In 1936’s Fury, Fritz Lang revisits one of the key themes of M, his 1931 paranoid classic about a child murderer on the run. The focus on mob rule had seemed prophetic in a country about to install the Nazis as its rulers, but how well would it translate to democratic America?
Very well is the answer, and it would stand up even better now, in the world of social media, where a rumour is enough to convict in the court of public opinion and the best option for anyone caught up in a pile-on is to disappear entirely.
Joe (Spencer Tracy) and Katherine (Sylvia Sidney) are very much in love and plan to wed. In opening scenes that flirt with the studios’ new moralistic Code, they make foreplay-adjacent noises at each other and hint broadly that what they really want to do is bounce straight into bed and get to it.
Instead Joe ends up in jail, accused of a kidnapping he couldn’t have committed. The rumour mill is soon at work, turning the suspect into the accused and the accused into the guilty man.
By the film’s halfway mark the jail where Joe is being held has been burned to the ground by an angry mob. Joe, so they think, is dead. But he isn’t. Instead, holed up in a nearby hotel, he listens on the radio as the wheels of justice grind into gear, putting the members of the mob on trial and attempting to pin a murder on them. A crime they didn’t commit, obviously, but which they are guilty of nonetheless?
The Chinese whispers of gossiping citizens and the heated accusations of the lynch mob are now replaced by the headline-seeking reports of radio journalists, keen to stoke whatever fire is burning in its pursuit of a story.
Revenge of a different sort is now the driver of this story. Will Joe really sit back and listen as the men who wanted him dead are brought to justice?
The unspoken word in all this is “black”. Lang’s original intention was to make a movie about the lynching of a black man for a crime he didn’t commit. The studio nixed that idea and so Lang turned to a reworking of the Brooke Hart case, when the lynching of the two men associated with the kidnapping and murder of the son of a rich San Jose businessman was publicly endorsed by the state governor.
Lang is entering his glorious talkie phase here. His film is full of lively frames with a highly mobile, often crane-mounted camera swooping in for reaction shots in scenes that were meticulously shot and reshot (to the ire of Tracy, in particular, who vowed never to work with Lang again). Tracy is in fact very good, in one of those honest-working-Joe roles that made him the US equivalent of Jean Gabin.
Sidney, also on the money, was Lang’s first choice for the role, and in fact he insisted on having her as a prerequisite for signing on with MGM. This was a very atypical movie for the studio, more at home with musicals and glitz than dramas full of ugliness, but Sidney and her pillowy lips provide a touch of elegant respite.
Bruce Cabot, often a slippery customer in movies of this era, is spectacularly unpleasant as Kirby Dawson, the smirking leader of the mob attacking the jail. And in an interesting bit of characterisation, Walter Abel plays the district attorney as a bag of elitist condescension, another figure with more than a touch of contemporary resonance.
It’s a fascinating film, of its era and yet strangely ahead of its time. Talking of which, fans of pets will enjoy an appearance by Hollywood’s most famous dog, Terry, who’d later “play” Toto in The Wizard of Oz. Her name here is Rainbow – more prescience!
Fury – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
