Fury

Fury, a 1936 film from MGM, was director Fritz Lang's first American film. He is probably best known today for M, about a child murderer brought to vigilante justice, and Fury has a lot of the power that his earlier film had. It's a crackerjack entertainment, and it's also a fairly incendiary message film.

As Peter Bogdonavich points in his DVD commentary, MGM was not the studio you would expect this from. They were known for lavish musicals and Andy Hardy, not for gritty stories about lynching. But it was made nonetheless, and though it stacks the deck as Hollywood is wont to do, it's a powerful statement even seventy some years later.

Spencer Tracy plays a young man who is engaged to Sylvia Sidney, and they have a few scenes of syrupy romance before she takes a train out west for a better job (they look through a furniture window at a newlywed ensemble--twin beds, natch). He will join her when he has enough money for them to be married. Tracy is a straight-shooter, a man who lives honorably, which he tries to drum home to his more wayward younger brothers.

He and his brothers open a gas station, and he finally has enough money to drive west. Along the way he is stopped by a sheriff's deputy. He matches the description of a kidnapper, and because there is some circumstantial evidence he is held in the town's jail. The sheriff, wonderfully played by Edward Ellis (who was also good in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang as a wise old con) does things by the book, and tells Tracy as soon as the district attorney examines the evidence he will likely be set free. However, the news gets out that they have one of the kidnappers in custody, and the gossip spreads (Lang has a marvelous cut from women gossiping to a coop full of hens). Soon many of the citizens, led by a ne'er-do-well (Bruce Cabot) lead a mob to the jailhouse, demanding to get Tracy. The sheriff tries to stop them, but they burn down the jailhouse as Sidney watches. Presumably, Tracy is dead. This is only the halfway mark of the film.

The second half of the movie is a courtroom drama, and one of the better I've seen. For one thing, it seems to follow actual rules of law (I've seen dramatizations of trials that are so inaccurate, like the defense presenting the case first, that it ruins it for me). The district attorney, Walter Abel, is trying 22 townspeople for first-degree murder. While presenting his case, he points out how many lynchings have taken place in the previous 50 years--one every three minutes (in the you-learn-something-new-every-day category, lynching is not necessarily hanging, but any execution by vigilantism). Of course, lynchings were carried out almost exclusively against blacks and Jews. Tracy plays a white man who is above-board and completely innocent, but considering the time period this is entirely excusable--no studio would have made a film about a black man being lynched.

As with I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Fury is only about ninety minutes and is as lean as a whippet, with no fat. Every shot serves a purpose, and I marveled at how clever a few throwaway details in the beginning of the film--a torn raincoat, Tracy's habit of mispronouncing the word "memento"--had deep meaning at the end of the film. This is an excellent film, and has as much meaning now as it did then.