You Only Live Once is one of Fritz Lang's most widely admired American films and is thought to be among the finest of the 'social consciousness' films of the 1930s. The movie is praised for its technical excellence, its richness of visual texture and its generally moving depiction of the story's star-crossed lovers. These judgments are absolutely correct as far as they go; and yet, I believe, they do not begin to go far enough. In particular, You Only Live Once exhibits a kind of structural and stylistic complexity which carries it into areas of concern that the usual remarks fail entirely to reflect…. The thematic concerns of the film and the methods by which they are expressed are of very considerable interest on their own. Moreover, understood in the context of the subtle framework that organises its significance, certain segments and aspects of the movie which have...