Fury

Fritz Lang's first American film, Fury (1936) is a rather garbled attempt at a message film. The first half of the movie is astonishing, but the last half is poorly thought-out and self-contradictory. Lynching is bad, but apparently it's wrong to punish the lynchers. Okay, whatever floats your boat.

Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) is an ordinary guy, trying to find work so he can marry sweetheart Katherine Graham (Sylvia Sydney). Just when, Joe is arrested outside the town of Strand, a suspect in a kidnapping and murder. Circumstantial evidence points to Joe's guilt, and the townspeople, convinced he'll get off somehow, storm the jail and try to lynch him. Joe somehow escapes, and enlists his crook brothers (Frank Albertson and George Walcott) to help get revenge. Soon twenty-two townspeople are on trial for Joe's murder, but Katherine - the prosecution's key witness - begins to suspect Joe isn't dead after all.

Anti-lynching films seem quaint now, but they were a pretty brave thing to make in the '30s. As the film states, 6,000 people were lynched in the fifty years leading up to the film - a truly disquieting figure. Like Try and Get Me!, the movie draws inspiration from the 1933 Brooke Hart case, with the Governor refusing to send troops to guard the jail and college kids joining in the lynch mob. Lang plays it safe by making Joe white and innocent, but this is to be expected. The big speeches against lynching are couched in a convenient court room setting, but get the job done. And certainly Lang's clever plotting is a sleight-of-hand that Hitchcock would envy.

The movie is also rather pointed in its depiction of '30s America. It's nearly impossible to find work, and Small Town America is small-minded, self-righteous and violent. The events depicted leave Joe a bitter shell of a man, redeemed only by the phoniest of Hollywood endings (but more on that later). Joe and Katherine's dreams are shattered by the lynching, and Lang uses the effective device of a store bridal display to dredge up broken memories. Whatever the studio interference, Lang's rage at Depression-era America, which he feels betrays American institutions, is palpable.

The highpoint of the film, of course, is the lynching scene. Following a series of montages of gossip spread through town, it has a believably spontaneous air. In Young Mr. Lincoln, Wyatt Earp and a million other films, a gutsy lawman can singlehandedly disarm a mob through soothing speech or tough talk, but no such luck here. The sense of uncontrollable fury and rage, the madness of a mob and the violence of lynching, is perfect even if the subject isn't actually lynched. It's an astonishing set-piece. One only questions why Lang put such a powerful scene midway through the film.

All this is superb, but it takes up only about 40 minutes of a 96-minute film. At that point, the movie shifts gears to an anti-revenge parable. Which would be fair enough, if Lang presented it believably. Instead, the movie really drops the ball, and we're asked to swallow some pretty big whoppers that lead to a rather unpalatable message.

Think about it. The prosecuting DA is a sarcastic jerk, and the mob members brought to trial seem pathetic rather than hateful. Frankly, knowing what I do about lynchings, the vigilantes' guilt is implausible, to say the least. These sort of people expressed pride in their work, and posed for pictures afterward! In the Brooke Hart case, people collected bark from the hanging tree for years afterwards. Worst of all is Katherine's plea to Joe, trying to dissuade him from taking revenge. "A mob doesn't have time to think!" she proclaims, then giving a speech that more or less absolves the suspects: it's okay that they tried to lynch you, because they failed! I can imagine Franklin Turtle's dad telling Joe "I'm sure they didn't mean to do it!"

Frankly, I'm with Joe on this one. Sure, taking the law into your own hands is as bad if you're an individual as a mob. But this isn't what comes across at all; it seems like Lang is excusing the individual members of the mob, which really doesn't help. I don't think turning the other cheek or forgive and forget really applies to lynch mobs, no matter how contrite they are. The ultimate message is: Think about what you did, Small Town America, or you'll get a Time Out.

Then there's Joe's final speech, which wreaks of studio interference. In its current form, it seems like three different speeches pasted together: first, Joe begins with an eloquent and angry denuniciation of vigilante justice, showing he hasn't forgiven his would-be killers. Immediately thereafter, however, he gives a pathetic proclamation of guilt, saying he couldn't live knowing he sent "innocent" people to their death. Huh? Even more bizarrely, it ends on a happy note as Joe proclaims his love for Katherine and embraces her. Roll credits. Is there a more confused scene in film history? Because I can't think of one.

Lang's direction is superb. Lang was never a subtle director, and he retains a lot of Expressionist tricks, namely heavy use of double-exposure and obvious "symbolic" images (the clucking hens). But the film gets a wonderful atmosphere of violence, hate and desperation across - at least in the first half - helped immeasuribly by Joseph Ruttenberg's stark photography and Franz Waxman's frantic score. The script is ingeniously plotted, with extremely clever "Macguffins" driving the plot along, making the movie mechanically sound even as the message clunks.

Spencer Tracy gives one of his best performances. He makes Joe seem, in turn, an ordinary guy, a bitter avatar of righteous fury, and a broken man who's lost everything. Sylvia Sidney is fine as Joe's love interest. Bruce Cabot (King Kong) gets an excellent part as the leader of the Mob, a sleazy public servant of the worst kind. There are also good roles for Frank Albertson (Psycho) and George Walcott as Joe's brothers, Edward Ellis (The Thin Man) as the Sheriff, Walter Abel (Mr. Skeffington) as the District Attorney and Walter Brennan (Red River) as a half-wit deputy.

Fury is a well-made, passionate film that gets across a progressive message very well. Too bad about the second half, which completely undercuts it.