You and Me

You and Meⁱ is a humourless farce, a sort of fore-runner to Sesame Street : how to be purposefully stupid for corporate benefit.

The main feature is a consumptive Sylvia Sidneyⁱⁱ explaining to a dozen or so assembled "men" that the per capita gain of a 30`000 haul is 113 dollars and 33 cents (point four), and thus therefore crime doth not pay. Somehow the obvious point that the main attraction to crime is not what it pays (if it pays anything at all), but the fact that nobody can fucking tell you to the cent how much it will pay, if it ever will pay anything at all is completely lost on the squareheaded accountants that came up with this brilliant script.

Apparently somewhere in this world there live - or at the very least used to live - people so painfully boring that they can't even comprehend how and why somebody might not give two shits (wrapped in creaky cellophane) about his own death, and anyone else's beside. Apparently these people write scripts, make movies... hell, they're probably building empires or something. Out on the beach, in the sand, with bucket in one hand and six inch plastic shovel in the other. Busily remaking the Taj Mahal out of pink and lilac silly putty.

No, crime doesn't pay. The way to get the hundred and thirteen dollars and thirty-three cents is driving a truck, sawing some planks, digging a ditch, punching the card for the Acme Cosmococcic Corporation. Nobody's arguing that any more than they care about the thirty-three cents. Suppose you don't care about the hundred and thirteen dollars either. Now what ? Suppose you just don't like the idea of some accountant telling you which side of your mouth to spit out of, what then ? What if the story these bright minds yearn, flat and tired such as it is, fails not to engross you with its sheer lack of intricacy or detail, but it fails to even interest you at all. At all. Suppose you can't be bothered to even watch their silly movie. Well ?

I guess you miss out, then. The good news is that I can tell you exactly how much you miss out on. You miss out on a hundred and thirteen dollars. And thirty three cents. Point three, and then three and then three again. You will never reach that promised four no matter how many digits you make it through. The four is a lie, it's just a convenient rounding. In reality, there's no four. Just an endless stream of threes. Forever.

Don't that many threes just make you itch for a social security number, a punching card, some government issued ID and maybe, why not, a union card ?

Other than this nonsense Raft is his usual cementfaced, blazer clad tough guy. I never much liked him, he's bearable if he plays support for actors worth that name, mostly because he's so easily ignored. Making him the lead has a distinct Campbell flavour. It tastes canned. Ya, I know, he was friends with Lansky and Siegel and all that crowd. Well... what can I tell you. Crime doesn't pay. He shoulda stuck to dancing.

1. 1938, by Fritz Lang, with Sylvia Sidney, George Raft, Roscoe Karns &co. [↩]
2. Whose mother, as you probably didn't know, was a Romanian-born ho. [↩]