You and Me

Morris, the manager of a large department store, has—out of the goodness of his heart—hired numerous ex-convicts as salespeople, without them knowing about one another. Things go smoothly until Joe and Helen fall in love: she keeps her criminal past a secret from him, just as he refuses to tell her about the old cronies with whom he is supposed to pull a heist right there at the store... With music by Weill ("You cannot get something for nothing"), the film approaches the style of a Brechtian didactic play—albeit a highly entertaining one—culminating in a magnificent finale: Sylvia Sidney demonstrates that "crime doesn’t pay" via a simple arithmetic problem on a blackboard in the children's department, while would-be gangsters in their pedal cars hang on her every word.
(Florian Widegger)