The Sound of Fury aka Try and Get Me!

A beacon of decent acting in a sea of ham and cardboard, Frank Lovejoy is the main reason to watch The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!), a dull, sanctimonious drama boosted by an incendiary finish.

Fritz Lang had already turned the original true story into a film, Fury, but this is Cy (billed as Cyril) Endfield’s version. The plot: decent, hard-working family man Howard Tyler is the everyday sucker who can’t get a decent break and so takes up with flash Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a smalltime criminal. Things go OK for Howard and Jerry for a while, and Howard’s blubby wife (Kathleen Ryan) is particularly happy that Howard is suddenly able to settle all the oustanding bills and buy some pretty things for her and toys for their gee-whizz kid Tommy (Donald Ross).

This all goes wrong when a heist goes wrong and Jerry kills someone. Suddenly, the two men are wanted by the cops, and the local press is also weighing in, running stories that turn this two-man outfit’s handful of minor hold-ups into a “crime wave”, and working up the normally peace-loving locals into a mob baying for justice at the end of a rope.

Lovejoy’s Howard – the decent man lured off the primrose path by filthy lucre – has a counterpart in the shape of Richard Carlson’s Gil, a handsome local journalist, who has also been lured off course, by the blandishments of celebrity. Gil is now a high-falutin columnist rather than a man-of-the-people reporter, and while Howard heads in one direction, Gil will head in the other, realising he’s lost his way, particularly when his paper – owned by a media mogul only interested in the bottom line – abandons reporting in favour of fanning the flames of a fire it had already lit.

“Isn’t this destructive to the public health, this distortion of realistic values?” asks the hilariously mechanical Dr Vido Simone (Renzo Cesana) of newspaper boss Hal Clendenning (Art Smith) at one point. Clendenning waves his hands – possibly painting dollar signs in the air – and Dr Simone, who has arrived out of nowhere, is parked until some other unmediated message needs getting across.

If it sounds grim, it is. It’s not helped that Kathleen Ryan, as Howard’s wife, is terrible, and so is Lloyd Bridges, every gesture mannered and late. If you’ve only seen him in Airplane! – that’s no parody, that’s how he acts.

And yet, there is good stuff. Potato-faced Lovejoy sails through. In a different world where looks didn’t count for so much he’d have been a much bigger star. He’s above and beyond the incompetence of the other actors and the programmatic nature of the plot, a subtle and gifted actor of real talent. And there are some lovely scenes around the halfway mark, when Jerry persuades Howard that what the two of them really need is a mini-break with two gals, Jerry’s brassy girlfriend Velma (Adele Jergens) and timid but desperate-for-a-man Hazel (Katherine Locke), who fastens onto the uxorious Howard, to his great discomfort.

Cinematically Endfield has it all going on. He knows how to swing a camera about a set and how to inject pace. It’s the moralising that’s tedious, the lessons on the responsibility of the press and the misguidedness of Endfield and co-writer Jo Pagano’s attempt to work a society-is-to-blame angle to Jerry and Howard’s crimes, which they possibly think is socialism (Endfield would be hounded out of the USA by the McCarthy mob).

The ending is what it’s really all about, when Endfield gets his rabble-rousing mob in place and a sense of misrule takes hold. Suddenly a different film emerges, a much better one, and suddenly we see Endfield as the future director of Zulu – fields of people moving with a deadly unified purpose. It’s worth hanging on for.

The Sound of Fury aka Try and Get Me! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon

I am an Amazon affiliate





© Steve Morrissey 2023