions Sidney’s known penchant for bad boys against Fonda’s fresh-faced, mysterious ex-con.

Joan’s sister raises the issue of romantic choice in the second scene, declaring Joan “absolutely wacky” for eloping with a criminal coming off of a three-year prison sentence. The film itself, though, offers a bit more sympathy. Joan secretaries for a public defender, and she does so well helping defend “victims of circumstances” that the opposing prosecutor wants to poach her. Joan quickly refuses, quipping “You put them in, Stephen gets them out. Much more interesting, don’t you think?” 

In a film saturated with ambiguity, the nobility of Stephen and the work of his office never comes into question. But Joan’s relationship to that work is itself a bit opaque—is she seeking justice or thrill? The narrative of You Only Live Once fixates neurotically on Joan’s desire as a way to judge her character, obsessing over whether she has fallen in with the wrong man, and if so, to what extent she deserves to be punished.   

Henry Fonda, Homme Fatale

You Only Live Once primarily considers Joan’s morally dubious status as a reflection of her attachment to Eddie—a phallocentric dynamic thankfully upended in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, which permits Bonnie to be a sicko in her own right. In contrast to some of Sidney’s earlier romantic opposites, Fonda cuts a highly ambiguous figure. He harbors a tenuous sense of innocence in the first act. He insists on a straight life, but slips into anger when facing discrimination as an ex-con, especially when his lowly social status threatens Joan’s (in a case where an innkeeper refers to “convicts and their wives”).

Fonda looks imposing in the scene at the inn, but generally his temper plays more as melodramatic excess than hardboiled criminality. After an altercation with his (also discriminatory) boss becomes physical, Fonda quips “And I wanted to go straight.” The line could have been sardonic, but Fonda’s expression is genuinely mournful. 

Crucially, a prison chaplain (here operating as a beacon of 1930s moral wisdom) vigorously defends Eddie’s better nature. Like Joan, he insists that people have fundamentally noble natures, simply obscured by circumstance: they are born with the “nobility of a king,” but brought down by the “stain of the world.” He also tells Stephen that he “won’t regret” helping Eddie get out of jail. But in that same scene, when Joan and Eddie try running to their happily ever after, both the chaplain and public defender stand in their way, stopping the star couple in their tracks. The dialogue here is friendly, but delivered sternly. The staging of this scene visually suggests that both Stephen and the chaplain still have reservations about Joan and Eddie’s coupling, despite their ostensible support for the imprisoned man.

Passions high and low 

Unlike that of the chaplain, Joan’s love for Eddie is clouded by social prohibition and anxiety. The film establishes that this anxiety is not just driven by Eddie’s dubious nature, but also by a broad suspicion that Joan’s “love” is a more base passion. 

The chaplain and public defender obliquely discuss the possibility of lust. When asked whether Joan’s interest is driven by love or pity, the chaplain jokes that it must be “more than pity,” leaving the verdict on whether her feelings are also less than love unaddressed. 

In the very next scene, Joan and Eddie take up the same subject. Joan admits herself that she might be mistaking higher passions for lower ones. She tells Eddie she previously went to “tell you how much I hated you, only I got mixed up and told you how much I loved you.” While she doesn’t specifically mention lust, the idea that she doesn’t understand her own emotions hangs over the film. Eddie phrases the question directly: “Are you still mixed up?” This precise question seems to fuel the film’s melodramatic inquiry into Joan’s passions.

The lovers’ discussion here veers into a symbolic register that both frames and elevates the impending melodrama. Eddie notes a couple of frogs, telling Joan that when one frog dies, its mate dies as well. “Maybe they see something in each other that no one else can see,” Joan replies. This shared metaphor is working overtime. On the one hand, Eddie has confused frogs for swans, which reinforces the notion that these two might be “mixed up,” mistakenly overlaying a romantic paradigm onto a squalid situation. The camerawork harbors a similar suggestion, filming the upside-down reflection of the lovers in the pond.

On another level though, the metaphor introduces the theme of transmission. The death of one frog precipitating the death of the other forms a symbolic warning against Joan throwing in her lot with a doomed partner. This unheeded warning comes closer to fruition as Eddie soon finds himself charged with murder, and placed on death row.  

Other modes of transmission

Eddie’s final incarceration marks the turning point of the film, which begins to circle around the notion of transmission between guilt, death, and punishment. Given the film’s other fixation, on the moral status of Joan, it seems to be using these repetitive metaphors to think through what fate Joan might deserve.  

The prison’s cook offers a myth about consumption: “First they kill the chicken, Taylor eats the chicken, and then they kill Taylor.” The cook’s myth reiterates the lesson from the frogs: doomed subjects are contagious to those around them. He apparently speaks from experience, having poisoned three of his customers before ending up in prison.

Subsequent scenes continue along the same lines, with Eddie receiving a blood transfusion from a fellow inmate after slitting his wrists to aid an escape attempt. Their bond solidified, Eddie jokes that his friend should “Sit on my lap when they throw the switch.” Even a purely charitable association with Eddie seems to bring doom. 

Choosing Wrong

As these acts of transmission play out in the symbolic realm, Joan finds herself actually looking to commit her first crime. In a confusing narrative formulation, Lang withholds information about Eddie’s culpability in the robbery, instead suggestively cutting from Eddie being fired to a masked man participating in a robbery, and then to Eddie’s hat being found at the crime scene. This fake-out gives the audience similar knowledge to Joan—that it is possible, but not extremely plausible, that Eddie is actually innocent. Later, the film reveals that Eddie really was a victim of circumstance, but Joan has no good reason to believe him.

So, when Joan acquiesces and tries to help Eddie bust loose, she transgresses beyond her role in the public defender’s office, and places her own feelings towards Eddie above the laws of the society they live in. This transgression marks the beginning of her journey towards comeuppance, but even here the film hews to ambiguity—Joan is correct about Eddie’s innocence. Does she, like the frog, see something in him that others miss?

It doesn’t really matter in the end, because Eddie tries an escape just as a memo comes in from investigators establishing his legal innocence. In the course of his escape, he tragically and mistakenly kills the prison chaplain. Not only does this act seal his fate legally, but it actualizes the transmission metaphor, with Eddie literally spreading doom to his greatest benefactor.

The Life of Crime

Upon Eddie’s escape, Joan has abandoned any sense of guilt. While her husband wants to give himself up, Joan insists “I don’t care what you’ve done,” pulling him to his feet and stealing from department stores to care for him. 

In contrast to Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Lang refuses to revel in the thrill of criminal living. Instead Joan and Eddie face a grim existence, stealing only means of sustenance and leaving cash behind. Their ascetic criminal ethic goes unappreciated by the broader public, since gas station attendants themselves take the money from the till and report it as stolen.  

Even as she picks through her just desserts, the film suggests that Joan’s punishment is out of proportion to her crime. After they are accused of stealing cash, Stephen remarks the couple are “being blamed for every crime committed in the country.” The transmission of guilt has expanded here beyond all reason, with Joan first assuming Eddie’s guilt, and now acting as a scapegoat across a broad swath of society.

While the narrative pushes the couple towards the Canadian border (and freedom), the film’s tone never stops being funereal. Just as they move to their escape, a police officer jumps to the center of the road, his obstruction mirroring the moment that Stephen had blocked the couple’s exit from prison. In this particular case, though, the disapproval is final. The police gun down the young couple, who die together like a couple of frogs. Joan sat on Eddie’s lap, and the police threw the switch.


Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon

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